Dear Readers,
as you can see on my picture of my cookie plate, there was not enough time to blog all new christmas recipes. So after the holidays there will be some more cookie recipes on the blog 🙂
For now, I want to wish you a merry Christmas!
Stefanie
There are only seven days left until the first advent. So we all have to start planning what we want to bake for Christmas. In the last years I published already a lot of different recipe here in the blog. To make it easier to find them I sorted them and summed them up hier:
It is the seventh birthday candle I lit today for “Hefe und mehr” and I wonder how time is flying. Did I thought about how much the blog would be a part of my life? I don’t think so. But at this day was the start of a big adventure and things happend I never dreamed they would ever happen, like the advents calender or the book. I learnt a lot in this years, both in baking and taking pictures. And I met a lot of nice people due to the blog. I’m so happy that I clicked the publish button seven years ago.
To celebrate I would like to start another birthday blog event like I did in the last two year. This year I would like to collect recipes for bread baking beginners, fitting the new category I started this year. So here is my wish for this event:
I never like chain mails. In primary school I constantly ignored all the threads they included and threw them away instead of copying and send them forward. Blog awards are way better because their idea is a lovely one. But I do not want to send them forward today. And so I say “Thank you very much” to Backfreak for the “Liebster” (german for dearest) Award and ignore rule three to five:
The last month was a quite busy one and I was not so much at home. Time for blogging was rare and time for reading other blogs or leaving comments was even rarer. And so I enjoyed it very much to read all your post last weekend. I was so happy that so many people baked something for our virtual breakfast! I tried to leave a comment on every page, I hope you get them all because everyone did such a great job!
So please take a seat on our virtual table. Do you want a cup of coffee, or tea or a cappucchino? Or better some juice or water? Here we have honey (from granddad), homemade jams and jellies, some chocolate spread, quark and cheese. Does anyone would like a boiled egg? Or scrambled eggs? For bread, please help yourself from this stunning selection:
It is six years ago since I wrote my first blog post. Can you imagine that? And each year I look back in amazement. It seems to be just yesterday that I press the “publish” button for the first time. And now my “Baby” is old enough to be a school kid! How time is flying…
The success of my book amazes me , too. It was sold more than thousand times and that without a big publisher or a lot of marketing. I got a lot positive feedback which makes me very happy. I never hoped that so many people would like it! And just in time for the Blog Birthday Bod lowered their prices for hardcover and so I can now offer a hardcover version of “Hefe und mehr” as well.
When my dearest and I move together eight years ago we did it on budget. I was about to start my diploma thesis and he just startet at university. It was not the time to buy our dream kitchen. And so we started with my old second handed stand alone oven which broke some month later. By that our kitchen layout was for a stand alone oven and so we replaced it with a similar cheap oven. And this oven worked well all the time.
But I got more and more frustrated by the fact that spills would flow between kitchen cabinet and oven and were hard to clean. And after finishing my Ph.d. I started to dream about a new build-in oven. But I do not choose easily when it comes to investing some money. I needed about a year to decided which oven I wanted. I read a lot and decided at the end to buy an oven with hydrobake function from Siemens, together with an induction stove (Siemens EQ861EV01R ). The hydrobake function keep steam inside the oven instead of letting the steam coming out during baking.
Last week the oven was delivered and we used the elongated weekend to partly deconstruct the kitchen and build it up with the new oven once again. Here are my before/after pictures and some steps in between:
Now it’s official. I’m a little bit crazy.
I mean, who else would start making malt extract from scratch? But when I started to search for treasures in my pantry I found some left over barley malt from our last beer brewing. And that’s when the thought came to my mind that I could do my own malt extract. If you ever made beer by yourself you will know most of the procedure. Mixing milled malted barley with water and keeping it on defined temperatures for some hours. I do this in the oven which works very well with our normal mini batches (6 litre). After mashing I strained the mixture through some cheese cloths and then brought the malty liquid to boil. After the volume reduced to the half I had a thick, sweet syrup which looks and taste like the malt extract I normaly buy for baking bread.
I don’t think I will not start to make my malt extract by myself on a regular basis. But it is good to know that I could if I would like!
