I've had a wonderful, if quite short, time in Uppsala at the Material Literacy workshop. It was planned as a rather short stint, but ended up being even shorter due to a massive train delay. Fortunately I could follow the part I'd have missed otherwise on Zoom! 

It was wonderful to meet some old friends and colleagues again,  and meet new people. There were fruitful discussions and lots of looks in detail at wonderful textiles. Hopefully there will be more on the topic of material literacy - I think it's a very helpful term for being able to read objects, and having some properly structured, thought-out lessons or schooling on that will surely be very useful for many people.

We finished with a little excursion into the church museum, and I was very happy to see the Golden Gown again.. It's been so many years since I was there last.

On the way back, there was time for a short stroll through Stockholm (well, some of it!) and a bit of food shopping before going back in the night train. I managed to find a nice small Christmas market there, so back at home, we were able to enjoy some freshly imported ostkaka:

I had not heard of that before coming across it on the Christmas market, but I got to try it there, and it was very nice. It's served warm, with the option of adding whipped cream and jam or something fruity, which we did when we had it here. Definitely recommend it!

The way back had just a little delay overall, so I was home in the afternoon, one hour later than planned originally. Now there's no travel until the end of the work year... which is also nice. There's a stack of things waiting to go to the post tomorrow morning, and I'm looking forward to doing some maintenance work during the winter break. The cat also approves to have her cuddle spot on the desk appropriately staffed again!

I managed to totally forget blogging on Friday - there was just too much stuff going on. 

First, I was being very adult-y and sensible and had a doc's appointment to check for skin issues (cancer screening and mole check); I'd gotten some weird light spots in the upper torso area, and I was actually steeling myself for a kind of skin cancer diagnosis when going there. Fortunately, it's just an overactive dermal yeast and almost purely cosmetic, so now I'm quite relieved (and equipped with a cream and a special shampoo to curb the overenthusiasm of that specific yeast). 

After that, circumstances called for a baking spree - I'd promised a cake as a birthday present. A Snickers cake, to be precise. Which is a concoction consisting of a bit of dough glued together with liberal amounts of buttercream in three different flavours - chocolate, peanut, and caramel. 

Pro tip #1: If you actually buy caramel, and not sweetened condensed milk by accident, you don't need to boil the milk into caramel as an additional step.

Pro tip #2: If you read your notes correctly, you don't leave the cake itself in the oven for double the time necessary. (It was still fine. Phew.) It was a little flatter than I had hoped for, which made cutting it more of a challenge, but I did manage. (It's baked in form of a long rectangle, then cut in half lengthways, then the two halves are halved again with a horizontal cut so you have, in the end, four very thin and long pieces of dough. When fully assembled with the buttercream layers inbetween, you get something more or less with the proportions of a snickers bar. Which, by the way, will not fit on a standard long cake platter as it is, you guessed it, too long.)

Pro tip #3: If you try to mix double the amount of custard into the butter, you will kill the buttercream. (It's a water-in-fat emulsion, and it can only take so much of the water phase before it flips and "curdles".) If you don't realise what you are doing, you will manage to do that twice.

Which leads me to pro tip #4: Don't take skimpy notes, write things down properly. There's no guarantee you will really re-bake the cake after a short time, still remembering the bits you did the previous time in detail.

So... I had a bit of trouble getting the cake all done, but in the end, it wasn't more ugly than my regular not-so-much-trouble cakes, and (most importantly) it tasted really nice. Makes a large, very solid cake that is rather easy to transport, but should be cut in slices not more than a centimetre wide, meaning it makes about, oh, 30 and a bit servings? It will also freeze rather well, which is a good thing, as it's rarely all consumed at once!

That cake is also one of the test opportunities for my (still ongoing) quest to find the perfect chocolate buttercream, by the way...

It's Pi Day today!

I like pie. If it has pie in the name, and does not contain cheese, chances are high I'll go for it and enjoy it. Apple pie, shepherd's pie, Coastal Fish Pie, put-some-leftovers-into-a-shell-of-dough-pie... I love them all.

Unfortunately I get to make them way too rarely because, unfortunately, making pie is not a 20-minute-cooking-time lunch. It takes less time (obviously) if you have the filling prepared beforehand (hello, leftovers from another meal), but there's still the dough to be made, and it has to bake. Since my usual cooking plan is "go into kitchen, open fridge, see what needs to be used, put in pot, leave to cook, hope for the best", it also means I have to remember in time that there's something planned that needs prep time and then baking time, and thus I have to start early enough.

That all said... pies have happened here in the past, and will happen again, and there are a number of pie crusts that I've used. One of the versions that are pretty quick to make is the Hot Water Pie Crust:

 Hot Water Pie Crust

150 g fat (suet or butterfat)
150 g broth (or 60 g milk and 80 g water)
480 g flour
1/2 tsp salt

Heat fat and liquid together, then pour into flour mixed with salt, mix with a spoon, then knead until fully blended (should not take long). You can roll it out and use it at once, no rest time needed.

I bake it at 220°C in the no-fan setting for about 30 to 40 minutes. Filled with delicious stuff, of course.

We were wondering about old-style recipes for cakes a while ago, inspired by some quite old (Art Deco) tableware, which had rather small plates for the cakes (or whatever else would have been served on them).

So I did as you do when wondering about stuff like that - I went into the Internet Archive and the Open Library and had a rootle around for recipe books from the end of the 19th century.

One of the books I came across was a really curious example, with a lot of advertisements, and a lot of recipes, but not just for cooking, no, for about everything from dyeing wool to dyeing hair to cleaning stuff to baking to curing sick horses. It's called the Brill's Family Recipe book. 

I'm not sure if I will actually try one of the cake recipes - but it was definitely very amusing to leaf through this curious mixture, and it does give an impression of what was considered important or necessary recipes back then. 

Holiday travels are wonderful - seeing new places, meeting new people, eating new and different foods, talking different languages (or at least trying to). Then you arrive home again, eventually, bringing with you... well, what do you bring with you from holiday trips? Memories, of course - which may or may not fade over time. I'm not a diary person, but when we are on holidays, I write a little travel diary. That is something my mum always did, and because memories may fade, or it could be handy to look up where one stayed a few years ago, or some highlight of a trip, I also made this a habit. 

Then, of course, there's photographs. When I was a teenager and in my early twenties, I really enjoyed taking pictures during holidays, but somehow, that enjoyment got less and less over the years. Maybe it has something to do with me taking the camera mostly for work purposes, more and more so as time progressed. Mostly, though, the reason is that when I'm taking photos, some part of my brain gets obsessed with looking at things only in "will that make a good picture"-mode, and that distracts me from actually enjoying things, or looking at stuff just so. Fortunately, the Most Patient Husband of Them All does not have a similarly weird brain, and he takes a picture here and there and now and then, so we go home with a few images for our collection and to keep memories alive and to show them to friends and family.

Sometimes there's also something that we buy to take home with us. I have blind-baking ceramic "beans" that we bought on one of our England journeys years ago, and when I take them out to use them, I remember that trip. 

There's only so much you need for a household, though, and only so much stuff you want to buy and lug home from travelling. So my most favourite type of holiday souvenir is... a recipe.

I'm fond of good food, and I very much enjoy eating "foreign" things when abroad, and trying stuff that is a regional speciality. And sometimes, something is delicious enough for me to look up the recipe (or several of them, since, you know, Internet recipe search) and integrate it into our portfolio of things to cook here. Which means that I both get new ideas on what to cook or bake, and I have something reminding me of glorious times in other places, and it's something that does not need storage space (apart from the bit of space in my cook book).

Cinnamon rolls remind me of trips to the North - Scandinavia or Finland. Scones are, of course, England and Ireland. Just like pies, which I make way too rarely. There's Sächsische Quarkkeulchen, from our hiking through the Sachsenforst, there's Crostata reminding me of the Embroidery School in Muro Leccese this spring, and most recently there's Pressgurka, from our stop in Sweden on the way back home this summer.

Definitely my favourite kind of holiday souvenir, these recipes!