Sweetberry Honeysuckle or Blue-berry Honeysuckle (Lonicera caerulea)

Do you recognise those oblong blueberry lookalikes? These are the ripe berries of Lonicera caerula or sweet honeysuckle aka blue-berry honeysuckle (depending on your country of residence, you may know them as le chèvrefeuille bleu, haskap berries (whose flavour is considered to be superior to other blue honeysuckles), honeyberry, marjasinikuusama, blåbärstry, Жимолость съедобная, Blaue Heckenkirsche/Blaue Doppelbeere or something else; söödav kuslapuu/sinine kuslapuu in Estonian). In general the honeysuckle berries are somewhat bitter and mildly poisonous, and it's just the fragrant flowers that are used for making cordial, sorbet etc, for instance (just look at all those posts on FoodBlogSearch). However, the berries of blue-berry or sweet honeysuckle are edible and that's what we've got growing in our garden:



Being one of the first berries to ripen in our Northern climate (just after rhubarb and before strawberries), the blue-berry honeysuckle is a useful source of vitamins and excellent berry flavour. As it's only a second year our honeysuckle bush carries any berries, there are not really enough for making jam or juice or ice cream. I served them on Midsummer eve, piling them on top of my all-time favourite cheesecake, throwing in a handful of wild strawberries as well (also from our own garden, of course).

Baking with whole-grain flours: Chocolate Chip Cookies

One of my recent cookbook acquisitions is Kim Boyce's Good to the Grain: Baking with Whole-Wheat Flours. Kim Boyce is a former pastry chef, who has been experimenting with using much more whole-grain flours instead of refined white flours/wheat flours. The book is divided into 13 chapters, each focusing on one grain/ingredient - whole-wheat flour, amaranth flour, barley flour, buckwheat flour, corn flour, kamut flour, multigrain flour, oat flour, quinoa flour, rye flour, spelt flour, teff flour, as well as a chapter on jams and compotes. Plenty of good stuff in there to keep me busy baking over the summer!

The first recipe I tried was for chocolate chip cookies. Way too sweet for my Estonian tastebuds (as most American cake recipes out there), but delicious enough for me to give it another go just a few days later. I've changed the quantities into metric, and used only about 2/5th of the amount of white sugar in Kim's recipe. This had no effect to the flavour - these were still very sweet and delicious cookies. My cookies were much smaller - one heaped Tbsp of cookie dough yields one large cookie. If you want to follow Kim Boyle's advice, take three Tbsp of dough per cookie :)

These stay nice and crisp for about three days in a air-tight cookie jar.

Chocolate Chip Cookies
(Šokolaadiküpsised täisterajahust)
Yields about 30 cookies

Wet mixture:
225 g cold unsalted butter, cut into 1 cm cubes
150 g dark brown sugar (dark muscovado)
100 g caster sugar
2 large eggs
2 tsp vanilla extract

Dry mixture:
420 g whole-wheat flour
1.5 tsp baking powder
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
0.5 tsp finely ground sea salt

Furthermore:
200 g dark chocolate chips or finely chopped dark chocolate (I used Callebaut)

Preheat the oven to 180 C. Line a baking sheet with a parchment paper.

Place butter and sugar into the mixing bowl fitted with the beater blade or paddle attachment. Mix until just combined.
Add eggs, one at the time, mixing until each egg is fully incorporated. Add the vanilla extract.
Sift the dry ingredients into a bowl, mix and then stir quickly into the egg-butter-sugar mixture.
Finally, add all the chocolate and stir until combined.
Take tablespoonfuls of the cookie dough and place heaps on the baking sheet. Leave plenty of room between the heaps of dough, as it spreads during baking. (I baked about 8 cookies at a time, 4 baking sheets in total).
Bake in a pre-heated oven for about 15 minutes, until the cookies are nicely golden brown on top.
Take out of the oven, let cool for a minute, then carefully transfer the cookies to a metal rack to cool completely (they'll crisp up during the cooling process).

It's Pimm's Time!

What's your favourite way of enjoying Pimm's?



Last Thursday Estonians celebrated summer solstice - Jaanipäev - and we had 4 consecutive days off. Being a stay-at-home mum, I'm always at home, but it was wonderful to have our family's busy bee K. stay at home for 4 days in a row. We had friends over on Thursday night (dry, but sadly too windy for lighting a bonfire outside, so we stayed indoors), went to the Tallinn Zoo on Friday, had a wonderful meal at our friends' place on Saturday and hosted various visitors (all grandparents of our kids, plus some more) on Sunday. In addition we managed to do quite a lot of cooking, make three different types of jam for spreading over pancakes during the winter, and spend quite a few hours gardening - and taking pictures of our beautiful garden. I just wish that all summer weekends be four days long!



On Saturday night, when packing our family up for visiting nearby friends, we also grabbed a bottle of Pimm's No 1 from our drinks cabinet and stocked up on various mixers at a nearby store. I fell in love with that British summertime classic when living in Scotland for seven years, and I've got many fond memories associated with that drink. For those of you unfamiliar with Pimm's, it's a gin-based liqueur that was first produced in 1823 by - yes, you guessed already - a certain Mr Pimm. James Pimm was a farmer's son from Kent, who was the proprietor of an oyster bar in the City of London. He sold a cocktail containing gin tonic, quinine and an assortment of herbs to aid digestion. The drink became very popular, and Mr Pimm's began selling it ready-mixed.

There have been other versions of Pimm's over the years, based on vodka and brandy and others. Currently only two varieties are made Pimm's No 1 (gin-based) and Pimm's Winter Cup, which is a version of the brandy-based Pimm's No 3 (with added orange peel and spices; apparently excellent with warmed apple cider).


Pimm's No 1, Appletiser, ice cubes, slice of lemon and some borage flowers.

The traditional way of enjoying Pimm's is to mix one part of Pimm's No 1 to three parts of mixer, serve it with ice cubes and a slice of fruit (lemon, orange, strawberry), slightly bruised mint leaves and some borage flowers (a slice of cucumber works as well). Ginger beer and good English lemonade are popular mixers, but both are hard to find over here (and I doubt that anyone will start importing my favourite Fentimans sodas and drinks any time in the near future). We tried four different Pimm's Cups with our friends - with Ginger Ale (Schweppes), Bitter Lemon (Schweppes), Appletiser, San Pellegrino Limonata. Although the lemonade Pimm's are popular - and all four were definitely quaffable and very much so - then K. and I loved the versions with Ginger Ale and Appletiser most - the latter being the more dry option of the two.



We've been mixing Pimm's Cup over the weekend (don't worry, I've been only sipping a little), and another favourite is a generous slug of Pimm's No 1 mixed with San Pellegrino's red orangeade (Arancia Rossa), garnished with a slice of orange. If we continue on this pace, then I must humbly ask my Scottish friends Emma & Michael to bring us another bottle of Pimm's No 1 in July (and Pimm's Winter Cup!), as, sadly, Pimm's isn't available in Estonia :(