When my Stollen was Stolen

When someone suggested that I try making a German Christmas Stollen bread, it occurred to me that while I knew I'd had Stollen when I was little, I couldn't for the life of me remember what it tasted like (other than that it was obviously sweet) or what the consistency of it should be. Was it a cakey bread? a bready bread? The suggestion was accompanied by a translated recipe for Stollen from Dr. Oetker (specifically from an old Dr. Oetker recipe book) and, while yeast and I are not friends, the lack of yeast and the proportions of some ingredients in this particular recipe seemed a bit odd to me, so I decided to look up Dr. Oetker and see if there was an official "interwebs" version of the Dr. Oetker Stollen; indeed there was. The two recipes were comparable except for a few of the measurements including those relating to baking soda and baking powder.

As I am skeptical of my bread-making abilities at the best of times and under the most auspicious circumstances, I decided to go with the official web version rather than the translated version. I made a few very minor changes here and there: I added cranberries instead of currants and no candied peels as A. is not fond of them and, while I like them in some instances (e.g. coated in chocolate), in baked breads they make me think of English fruit cake which, frankly, I loathe. I also didn't put the butter and icing sugar on at the end, as I traditionally should have done, mostly because as I didn't know how sweet it was going to be, I didn't want to oversweeten it to my and A.'s taste buds by adding the icing sugar coat on the exterior. For us this turned out to be a wise move.

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FBC09 - When the Food Bloggers Connected

We will resume our regularly scheduled programming of food and other posts in a couple of days, but before that...

There isn't much I can say that hasn't already been said about Food Blogger Connect this past weekend, but here's what my checklist looks like:

• Have fun! -check
• Finally meet a lot of great people face to face -check
• Try to take a lot of pictures -well not so check but I also knew everyone else would be clicking away (there are many posts and many other pictures to see besides my very few)
  
• Have fun! -check
• Make lifelong friendships established online concrete -check
• Eat a lot of good food -check
• And HAVE FUN! -check

I don't think I could have imagined in my wildest dreams that all those tweets and emails and chats would turn into this little group that is my blog family. Some photos courtesy of Deeba of some us meeting for dinner on Friday night:

 The Twins: Deeba and Jamie

The Boys: Mowie and Alessio

More of the gals: Jamie, me, Pam and Beth

Slightly over two years ago, I read a post on What's for Lunch Honey? where Meeta talked about how difficult it was to find pecans at affordable prices and in reasonable rather than micro quantities in Germany. Having just brought back a couple of pounds of pecans from the U.S., I emailed her and offered to send her a big bag of them just for the pleasure of seeing what she would make with them. She replied back insisting that she would have to send me something in exchange, and thus a blog friendship was born over email. Occasionally we'd write each other and do Daring Bakers' Challenges together, and then with the Twitterization of the universe, we started talking to each other one way or another almost every day.

The awesome Presenting Triplets: Jeanne, Jamie and Meeta

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Food Bloggers Connect & Walk - Final Update & New Website ... & Late DB

First off, if you will be checking in with me tomorrow on the Daring Bakers' Challenge, I will be posting late, hopefully right after the weekend. We are moving from one house into another and it is complete chaos around here at the moment. I did the challenge and simply haven't photographed it yet -that will be interesting in itself- so if I succeed in what I will be attempting to do with it, I will be delighted for you to come back and check on what I've done, but for now just know the post will be late.

And now to Food Bloggers Connect...

It's time! This Saturday, some of us will be meeting each other for the first time after months and sometimes years of virtual friendship, I can't wait!

The official FBC website is now up with teasers from our guest speakers and all the details you could possibly want about the event so please check it out.

Finally, we've added a Marylebone Village Food Lovers' Walk which will take place on Sunday the 29th. We're meeting in front of the Baker Street Tube Station at 11:30AM so if you're around and would like to join, please do, the more the merrier!

And for all you Americans out there, Happy Thanksgiving Day!
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When the Fall colors found me...

Or was it that I found them...

I know I've been missing in action. As I said before there's a lot going on, but see, I haven't forgotten you all. I just start drafts and then have to go do something else. Before you know it, I've got five drafts, none of them are even half done, and it's been ten days since the last time I posted.

I feel like the leaf in the last picture here; I've yellowed, fallen off the tree and am now slowly drying and waiting to become mulch.

My saving grace is the little one.

Today was my little girl's 8-month birthday. I love that she was born on the spring solstice 8 months ago (even if the solstice doesn't technically happen on the 21st every year, must one really be punctilious about such things?...) I love it partially because the spring solstice is also the Persian New Year, so my little half-Persian noodle was a brand new everything born on the New Year. Perfect.

Anyway, I'm thinking of that because since I found the fall colors, it really feels like fall now, but winter is already on its way since I found them very late this year, and these are some of the last leaves up on the trees right now. Soon it will be her 9-month birthday and we'll move technically from fall into winter, and then it will be the Persian New Year again and she'll be a year old. Time really does not just run but gallops away from you.

Hopefully there are a few sunset moments such as this one left before the winter gloom descends upon us. I will be back soon with more posts. 

Egg

The store, not the oval body laid by a chicken or other fowl.
It's just around the corner from where we live and it's such a beautiful store.

For a long time I walked by it without realizing it was a clothing store; it looked like a mysterious room with a big window with a light gray shade behind it and the word egg stenciled onto the glass.
Then, just a few days ago, on a slightly warmer day than usual for this time of year, it was wide open as I walked by with the baby and, as I had my camera on me, I asked if I could take some pictures.

The space is a converted stable.
It looked ideal, having that long white table to work on, the fabric, forms and other items strewn about.

The very sweet women who work in there didn't seem to mind at all my taking pictures of them while they worked, perhaps they're used to it.

There's another, smaller store across the street but there are no clothes in there.  There's always some sort of interesting installation in it though, perhaps it's the "art exhibit" part of the store.

Maybe it's the artisan nature of the workspace that is so attractive to me.  I'd certainly know how to cover that whole table with "stuff" in a heartbeat: drawing, painting, and crafts supplies, my computer, camera stuff, and piles of paper and other things which my best friend lovingly calls "the filing system" (Hey, I know where everything is in those piles, true story). It would be the perfect place to do collages of the kind Leslie does on her beautiful blog A Creative Mint.

They've changed the collection in the last few days, no more tartans, no more bowler hats for now.
The colors are gorgeous, very rich or very muted, they cover the spectrum, but I haven't seen anything egregious yet.

I love this store, have I mentioned that? It might be the space I love even more than what's in it, but I must admit all the clothes look interesting and different, and I like the layout of it all.

There's room to see and hear yourself think.

Egg
37 Kinnerton Street,
Belgravia
London, SW1X 8ES