daring bakers: macarons

The 2009 October Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to us by Ami S. She chose macarons from Claudia Fleming’s The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern as the challenge recipe.

So I was debating which flavour – and, most importantly, colour – to give my macarons, and decided upon the following: Green tea macarons with lemon curd mascarpone.

There’s a thing about matcha.

I love it. I fell in love before ever having tasted it. (Yes, I have tasted it by now.) When I started reading a number of food blogs, I seemed to encounter tons of extremely interesting recipes containing matcha. So, when I finally ordered some of the extremely expensive stuff, not being able to live much longer without – just having tasted a Green Tea Latte, of all things, on my birthday at Starbucks during my stay in Canada, and realizing the concentrate is not at all like the real thing – I pretty muched stuffed it everywhere I could reach with my also new all-purpose bamboo spoon. (Actually, they’re not all-purpose at all, it’s what I do with mine that makes this particular specimen all-purpose.)

A post of clashing topics

I’m being consistent. The word consistent doesn’t really appeal to me, though, so I’d rather say I am employing a large amount of discipline at this very moment. How long has it been since I’ve blogged? A month? Two? Three? Well, you can check by scrolling down a bit, but I’d rather not at this time, thank you very much. It would be an understatement to say a lot has happened since that last post, which wasn’t even a real “post” because it neither contained interesting text (I hope you agree with me on that one – that my posts are fairly interesting to read..) nor equally interesting pictures. But it did contain an interesting video, as well as the title “interesting.” So it did qualify as a blog post posted by me.

A week ago, I came back from what, for the average grad student in Germany, is known as a graduation trip. For me, it was more of a farewell trip. To be exact, it was a farewell trip, we’ll have none of that “more of/more like” gunk now. It was a farewell trip and nothing I can tell myself will change that. We went to Prague, Europe’s Mecca for those who drink beer with ambition, mind you, not the quality-ambitious, just the quantity-ambitious types. We had a couple of those. Hey, the quality wasn’t even that bad. It wasn’t all Czech beer.

interesting.

more about “The Age of Stupid“, posted with vodpod

I wanted to write a couple words about this, but I’ll do that sometime else. Didn’t mean to post it already.

Some Notes On The Interpretation Or Misinterpretation Of Modern Art

Sometimes people tend to interpret way too much. And sometimes they don’t do enough. They don’t see enough. Because sometimes artwork can only be interpreted by the artist him- or herself. More than often enough, actually. The problem is, (disclaimer: I can only speak from my own experience; I have absolutely no idea how [other] artists feel about this; I can only speculate and guess and assume) that art has lot to do with coincidence. For me, at least. My art is usually a work of a moment. It has a lot to do with influences from.. I forget what influences I meant, I began writing this post in Canada, after I had drawn these:

daring bakers: dobos torta

This is WAY too late. But I’m posting anyway because I suddenly felt the urge to do some useless photo editing yesterday when I should have been doing English homework – write a news report of a day in 2031 showing the world then as you think it will be. Or something like that.

Here’s The Line, even though it’s probably pointless by now:

The August 2009 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Angela of A Spoonful of Sugar and Lorraine of Not Quite Nigella. They chose the spectacular Dobos Torte based on a recipe from Rick Rodgers’ cookbook Kaffeehaus:  Exquisite Desserts from the Classic Caffés of Vienna, Budapest, and Prague.

I’m going to keep it short this time, and am not including the recipe, as I just about messed this up as much as you can mess up a Dobos Torta. Let’s just say I added a bunch of matcha tea to the batter at some point or another, which was quite good actually; used some suspicious-looking eggs that had probably gone bad already, though they were fresh, or so I thought, and I don’t even know how to tell if eggs have gone bad, which had the consequence that the egg-based buttercream wouldn’t thicken, and paired with the then still not-all-too-moderate-temperature, resulted in runny, curdled buttercream. Not so “spectacular”. And the caramel tasted ok, but with the cake layer, and on the buttercream…nah. I’m sorry, I could have/should have done better. There was too much going on, yet again.

To make up for it, I made this cake three times in three weeks for three birthdays. It was a huge success every time. (It’s in the lovely orange pie dish in the background of the nice picture of the currants at the bottom-mid-right).

My opinion on the ‘Information Age’

Okay, so I’m supposed to write a comment on the Information Age in which I either support it or condemn it. Frankly, that is something that I hardly ever do. I always try – at least try – to form a balanced opinion, neither supporting nor condemning. Or that is what I usually end up doing just because my head’s spinning from all the different angles from which you can look at a problem. Or I do.

On the other hand, I love to rant about TV shows where pseudo-know-it-all-scientists and investigators (or anchormen/talk show hosts that have proclaimed themselves the latter) pretend/claim to uncover some incredibly mysterious secret and end up concluding that there is nothing to conclude; the answer is that there is no answer. Ha. Ha. Ha…

Well, I could go for the usual arguments. Of course I love the Information Age because I have access to just about anything via the Internet. And of course I hate the Information Age because there’s no more privacy. Well, hardly anyway. So what is there left to say? (hey, an on-the-spur rhyme)

Nothing. Period. 

Homework: Done. (Yes, I did go for the usual arguments) (as you can see for yourself) (duh) (I’m not addicted to brackets at all)

Here’s what I’d rather do: (you may attempt to guess what I’m trying to tell you with this ominous picture) (not that you will)

Happy guessing. Or not.

daring cooks: cuttlefishy rice

Ummm.. sorry! For hardly posting. I can’t even promise it won’t happen again. I’ll just leave it at that.

I have mollusk-phobia. And I just invented that term. Though it probably isn’t even new, as there is probably a phobia for everything. And I am also a Daring Cook. At least I call myself one. If I really am one.. maybe you can decide after you read this post..

Ta-taa.. Daring Cooks!! The August challenge was hosted by Olga of Las Cosas de Olga and Olga’s Recipes. She has chosen a delicious Spanish recipe, rice with mushrooms, cuttlefish and artichokes by José Andrés.

daring bakers: mallows

I am back! From possibly the most amazing holiday in my entire lifetime. That’s not an overstatement. I miss Canada so much already, and the small things are the ones that fuel this homesickness, if that’s what you’d like to call it, the most. The keyboards are different here; I miss not having to press shift to type an apostrophe, often enough I forget and do something like this – I#m missing the people, the way they greet you, the amazing sky, the language – this perhaps most of all – in Germany so much is simply so small-townish that it makes me want to cry, it’s so pathetic.

But don’t go thinking I’ve been wallowing in the depths of despair (name that book/movie..) so much I haven’t been doing anything! I’ve actually just finally come around to completing the July Daring Bakers challenge and am now posting it, three days late.  First of all, here’s the line:

The July Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Nicole at Sweet Tooth. She chose Chocolate Covered Marshmallow Cookies and Milan Cookies from pastry chef Gale Gand of the Food Network.

a drunken rose and more paint.

This is a rose I picked up from a bus seat at two thirty a.m. Saturday night, which was then dropped into the garbage in front of McDonald’s by my brother, then picked out of the garbage again on the way out by me, much to the amusement of several Turkish (probably also very drunk) young men, and was left abandoned on the dining room table to be photographed the next day (also by me – what a surprise!) as an almost dead, but soon-to-be-sober-again rose.

The End.

So.. you haven’t heard from me in a while. Again. I’m about to remedy that. I arrived in Canada, Toronto, to be a bit more exact, about 2 days ago. I was pretty busy until then, with various things like… (here it comes) … painting and going out.

a leftover-paint-picture

I think this speaks for itself.

I was painting, and I used lots of acrylic paint to get the colours I wanted, and didn’t always need all of it. Sometimes I changed it again to suit another portion of the picture, but often enough I just had a pile of leftovers. So I grabbed another canvas and brushed it all on there. I like it.