baking > complaining.

Dear S.,

Instead of complaining, I'll talk about baking.

1) baking asks your full love and attention and therefore takes your mind off everything else.

2) the smell of something baking in the oven makes you feel home.

3) baking attracts friends and good talks.

4) eating something someone else baked especially for YOU is one of the biggest pleasures in culinary terms...

5) ...just as it is a great source of joy for the baker to watch other people enjoy their piece of baked good.

6)baking shows your ability to work concentratedly and precisely and with lots of Hingabe on a project.

7) kneading shortpastry, rolling out a yeast dough or beating a batter with your hands is a great outlet for your fears and frustrations.

8) a piece of pastry in your mouth prevents you from needlessly complaining about your life.

9) eating something baked is the best thing to do to fill in your breaks from work and study. It provides you with new strength and energy and satisfies you.

10) having to bake something is a great excuse not to work or study for a while.


that said, here is what I baked yesterday: carrot cake. Darling J., was here for dinner, and while N. made some gorgeous lasagna, I searched all my cupboards for baking material (note to self: always have a decent stash at home in the future). I wanted something with a fresh ingredient, fruit or so. Carrot was the next best thing- carrot cake it is.





The little carrot is a real carrot I carved into the right size. together with some fresh thyme, I find it looks much better than the normally used marzipan carrots.
The day before, we had you, M. and T. over for a small dinner party, the topic was white food ;) we had asparagus risotto and cheesecake. mmmh. A cake a day....
I really enjoyed you all being here, quality time :)

love, m

Frühling im Mund. Und Schokolade.

Dear S.,

2nd post today! trying to keep up with you :p

Sooo, my friend P. came over today and we made...

Sachertorte!

P. spent the first semester of this Uni-year in Vienna and learned to know (and love!) our Austrian Konditorei world. For quite some time we'd planned to bake a Sachertorte ourselves- (oh, I just noticed that I presumed you all knew what Sachertorte is; it is the most famous Austrian chocolate cake. Expensive, exclusive, extrachocolatey)
-so, today we finally met up and tried our luck. It was not like the original in texture, ours was a little too light, but the taste came quite close :)
Anyways, it is a lovely chocolate cake.


Also, we (S. and M.) finished the last step of our Elderflowersyrup today- we bottled it. WEll, we did not exactly use bottles, just jam-jars. Our title for the project:

Frühling im Mund- springtime in your mouth.

Also, next to all these seemingly irrelevant, procrastinating actions (which they are not actually, these things are just vital for me), I have worked concentratedly on my Ba-paper. yes.

see you soon :)

M.

easter in germany= baking ( like crazy)

and the second post for this evening ( i listen to the music of the movie where the wild things are, i just love childeren movies..)

and it kind of fits.
this time in germany i just felt incredebly blessed. i sucked in every minute. it was nice sunny warm weather. i had olenty of time with my parents( mr le chef and daya). made long and less long bike tours. we wnet to a lake which seemed so fare away as a child and isn't that fare away after all. how perception changes still fascinates me. on one of teh trips we saw a little lamp abandoned by the rest of the sheps, my mum and i where directly overwelmed by motherlyfeelings but on our way back the mother cared again about it.

going to the market to buy some good food. i love especially one stall owned by a woman named maya. she is old, quite rough and speks the lokal dialect, next to veggies from her fields she sells the moste beautifull flowers...




i also baked ..like crazy. some times even in this homienes i go a bit crazy... this time one cake collapsed on the ground and i threw it verry angry into the zink, with the result of some dough on the kitchen window... after this sudden emotional outburst everything was ok again.
and also knowing that at home( i mean the other home, antwerp) there was waiting somebody for me. but first i had to go to amsterdam to meet an young artist. more about that later on..





Eastereggs: we had chicken, duck, goose, chocolate and marcepein ones. i backed some gist nests for them. and a delayed birthday cake for may mum. rubarb cake, so the chocolate butterflie doesn't really fit but looks good.

sleep well
it's proably not the best idea to go to bed with a stomache full of warm cake but just today i won't cre( so fare to my suggar free diet...)
kisses
s

stressed=desserts ?!

Dear S.,

It is now 11.30pm. While I am writing this text, my oven is baking a bunch of cupcakes. I am baking them at this hour because I can’t deal with myself anymore. (Besides, any time is the right time to bake.) So, it’s May today. Wow. 30 more days and my Bachelorwork has to be finished. 31 days and my exams will start. So, I am kind of freaking out a little. I am sooo incredibly tiring to myself like this! I have stayed inside (well and on the newly cleaned terrace) all day long to write. At least like… 10 pages or so. But, of course, after having written a few sentences, I notice that I actually do not really know all that much about what I’m writing (some narratological questions). So I think: hey, let’s get that book from first year to refresh my knowledge about narratology. Having found the book, I notice that back then I had only read like a third of it- it was my very first real Dutch uni book. It was sooo incredibly difficult to understand it, the field is quiet complex and then that new, strange language… So, what do I do: I start reading it on page 1. And whenever I read a theoretical book, I like to take notes. Like a few lines per two pages, in a word document, so that I have the core information at hand whenever I need it. As you can imagine, this takes up QUITE some time. The book I’m talking about has 177pages. Ok, it was utopical to think that I could do them ALL today, but, come on, I’m only at page 50 now, after say 3 ½ hours of work. Also, I have only written one single page for my work. 1. Sigh. So, this is basically how every single day I am trying to do productive work and end up desperate and with no output whatsoever. That is why I am baking now. I can sometimes be so incredibly tiring for myself (and my surroundings), when I have the feeling I’m not working well enough. I tend to get all hyper, sing awful songs in a horrible voice, start meowing like a car just rolled over my imaginative tail, start running around like a headless chicken (haha, like Charlie a little bit… We just found a little bell and put it around her neck with some lace… she is so funny! –and she’s ok, don’t you worry.)


(this is the postcard I gave you for your last birthday... isn't it just unbelievable ;) )

Ok, it’s time to get the cakes out of the oven. The icing is already waiting for them!
00:46. Can't wait to get my teeth in one of these!







N. and I decided to go for flashy colours. and love, of course. I have tons of love for her. and cake.

my dear, now I've written all about how exhausting studying is, and just yesterday I worked at a kinf of info-market at my Uni, trying to convince possible future students of how exiting and fun language-and literature studies are... :)
I guess, that's just how my life goes.

also, I still wanted to say that I miss us blogging more. i know we both have extremely busy times, but still our blog makes me happy everytime I visit it.

sleep tight, I'll enjoy a pink cake and read some more!
xxx

M.

tarte au citron à la m.

some midnight indulgence for you!
love,
m

... and mokka!

Dear S.,

today I made the most heavy cake ever- bisquit with mokka-buttercreme.
You wouldn't have liked it- and it was even very heavy for me. But N. and I both felt like this kind of treat to start into the new week.
here are some pictures: The cake looks so incredibly old-fashioned! Like in those awful
70's cook book photographs...
It tasted nice though, just very traditional and rich.




(the plates come from a vintage market in Dresden)

mokka the second:
Charlie and I performed some shadow puppet art yesterday night. I got quite a lot of scratches and bites, but she just loves to play with me. So funny, she really finds that I am the one to play with and she attacks me out of the blue if she wants to wrestle or play catch or poesbal. With N. she never does that- apparently she is the one to be nice to in our house, according to Charlie :)





as you said in your last post, we didn't see each other a lot, lately. But it doesn't matter: I know that you are around, I know that you are busy, and- the foremost thing- I know that you are happy. It is such a joy to see you enter the room with this very special expression of happiness on your face!

Much love,

m.

ginger cookies!

Dear S.,

5 o'clock is tea time! Today, with freshly baked ginger biscuits:





The lovely tray I got from L. for my birthday fits perfectly. The porcelain tea set comes from a second hand market in Dresden. Also, take a look at the bird-shaped sugar lump (thanks, J.!)
I still had an empty box of "Ingwer Cookies" I once bought- refilled :)
We used ground dried ginger as well as tiny pieces of candied ginger.
come and try them!


Love,

M & N

La Cassata -queen of the dolci

Dear S.,

how very sweet this post is going to be!
literally. N.'s mum L. is taking an italian class, and this year she focussed on Sicilia. For the birthday of N.'s dad, she decided to bake/make the so-called queen of italian desserts: la Cassata. She asked, if N. and I wanted to help- sure thing! A new cake- challenge, I can't resist that. and here is the result of many hours of work... tataaaa :)


I love the 70's kitch atmosphere it spreads ;)



hi there.


The cassata is essentially a biscuit 2 or 3 layer cake filled with ricotta, chocolate, Amaretto liqueur and candied fruit- thus a LOT of sweet stuff! To top it off, it is covered in a thin layer of whipped cream and then decorated with a hood of marzipan and more candied fruit. I find it a really impressive cake. It tastes very nice, but you (and even I!) can only eat a small piece at a time. Also, it is the most colorful cake I ever made/ assisted with. L., N. and I were really proud when it was finished :)


bye for now!
M.

project : how to make a cake without an oven , vol I

hey hey
I still don't have an oven.so I need to figure out other possibilities to "bake".
my first atempt is a microwave cake. it's so easy and so fast... but taste like airplane-food. which means not very good. but i won't give up, i keep you updated with my other experiments.
it was ok though with mascarpone, kiwi and honey.





for the rest i have been buzzy watching the gras grow.
i tried to be a good plant mum, and for once it worked out. it grows and grows, in the weekend i will have my first sandwich with cress!!!
spring is coming! It's my mantra at those grey days.





see you soon at oure stich and bitch
kisses
s.

Heute kann es regnen, stürmen oder schneien, denn du strahlst ja selber wie der Sonnenschein...

Dear m,

today is your big day. your birthday...
i wish you so many things for the next year.. advantures, relaxing, love, cupcakes, kittens ( i'm in the get charlie pregnant camp) ... and so on.
i thought it was a really good party. a jolly good english tea party as you wished. so many important and good people around. just really nice.
i put together a random collage of the pics i took.
a sneak peak of your present to come.
sadly alot of them are blurry, but well there are also some good ones.
still have a nice rest of your birthday

and here we go a blur of impressions







a truckload of kisses
your s.

p.s.
on special demand of dear L.
there it is his blue eye, and some other more random pics: pinata, iphone and what remains after a bunch of hungry people cae to your home ;)

Dear S.,

hello from the graydays. I am so glad January is done by today. February promises more peacefulness, somehow. I don't quite know why, but it feels like that. January was just wild. Yesterday I looked outside the window at 6pm and the sky wasn't yet fully dark.. a small moment of joy, I tell you! I miss my home these days. After being in Austria for a whole month, it can be hard to be back here. N is extremely busy, as always. It is such a miracle how people can have such different values and goals in life. At the moment, there is no Uni, so I have time.
But what on earth do I do with it?! phhh. not much, really.

Ok, I'll stop with my lamentations. Here are some pics



Buchteln! a kind of brioche dough filled with berry jam or prune jam. So nice! This is the first batch I ever made, and they were lovely

Here's Charlie with a little promise of spring: She ADORES apricots. no idea why, but she goes totally crazy about them. Here she tries to catch mine. Her latest trick: she always sleeps on the working table, and when she smells or sees something she wants to have, she yawns and stretches her paws *accidentally* right on to the object of desire :)


same trick with the cheesecake N and I made yesterday evening:



button projects! one for the wall, one to wear:






And here are some of the birdies I made as decorations for my very plain white bedroom curtains.




Now I will go on with sewing. I'm trying to do a cylinder shaped pencil case for M., it takes me quite some brainsqueezes to figure out how it will work ;)

love, M.