Poppy seeds have a long history - there have been finds of poppy seeds from Germany dating back to about 4600-3800 BC. While opium, also derived from the poppy plant, was used only for medicinal reasons in Europe during the Middle Ages, poppy was listed in about every compendium of plants for food and medicinal use - the Capitulare Karls des Großen, the plans for the garden of St. Gallen, and so on. Poppy seed oil was not only used for food purposes, but also for mixing paints, since it dries up. (All after Körber-Grohne, Nutzpflanzen in Deutschland).

And why do I write all this? Because some years ago, we became acquainted with the family recipe of a good friend of ours - a poppy seed cake. And what a poppy seed cake! It combines all good things - poppy seeds, freshly ground and heated up with milk to release all the flavours; yeast dough; streusel topping and finally an icing of lemon juice and sugar. This cake is heavenly, and the recipe I have is just too good not to share. So here you go - a typical German-style family recipe:

Mohnrolle mit Streusel (Poppy seed cake roll with streusel)

For the dough:
Ingredients: 500 g flour, 30 g yeast, 1/5 litre milk, 60 g butter, 60 g sugar, 1 pinch of salt.
Instructions: Make yeast dough from this.

Poppy seed filling:
Ingredients: 500 g ground poppy seeds, about 1/2 l milk, about 3 tblspoons semolina, 2-4 eggs, a little bitter almond aroma, ample sugar.
Instructions: Cook a thin soup from milk and semolina, put in poppy seeds. Stir well and let it cool. When cool: mix in eggs, sugar and aroma until mass is spreadable. Sugar to very sweet taste because poppy is slightly bitter in taste. Amounts needed may vary; add in only 2 eggs at first to keep the filling from getting too liquid. Should it be too stiff, add boiling milk.

Streusel:
Ingredients: 200 g flour, 125 g butter, 125 g sugar
Instructions: Mix flour and sugar; knead in butter (cut into pieces) until streusel result.

Icing:
Ingredients: 250 g icing sugar, lemon juice
Instructions: Mix until spreadable.

How to make the cake: Roll out dough until thin. Spread poppy seed filling on it and roll cake into a roll. Place on baking sheet. Moisten roll with cold water and place streusel on top. Bake 50-60 min. at 190-200° C. When cool, ice the cake.

As you can see, it's quite... non-elaborate, and thus always reminds me of medieval recipes - "hey, anyone knows how to make this or that, so there's no need to describe it". However, here are some add-ins from me to make it a little less non-elaborate. (If you don't know how to make yeast dough, I will not describe it here. Go find out - it's totally worthwhile to acquire "make yeast dough" as a basic cooking skill!)

Ground poppy seeds are best used fresh. You can use a poppy seed grinder, which will process absolutely nothing but poppy seeds, or buy freshly ground poppy seeds - though that can prove a bit difficult.
I use about 360-400 g of sugar for the filling, and usually only 2 eggs. The icing will take the freshly pressed juice of one to two lemons.
Roll out the dough really thin; to transfer the roll to a baking sheet, roll out on a clean tea towel, spread filling on it, roll by lifting one side of the tea towel and carry the roll to the sheet on the towel, there to let it roll off. Handle very carefully, or it will burst. When spreading the filling, don't spread it all the way, but concentrate on the side where you will start rolling and leave the opposite end free - the filling will spread more while rolling.
Baking in our oven takes about 50 min at 170° C in our fan oven.

This cake is a fair bit of work - grinding the poppy, preparing all the different bits - but is totally worth it. And I will now go and have a piece of the little that is still left from the weekend...

Yesterday evening, after the Most Patient Man On Earth was back home from work, he casually told me that he had ordered a new hardcover book from our mutual favourite author.

I tried not to flinch - we had been ordering our English books from Amazon, like I wrote yesterday. And a new book from C.J. Cherryh - the first volume of the next trilogy she writes - that is something to rejoice about, after all!
I asked him what publishing house the book is from... and he says "oh, I don't know - I think it's Daw (it is, by the way, and Daw belongs to the penguin.com group)... and I didn't order it from Amazon."

The Most Patient Man had not only read my blog, he had also clicked on some links, and then read some more, and clicked some more, and (via a comment from a lady in France) found an on-line bookseller based in the UK, with free shipping wherever they ship, worldwide. So the link above? Will not lead you to the Amazon site, but to www.bookdepository.co.uk. For me, that means getting used to a new online bookshop structure. They may not be as large as The River Shop (yet), and they might not have as huge a selection as The River Shop, but they will be seeing my (our) money for English-language books now. And my links, with the little traffic that might bring (since while I am utterly happy about the two new followers this blog got during the last few days... realistically thinking, this is a teeny-tiny blog with really not so many readers). And thus hopefully you (as you follow my links) and maybe your money, too...

In a recent comment, I found a link to academia.edu, which seems to be something like Facebook for academics (with listing of papers). Another social platform, just what the Internet needs! Did any of you know about that platform before? Am I the only one who was in the darkness?

To blog in earnest about that, I think it is a brilliant idea to have some sort of academical network like that - you can list books and papers you have read, maybe discuss them with colleagues, follow other people's work, and so on. Just like Facebook is a brilliant idea, keeping track of old colleagues and friends, instant chatting to just drop a word or two, and so on. And like Xing and LinkedIn are brilliant ideas, building a network of business acquaintances and partners, getting recommendations and seeing who trusts whom in business things, and so on. And like Ravelry, where you can connect with knitters you know and new folks, see who knits what, find new pattern ideas, message around, hang out in groups and so on. But is having so many different network platforms still a brilliant idea?

The problem of all this, as I see it: There's too many of them platforms. And each and every platform presence of a person means you need to dedicate time and energy to your place in that network, keeping your status and your information up-to-date, keeping track of your network connections, dropping a comment here and an answer there. And more and more I get the feeling that all those social networks are a good idea, but a great big honking single one would be an even better idea - because the idea of each of these networking sites is to collect everybody into the site and database, and every single platform wants as many people as possible, but my time is limited, and my energy that I am willing to devote daily to my presence on the Net is limited too. And that is exactly why I am blogging, but not going online to check Facebook or Xing or LinkedIn or whatever often: because this blog is my main bit of internet presence, and all the other groups and networks have to take the back seat. With this blog, what I write is there to read for everybody with Internet access and sufficient knowledge of English, and there is no need to be in any of the social network sites - and no need to know in which of these many sites I can be found...

My normal life style does not include lots of reading or listening to the news, but even if you don't try to catch news every day, the big issues sooner or later still come up somewhere. Like the Haiti earthquake.
To help with relief in Haiti, the Yarn Harlot has put up the knit signal (like the bat signal, but with more yarn) and asks for donations to MSF (Médecins sans Frontières, which means Doctors Without Borders).

MSF has been doing great work all over the world for many years, and I personally think that they are one of the best humanitarian organisations to give money to - because besides other reasons, very very little of the donations does go into the overhead, and most goes to where it is needed. So if you have a little money left over, consider giving them a bit - and if you need a better pro-donation pep talk, read Stephanie the Yarn Harlot's blog.

The year 2009 is over, and I hope you all had a wonderful and smooth transit into 2010!

Last year was a year of beginnings and starts into new adventures for me. I made my first steps in the publishing process of the thesis, I joined forces with Sabine for some textile madness projects (including the Textile Forum in Eindhoven), and 2009 also was my first full year in the freelancing venture. I had an exhibition, I went to several conferences and medieval events I had never been to before, I did some research on new things. I planned and ordered things for the market stall, I planned some workshops, and I acquired skill in some new old techniques - like netting, brocading and a bit of goldwork embroidery. Hey, I even learned how to knit!

So looking back, 2009 seems to have been a good year. I say "seems", since a year of Beginnings is just that - fresh starts with no way to guess how each little thing begun will work out over time. And so I am curious to see what opportunities 2010 will bring to go on with each of these things... because ultimately, 2010 will decide just how good 2009 has been.

I hope we all have a wonderful, interesting and successful year. And to all the rest of things in a year one could wish for, I think nobody wishes it better than Neil Gaiman in his New Year Benediction:

 I'm off for the holidays now - meeting with the family and later with friends to start into the New Year. As I'm sure me and you will all be much too busy for blogs during these days, I'll see you in January 2010, on Jan 4, to be exact.

Until then have some wonderful, relaxing and stress-free days with your friends and families!

And if you are curious about which New Year's Eve tradition is most hallowed to me and my friends, you might want to know about the phenomenon that is Dinner for One (which even has a Wikipedia entry telling about its importance) and then watch it.

Best seen on New Year's Eve, along with countless Germans!

There is a German saying that goes "Wenn einer eine Reise tut, dann kann er was erzählen" (roughly translates to "Travels will always provide you with a story to tell"). This is certainly true about travel home from London yesterday, where we spent a few days to relax and take in the Christmas lights.
We traveled to London with the Eurostar, and it was a very pleasant travelling day, with windowgazing, knitting and reading the hours until we arrived in St. Pancras station. The way back, however, was not so smooth: Due to the train failures in the Tunnel, there was no train service yesterday, and according to the updates on the Eurostar website today, we would not have come home until tomorrow at the earliest.
We were alerted to the tunnel problems in time, luckily, and went back home using a plane - and again we had a good measure of luck, since our (evening) plane only ran two-and-a-half hours late, which means we arrived at our home in the small hours. Still, it could have been much, much worse.
It will never cease to amaze me that a metal contraption, made of several tonnes of metal and plastic, can take off into the air by sheer power. But comparing the journey to and from England, I liked the train journey better - and I hope that Eurostar will recover from this fiasco, both reputation- and finances-wise. (And of course I also hope that they will not try to keep their losses smaller by not paying for extra expenses of the travellers who got home by plane or ferry...)