Easy Chocolate Fudge Toffees .. or caramels

I have always wanted to make chocolate fudge or chocolate toffees! The difference between fudge and toffees is officially that fudge is softer than toffee, at least that's what the German wikipedia says. I have been using the terms as synonyms...

After reviewing various recipes I decided on this one, which was praised explicitly as very simple (not to say foolproof) and as not requiring a candy thermometer. It worked out just fine, but with the funny volume measurements, I never know exactly at what height exactly I should aim in the measuring cup ... therefore the recipe below is in weight units. Go metric system! ;-)

Reindeer Heart Cookies

Like so much else, I discovered this cute and easy way of decorating cookies on Pinterest. My reindeer are (intentionally) darker than thanks to cocoa in the dough, and I thought a heart shape would be nice - even if that lead some onlookers to mistake the heart-shaped ones for "Reindeer mice" and the jagged ones for "Reindeer hedgehogs"!
If you decorate as many cookies as I did, it takes time despite the simplicity ... but it was worth it, right? And you'll have many cookies to hand out, which is always good. :-) I used the same dough as for the non-lemming Funny cookies .

Rainbow Snow Cake with Snowman Macarons

For my mom's birthday this year, we made  and froze a cake, because my sister and I were at our parents' house on the weekend before the birthday. I wanted to bake this  cake with the cuuuuute Snowman Macarons. Also, I had always wanted to bake a rainbow cake, so I thought I'd combine the two: a Rainbow Snow Cake with Snowman Macarons! Since the mother of my friend Andrea had her birthday a few days before mine, on the weekend that we spent there, we baked the cake twice - thus, I could also try a piece :-D

Bad-Ass Bat Muffins

I had a Halloween party planned for his year and a lot of ideas of what I wanted to prepare for it. After this plan had changed spontaneously, I was invited to a Halloween party at a dear colleague's house and chose these bat muffins from all my ideas as my contribution to the finger food buffet. 
Mine are not as cute as the original ones with mini muffins and huuuuge eyes , but they also look a bit halloweenig and nasty, as it should be!

DIY (Halloween-) Cookie Cutters

I got the idea to make cookie cutters myself when I saw a cute gingerbread reindeer in a bakery and wanted to bake some myself. Since that worked out so well, I made cookie cutters for Halloween gingerbread in the form of a ghost and a pumpkin last year, and since this year I finally have black food coloring, I would like to make a black angry cat and a bat. Oh, and my form for NOTFUNNY-lemmings I've showed you here already. As promised in that post, here come my instructions on how to bend your own cookie cutters - bringing you unexpected possibilities of creativity ;-)

Chocolate-Coconut-Muffins with Fondant-Frangipani

Last weekend, I attended a Buddhist ceremony. The food at such ceremonies is usually wonderfully varied, and since my Dad was one of the main organizers, I wanted to bake something suitable. The emblem of Buddhism is actually the lotus flower, but in all the Buddhist temples I have ever seen, Frangipani also grow (they are called Aralia in Singhalese), which are also known as "Temple Flowers", precisely because they are planted in each temple. Unlike the lotus flowers, I could imagine to make Frangipani out of gelatin fondant, and that decided the decoration question! ;-)

Favourite Blog

Hurrah! :-) 
Dani from Gingered Things has nominated my blog as one of her five favourite blogs in the "Liebster Blog" campaign. Thanks a lot! Even more so as my blog is the online baking blog, the others and Gingered Things itself are mainly about DIY - but I think DIY can be combined very nicely and to the advantage of both topics with baking... :-)

My very first Chocolate Muffins

The very first muffins that I have ever baked come from a long-forgotten recipe book which a school friend of mine had once borrowed from the town library. Yes, back then we had no Internet! 
In the meantime, the recipe had disappeared, but I found it again and think it's still as good as ever. Sophias Quick Chocolate Muffins are very similar (except for the more fluid dough ) because I had then tried to reproduce the lost recipe from memory... So, here come my very very very first chocolate muffins! Tadah!

Elderberry Syrup

Since both my elderflower syrup and my lilac syrup have been emptied or given away for a long time now, I was happy to realize that nature has cleverly built the elder in such a way that you get your second chance and can make elderberry syrup from August to October! Like the other syrups,  elderberry syrup is excellent with  sparkling wine, prosecco, mineral water, ice cream and other desserts. 
I still knew the elder picking places, thus I set out to collect some berries on a sunny bike ride home. Well. Turns out that the biggest and ripest elderberry clusters are hanging high up, where it's nice and sunny and impossible to get there for the picking them. I managed to get some, and even experimented with different methods of juicing and made ​​two batches of elderberry syrup... because  elderberries are healthy, high in vitamin C, boost the immune system, and can even be used to reduce fever, says the Internet - I will test that some time!

Sweet Pesto of Mint und Lemon Balm - and Chalkboard Lids!

Hurrah! I have found a very effective way to use my tide of mints and lemon balm from my herb garden, and at the same time, to preserve them in a very tasty way: Pesto! Pesto can also be sweet and makes an excellent contrast to desserts such as panna cotta, crème brûlée, ice-cream, and more or less everything! 
I also tried a new technique for labeling glass jar lids: painting them with chalkboard paint! It is very simple and even dishwasher-proof!

Stick bread with herbs

Lately, it seems that stick bread has gotten very popular again, and since I missed this trend as a child, I really wanted to try it! Last weekend, we were invited for a barbecue and our gift in addition to the lemon meringue cupcakes was dough for bread on a stick. 

Unfortunately, I had not thought ahead to ask the host about the type of grill, which was in fact the sort of grill  which has to be covered with a lid while grilling - so no stick bread heat source! And since it was a barbecue party, something is on the grill at all times! Thus, I made 2/3 of dough as "oven bread" and only 2 stick breads to try it out - and considerung that everyone was already stuffed from all the other delicious barbecued stuff, the stick bread was remarkably popular! ;-)

Cookies of Death - NOTFUNNY Lemmings and Death

Today is my best friend Fabian's birthday, and since he loves the Notfunny Comics by Joscha Sauer and always likes to present us with a Notfunny book or postcard calendar, my sister had the idea to bake him cookies and to send them together with a Notfunny postcard. And because I always love to stay in theme, I wanted to bake Notfunny cookies! 

From the notfunny characters, the death and the lemmings suited best from a cookie perspective - because they are brown and fairly simple to make. So I wanted to bake lemmings and made an almond pastry dough with a little cocoa. My sister wanted to make sweet Pretzels from peanut-chocolate pastry dough, but offered me half of that dough for the Death biscuits, such that the colors match the original's closely - even if the proportions do not quite fit ;-)

Pineappe Sage Tea with Lemon

Since the summer seemed to be over for a while, I started into the tea-season. In addition, my pineapple sage just grows and grows, taking resources from the other herbs, such that I'm trying to use a lot of it right now. ;-) Apparently, it really likes my herb garden, much more than the other herbs, which grow normally and much slower!
Just like from mint, lemon balm, or sage,
you can make a delicions tea from pineapple sage, which even tastes much better than sage tea - but it's also not as healthy as sage tea. I won't use it up all, though (apart from the fact that I won't be able to drink THAT much tea) - the red flowers of the sage are supposed to be very pretty!

Mail/Post from my Pâtisserie

As I proudly announced in the previous Post, I participated for the first time in Post aus meiner Küche - I think the idea is great! You get assigned an exchange partner, whom you can clarify food allergies with, and then mails each other parcels with self-made delicacies. Also, photos of the delicacies get pinned onto the matching board on Pinterest, which reflects the motto and visualizes a virtual picnic meadow. Genius! Check it out, there are great things to see and a lot of inspiration to be found. And it's all packed so prettily!

Blueberry-Chocolate Cake-Pops...or Truffles

For the picnic exchange of "Post aus meiner Küche" (Mail/Post from my kitchen), I wanted to create a new and fancy recipe. Since my exchange partner said that she loves the Blueberry Tarte in my blog and blueberries in general, I wanted to make something including blueberries. And as I've  wanted to try cake pops for a while, and thought they were nice and small and compact and well suited to mail them, I created this recipe. I was very excited to find wooden popsicle sticks in my DIY cupboard as well as a coated wooden board in the perfect size which already had 4 holes in it and serves perfectly as a cake pop holder!

Lemon Meringue Cupcakes with Lemon Curd

At my parents's house, there is an awesome lemon tree that bears a LOT of lemons this time of year. They inspired me to make these lemon meringue cupcakes with lemon curd! Also, there was a flea market in the next town and since I'd been searching for a vintage footed cake stand for a while, I kept my eyes open and found this one :-)
It's vintage and frilly enough for my taste, but not overly garish ;-)
I made more lemon curd than I needed for the 12 cupcakes - although it keeps only for a few days, I decided to keep some in the freezer and use some as a bread spread or for the next batch of cupcakes. It's delicious!

Strawberry-Lavendar-Vanilla-Jam

Visiting my parents together with my dear sister, we could harvest a lot of lavendar which we used for lavendar pillows and this great jam (of course, the composition was my sister's idea!). The flavours of strawberry, vanilla and lavendar harmonize even better than we'd thought!

Cereal Grains

On my daily bike trips to work via the rural outskirts of Munich, I enjoy (apart from the many wildflowers) the idyllic landscapes with fields of cereal grains.  It's really great to watch as the fields change their color over time from a soft green to a full yellow, until at the end, there are only cute little hay bales left. And since I do use different kinds of flour for my baking, I thought I should blog about the kinds of grains and other foods growing on the side of my daily route!

Pretzel Basket for the Beergarden

From yeast dough, you can braid almost anything, and for the beergarden, you always need a basket.
This gift basket for a birthday in a beergarden couldn't truly be used for the transport of the contained food, but at least it provides a pretty setting! 
I also learned a lot about the theory of basket weaving...

The dough is exactly the same as the one described in the Pretzel dough post, it's very easy to work with.

Big Oktoberfest Pretzels

I've loved Pretzels since I was a small kid. After spending some time in Bavaria, I realized that there are subtle differences between Bavarian and Swabian Pretzels - the Pretzel arms are thicker and sit higher on the Bavarian Pretzels, the Swabian Pretzels have a bigger "belly" that is cut open so that there is a well-defined white spot on them while the Bavarian Pretzels just burst at some random place. ;-) My big Oktoberfest Pretzels are Bavarian Pretzels. You could tell, right? Concerning the lye, there are heated discussions online whether sodium hydroxide (NaOH) or sodium carbonate solution(Na2CO3) is better to use. I tried both, but the big Oktoberfest Pretzels can only be made with sodium hydroxide, as you need to boil the pretzel for a bit in the sodium carbonate solution and that won't work for Pretzels this size. For normal-sized Pretzels, it works well, see below. For these Pretzels, I used light spelt flour (type 630), which is similar as wheat flour type 550. From this amount of dough, you can make 16 normal-sized pretzels instead of the 4 Oktoberfest Pretzels, or one Pretzel Basket!