Nominated for best food photography + Chocolate chip cookies with caramel | gf 

This morning I woke up to the greatest news – I’m nominated for Best Food Photography in the Swedish Food Blog Awards called Matbloggspriset. I’m celebrating 3 years as a food blogger in a couple of days and this nomination came as such a great blog-birthday gift. Photography has been my passion since I was like 8 years old when I got my first analog camera. Back then I shot mostly travel photos. Well, it was mostly photos of cats I saw when we traveled, to be honest. My father was really into photography and I guess this interest passed on to me.

Anyway, when I was in high school, I started to really practice photography. I bought my first digital camera (after saving like forever) and I started to photograph all sorts of things. A lot of nature photography and Tumblr inspired still life photos. I got better and better at it and I loved it so much. Spending time with my camera was like meditation to me, and it still is.

When I studied at the university, I decided that photography was something that I really wanted to do. You can read all about my journey from medical researcher to food photographer in the about me page, but long story short, I decided to start photographing food because 1) I hated (still do) to be in front of the camera so food was a great thing to photograph and 2) it didn’t require a lot of traveling or money (hey, I was a poor student back then). So, I started to photograph food. At first, it was only on Instagram and I wasn’t good at it at all. Photographing food was new to me, I had only photographed nature and still life before. But I got better at food photography too. All I had to do was practice. And I did.

After a while, people started to ask for recipes so often that I realized that starting a blog was inevitable. So I started The Nordic Kitchen. And now, three years later, I’m nominated for best food photography alongside my all-time favorite food photographer, Linda Lomelino. How did I get here? It’s so surreal and kind of weird, but I’m so happy and so proud. I’ve spent so much time in the kitchen cooking, baking, styling, photographing, editing and repeating this over and over again. I’ve loved every single minute of it, even though I sometimes have felt like giving up because I’ve felt that I’m not good enough.

So, this nomination means so much to me. And it’s not only my hard work, it’s also a lot thanks to you guys. You support me with your likes, comments, and sweet messages every day and if it weren’t for you, I would never be where I am today so THANK YOU <3 Now I have my fingers crossed that I will win too, but I’ll be happy anyway 🙂

Well, I think it’s time to change the subject and start talking about chocolate chip cookies, which btw are a great way to celebrate both the blog birthday and the nomination, right? I have shown you these chocolate chip cookies on Instagram a couple of times but I had to keep perfecting the recipe before it was ready to be shared on the blog. But now it’s ready, so let’s start baking, shall we? 🙂 By the way, who else has been binge watching Stranger Things this weekend? I sure have.

Chocolate chip cookies with caramel and sea salt

makes about 15-20 cookies 

80 g soft organic butter or margarine
1 dl | 70 g light muscovado sugar
1 egg, beaten
80 g rice flour
20 g almond flour or oat flour
2 tsp baking powder
2 tbsp cacao
75 g chocolate
1 tsp sea salt
6 pieces of caramel candy (like Werther’s Original Caramel Hard Candies)

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 175°C (350°F).

2. Combine all the ingredients except the chocolate, caramel and sea salt, and stir together.

3. Chop the chocolate and caramel candies and add it to the cookie dough.

4. Scoop heaping tablespoons of the dough onto a baking sheet. Make sure there is space between the cookies because they’ll float out in the oven.

5. If needed, carefully flatten the cookies using the back of a spoon.

6. Sprinkle each cookie with a pinch of sea salt.

7. Bake in the middle of the oven for about 8-10 minutes.

8. Let cool on a baking tray and then serve with coffee, tea or a glass of plant milk.