Sweet dots

1. Drying before baking

December is definitely the month of the year where pastries are highly fashionable! I have made a few more batches of cupcakes and Christmas cookies.

Now everyone seems to get crazy about New Year's Eve. I never understood the big fuss around that night. I will have a fairly quiet one and I am happy to do so. However I could give myself a little treat... a sweet treat :o)

2. Gently rising in the oven

One pastry I absolutely love in France are macarons! They are so fluffy, soft but crunchy at the same time! I asked my mum if she had done any before, but she said she never dared too since many women told her that they'd failed, that it is incredibly difficult to make them. That's maybe the reason why they are always so ridiculously expensive.

3. Cooling down

Anyway I was in town yesterday and I had to have a stop in the cooking book section in the bookstore. I had a look on the macarons books. There are not many of them. Actually only two. The one by a French chef, José Maréchal, got my attention. I started to have a look into it and realised that indeed you need first to study before baking. I had time so I got the book and a thermometer for cooking which seems vital for macarons. I studied till late last night how to make your sugary sirup, how to beat the eggs, which quantity was necessary etc...

4. Putting the ganache on the cookies

And today was the big day: the day of baking macarons!

If took me a couple of hours, especially the sirup was tricky since I needed to get a certain temperature. But I have to say making macarons is not that difficult it is just a very exact way of preparing those little round dots. And really do not mess around with the quantities!

5. Ready to serve!

I made vanilla macarons to keep it simple since they are just plain ones with a bit of vanilla pod. I first wanted to see how this works. Next time I will definitely try to experiment on the colours and flavours!

6. Yummi!

They are very tasty, very sweet (maybe a bit too much for my taste), and the texture is pretty good too. I am sure that I can optimise this over time but I am fairly satisfied with my first macarons batch!


Happy New Year 2012 to you!

Sackboy

Real Sackboy

My home-made-Sackboy

My better half is very much into computer games and he particularly likes a very sweet game called "Little Big Planet".  A beautiful game with a nice environment and great music. The player can create levels him/ herself and share it with the community. Anyway the little creature you are in the game is Sackboy. So for my boyfriend's birthday I tried to sew him a little Sackboy. However I have no experience in sewing nor do I have a sewing machine. So I stitched everything by hand. I was quite happy with the result and I hope it is possible so see some similarities with the real Sackboy...

 

Let it snow!

I mentioned a few days ago that we Germans love our Advent time. Today it's already the 2nd Advent and for this matter we also love backing. We love making all sorts of cookies which usually have some jam, all sorts of nuts and christmassy spices such as oranges, tangerines, ginger, cloves, cinnamon, lemons, rum, chocolate... I'd usually be very traditional I make every year the same cookies which I've done for many many years which my mum gave me on the way.

However this year after spending a year in the UK I really got hooked on cupcakes! I love them because they are usually fairly simple to make, so far they always were a huge success and decorating them is a simple and nice way to do a bit of artwork. And are cupcakes not ideal for a little sweet snack in between? Not as big as a piece of cake but not as small as a tiny cookie. And I rarely go crazy on my icing, because usually in shops I think it is just way too much and ends up to be too sweet!

Two of my best friends were very kind and gave me for my birthday a great cupcake cooking book ("Eat Me!").  I rarely have used a present that much before!

So yesterday for for the weekend of the 2nd Advent I decided to let my traditional German cookies rest in their book a bit longer and find a recipe which has all those lovely Christmas spices I love so much. And I found one in my beloved cupcakes book: ginger, cinnamon, zest of clementines, cloves and almonds! When my better half had a bite he said "It tastes like a ginger man!". This is a perfect description of a Christmas cake!

Whilst I was in Brighton I also found those really cool snowflakes for decoration. I bought them in summer, which felt awkward but now I couldn't wait to use them! So I tried to make those Ginger-man-tasting-cupcakes look like a winter wonderland. The icing turned out pretty nice and the sugar gives the whole cover a little extra shine!


Ho!Ho!Ho! Let it snow!

Knock-Knock...

The advent period has finally arrived! And in Germany it is a big tradition to have an advent calender with 24 doors, or mini socks or so. Each day a little surprise is waiting for you and suddenly Christmas doesn't seem that far anymore.

Usually those calenders contain chocolate or other sweets and you can buy them in supermarkets. But isn't it fun to make one for a friend? I have already done a few in my life and this year I thought it's time to make one again for a very special friend of mine who is not living in Germany at the moment. Therefore she can have a bit of German "Heimat"-feeling in London.

I simply wraped up 24 little presents and put them in a box. The box was also nicely wrapped. And now my friend can enjoy every day a little surprise. Hopefully they'll all be somehow usefull for her, some may just be funny and some just pretty.


Now we can only wait for the snow to come to have the Christmas feeling around us!

D’you want to go to the seaside?

I love photoalbums. In times where digitalism was not completely surrounding us I would develop many pictures and would have therefore many albums. All over my childhood and teenage years I spend hours and hours making my albums. This is something I learned from my mum. And I love it. However I am flooding myself with hundreds and hundreds of pictures each year and I hardly organise them in folders on my hard drive. Suddenly visual memories seem to disappear on our walls and our books.

However sometimes you do not need many pictures to reconstruct a feeling, a memory or a certain period of your life. Sometimes you do not need more than a little box.

I spent my last uni year on the English coast in East Sussex. Lovely part of the world. And no (!!) the weather is not always crap! It’s not always raining cats and dogs! They call it the sunshine coast and as ironic as it sounds when speaking of England, they are not wrong!

As a little goodbye present to a friend I created a box which summed up roughly our year spent over there. And in this case I did not use any personal picture to make it work as our own memory. I bought the little deck chairs and dishes in a shop specialised in doll houses. The rest were mainly magazines, fabric, postcards and left over tickets from bus drives or concerts.

When moving continents you can simply close your box and take it on the road with you to open it up again in your new home. My friend will hopefully keep this box for a while with her, keep carrying the sunshine coast to any place she wishes. The only thing this box cannot do is imitate the sound of seagulls!

Frame it all!

I used to have for many years all my earings and necklesses in a box... It was a bit of a mess each time I wanted to get something out of the box. The other downside was also that I would oversee some really really nice stuff I'd have in the very bottom corner of the box. 

A few months ago I was at a friend's place and she had some really nice frames in her bathroom where all her earings would be presented. I really liked the idea and decided to try this out. Since I love colours a lot it became a very original "painting". I know that some people do not have earings so I tested out how to use the same frames with other things. With mini pegs I could fix small pics or even my necklesses.

The frames on the picture are meant to be christmas presents for this year but I definitely need to make myself one soon too! It really doesn't take much time. I probably took 30 minutes to make one frame (I was lucky since I found the frames already painted in bright colours, so this saved me a bit of time). 

Sealed food

Winter has finally arrived and it's time to hibernate. So what is best if you want to stay for the next few months under your duvet with lots of good books and hot chocolate without going for groceries? Well of course you could simply live from the pizza delivery man, but this could get boring and also the health aspect in that case is probably not the most favourable.

Instead an option is to cook things in advance and seal them in jars and finally reopen them when you need them. I've tried it for the first time a few weeks ago and now I have tasted all of them! First thing, it is absolutely easy to make any of these.

These are the following things I've tired:

• Marinated aubergine with basil and (lots!!!) of garlic (watch your breath!)
• Feta cheese in oil with pepper and chilli (yes you can buy this all ready made in the supermarket but isn't it fun to make it yourself?)
• Apples with vanilla (a real pod please!)
• Marinated pumpkin with chilli, lemon zest and dried apricots
• Marinated carrots the Indian way

The carrots and the pumpkin are just great to have as a side dish. A bit like antipasti. The aubergine do work the same way, but I also used them already at work when I wanted to make a quick pasta lunch: just cook the pasta and then add the aubergine mixture and some of the vinegar-olive-oil-marinade for the sauce.

The apples can be eaten like pure but they are very sweet, so I put a few slices in my porridge in the morning instead and add a bit of the vanilla syrup in it for the taste. I guess those apples would go well with Greek yoghurt too. Well the feta cheese is obviously great in salads, but also pizza or pasta.

And since maybe some more people wish to hibernate this year too I will give some of the jars out and made them a bit more cute in their looks!

Happy hibernating to you!

Couscous and quinoa tartes

Quinoa Base

I recently had the chance to go to the Frankfurt Book Fair during a day which wasn't open to the main public. It was very nice to browse around. It felt a bit like a gigantic book store just without till at the end. During my visit there I developed my own little strategy to get a book or two or three or... for free (hey people gave them to me!). Three of them are cooking books. But not the common ones! One is all about veggie burgers (Thanks Peter!), another one about vegan food. But more about them another time when I'll post something from those books. Today I am writing about a French book "C'est pas de la tarte" (written by a lady who lives in Montréal(!!)) and it's all about tartes. Yeah those lovely round dishes that we French love so much! Mostly tasty, really easy to make and great if you wish to make a left over dinner. But mostly it's all about the filling of the tarte and not so much about the dough itself. However this lady dedicated the whole book on the base of the tartes. I recently made a quinoa based tarte. The filling was smoked tofu, cream and onions. It was one of those sunday evenings where nothing is left in the fridge besides weird stuff such as smoked tofu, tahini and quinoa. I'd never guessed I would find a recipe which would match those ingredients that well together!

Couscous base

Since the first result was already pretty satisfying I tried last weekend another tarte, this time with a couscous base. The filling was meant to be done with plain tofu and broccoli. Again I only had smoked tofu and not enough broccoli so I added a bit more zucchini with it. I had to blend the tofu and it was meant to be sort of smooth, the smoked one however war fairly dry. So I put a bit of cream on top just to have it a little bit more moist. Next time I'll try it with more softer tofu. It is definitely a very  unusual taste but again it was a great success.

Next time I'll try a sweet tarte with a müsli base or so.

A new beginning...

I've been trying to keep up for roughly half a year with a music blog but it was fairly hard because:
   a) I am not a particularly good writer and can hardly judge someone's art
   b) Music is not my one and only love.

I realised I could have a way more lively blog if I a show a bit more my DIY side of things. However if there is some music a really think is worth being shared, of course I will use this platform as well :o)

I know DIY-blogs are everywhere and I know I won't invent anything new... but anyway it's really hard to be a trendsetter nowadays I think. I am looking forward to your comments and suggestions and I am curious to see what new things I will be trying out no matter if it's in the kitchen, with sewing or with handcraft stuff.

The cool thing is that so many things are really not that hard to do and are really fun to do! Way more fun than buying them all ready-made from the mall!

Cheers!