Merry Christmas!

Dear Readers,
I wish you all a merry christmas! Enjoy your holidays!

A weekend at home

I have spent an extralong weekend at home with my family. "At home" means our cottage in lower austria. A wonderful place to relax and enjoy nature or to work in the garden...

Holidays are coming...

The hotel beach at Kallithea Mare Palace (Rhodos) where I will enjoy summer for one week...

Summer salad

As there is no summer outside, I try to make summer feelings by myself - with a varicoloured summer salad with turkey hen.

Kiss & Ride

Seen at the central train station in Linz last week ;-)

Just a perfect day

Today we were cycling to the Kahlenberg - Vienna's landmark mountain. Afterwards we enjoyed the sunny afternoon sitting in a vineyard (http://www.4winzer.at/about.htm) drinking wine and eating bread with bacon. What to say: Just a perfect day.

My first time

Today I have baked cupcakes for my very first time - on the fotos you see the result.

One part are chocolate cupcakes with a cream made of white chocolate and fresh raspberries. And the other part are almond-buttermilk cupcakes, also with white chocolate/raspberry-cream.

As the cupcakes taste very good - I have to sing my own praises - I want to share the recipe with you. Here it is:

Ingredients for 12 chocolate cupcakes:

For the cupcakes:

140 g black couverture

140 g butter

140 g sugar

2 eggs

140 g flour

For the cream:

200 g white couverture

40 g butter

200 g cream cheese (double cream)

125 g raspberries

Dough: Melt black couverture and butter in a boiling water bath and mix it. Stir sugar and eggs foamily, then add flour and mix it with the couverture mix.

Put the dough into cupcake pans and bake it in the pre-heated oven for 30 minutes (175 degree Celsius).

Cream: Melt the white couverture in a boiling water bath and then cool it down for 10 to 15 minutes. Mix butter and cream cheese foamily, then add the lukewarm white couverture and the fresh raspberries.

Put the cream on the chilled cupcakes and sprinkle it e.g. with chocolate flakes. Ready! Enjoy it.

But I do have to warn you: It is a very heavy desert ;-)

candy doc

For my traditional Oster-FIC I was looking for a nice gift and I found it yesterday at the candy doc shop in Vienna (www.candydoc.com).

The shop offers a large range of sweets that you can fill in bottles or as you see on the photo in a box. Then you can choose from a also large range of labels for your bottle/box. A really nice gift for many occasions and for everyone who love sweets.

New ideas for cooking

I love cookbooks. I think I have more than 30 at home. This week I bought two new cookbooks which I want to introduce to you because I like them and the recipes sounds very good to me.

The first book is from Haya Molcho and it is called "Neni Kochbuch. Lust auf fremde Küche". NENI is a restaurant at the Vienna "Naschmarkt" and offers traditional oriental food in a new way. And so is the cookbook - above all you get informed about oriental food. Besides the book includes also hints and a little bit about the family story of Haya Molcho who is born in Tel Aviv and married to the well known pantomime Samy Molcho.

The second book is from Sophie Dahl, a model and writer, and it is called "Verführerisch Kochen mit Sophie Dahl" (Miss Dahl's Voluptuous Delights). She writes about her favorite recipes. The book is departed into the four seasons and then into recipes for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Also Sophie Dahl let us know about private things from her early childhood.

In the next weeks I will let you know how the recipes of both books run in the kitchen.

Back to USA

Two years ago I was three weeks in California (and also in Arizona and Nevada) - these tree weeks were the best holiday ever. I would like to spend some weeks again in California. But unfortunately I have neither the time nor the money for a long trip through California. So I will spend my holidays in Austria this (cycling holidays) and maybe go to Berlin in summer with my then 1-year-old niece Katharina and her parents.

Nostalgic

Do you know the so called "Lilienporzellan"? It is probably the mostly sold tableware in the sixties and seventies in Austria. I think nearly everbody knows the coloured porcelain here in Austria. I know it since I was a little girl as my both grandmothers had also some Lilienporzellan tableware. One grandmother passed it to me and so I own some of this wonderful cups.

This weekend I found the adequate sugar bowl (left one) in my grandmothers former house. And at a flea market I found a sweet sugar bowl (right one). It is not from the Lilienporzellan collection but I think it fits very good to the cups.

I have seen the Easter bunny!

Today this bunny was sitting in front of our house for some minutes. I guess it was the Easter bunny ;-)

Happy Easter!

I wish you all a happy easter and a relaxing weekend!

Sporty times

Today I have quitted my membership at the gym - I wasn't really often there in the last weeks. Instead of my membership I have bought a sporty bike. Cycling is much nicer in nature than in a stuffy gym. You can smell grass and flowers and feel the wind on your skin.

I really want to be sporty this year - so my goal is to drive at least 1.500 kilo kilometers in the next six month. That's not a lot, because I don't want to think so big.

Besides cycling to work and after work, I also want to make some tours, e.g. to the Neusiedlersee in May and the so called "Drautal-Radweg" from Italy to Slovenia in summer. If you want to follow us, just contact me.

P.S. This photo is made by the Hipstamatic App for iphone, first seen at frauniepi.

Vacanze Romane

Last weekend I have been in Rome for three days. Most of time I thought I was walking through a film set. But it is all real. Incredible, isn't it?

An efficient sunday

There are very lazy sundays. And there are sundays like today. A friend of mine and I baked delicious rasperry chocolate muffins. Afterwards this very good friend helped me to sort out clothes and also bags that I am not longer wearing. It was very difficult for me to do that because I like collecting things (maybe I need them some day??). But at the end I got rid of really dead weight (six big bags full of clothes and bags). It feels very good because I know that I do not really need the things, at some of the pieces there were still the bar code labels, others I haven't worn for years.

Is there anything you want to get rid of? What is it?

Good bye winter

As I can already feel, smell and see spring I want to say "Good bye winter" with one of my favourite winter photos this year (even though you don't see much of winter). I took this photo in December, when I was visiting my family for christmas. It was one of my first photos with my new camera. On the upcoming weekend I will go and catch spring with my SLR-camera. What will you do on the first warm weekend this year?

Spring is near...

... wonderful flower arrangements (here with cherry blossoms) by Sarah and Nicolette from New York City.

Photo from: http://little-flower-school.blogspot.com/

That's me!

I am a 32 years old woman living in Vienna/Austria. More about me and my life here at Frau Svea.