Remnants

During December everything seemed to happen at once. I had an additional job working at the Christmas market, suddenly the lecturers at the university decided that we needed to complete everything we hadn't done in the past months in a few days and yet it was the month of Christmas parties and having to be social when all you want to do is sleep for eternity.

I spent the 24-26 at my friend's mother's place in Göttingen where we played boardgames, ate too many cookies and sweet things and hung out by the Christmas tree. As a present I had gotten a very cool cookie cutter, so when my friends came to Flensburg for New Years I had to bake some cookies.

The recipe was for Jamie Dodgers, which I found attached to some Jamie Oliver cookie cutters I had bought earlier:

- 250g softened butter
- 140g icing sugar
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 1 egg yolk
- 375g flour
- 30g caster sugar (for sprinkling the cookies when they come out of the oven)
 - 170g jam (I used watermelon-strawberry jam that I had made in the summer)

1. Mix the butter and sugar until it is fluff. Add the vanilla and the egg and beat well. Then sift in the flour and work the dough into a ball with your hands. This took a little while because the dough is rather dry. Then cover the dough ball in clingfilm and put it in the fridge for an hour. I left it there overnight and had to let it soften quite a while before it could be rolled out.
2. Turn your oven to 190°C. Prepare 2 baking trays with greaseproof paper or spray 'n cook.
3. Roll out the dough on a floured surface until it is about 3mm thick.
4. Here I multitasked: I used the 'eat-me' cookie cutter to just cut out some plain cookies, and used the other round cookie cutters for the Jamie Dondgers. You need to cut out an even amount of cookies and then Jamie uses a mini cookie cutter to cut a shape in the middle. Since I did not have a mini cutter I just used a knife and attempted to shape little hearts. It worked fine.
5. Bake the cookies for 10-12 minutes until they are pale gold, not golden brown.
6. Sprinkle them with the caster sugar and wait for them to cool.
7. Once they have cooled, use the jam to sandwich together the cookies.

And now for the bad news: I had to throw ALLLLLL the cookies away, because I used 'Dinkelmehl' (Spelt flour) and the brown pieces which I had thought to be the actual spelt turned out to be... little insects. So ja. In the end my friends saw the cookies, and then they were quickly dumped in the trash. NOOOOOOO.
 

Options

In the mornings my sister will only eat half a banana whilst reusing her mug from yesterday as a bowl for Bran Flakes or Special K with low fat milk. In between spoonfuls of cereal she takes bites of the banana. What I would probably see as a bit of a disgusting habit in people who I am not related to with her it is just normal. Maybe I am like Pavlov's dogs, conditioned into accepting the remaining half of the banana when I hear my sister leave her mug next to the sink.

I have never had the same affinity for bananas. Much rather give me a mango, or figs or berries. However, it is only the beginning of berry season here and let's just say it is never mango season in Germany. So my weekly grocery shopping often includes bananas (also because I am poor and they are cheapest).

Today one of the bananas was extremely blackened and instead of making a bread out of it I searched for a cookie recipe. I found these Banana Chocolate Chip Cookies over at the Cooking Channel and decided on them because they included oats (yay illusions of healthy cookies). They are easy to make, taste great and offer a good alternative to banana bread :)

Banana choc chip cookies and a view that I can't get enough of. 

Cough Cough

Is there ever a reason not to bake cookies? With foodgawker and millions of food blogs available I relish in trying a different recipe every time, even though sometimes they are not as great as the photos make them look. For my language group I baked Mini Chocolate Thumbprint Cookies  because I thought they looked quite cute and seemed fairly easy to make. And I had nothing else to do. So there's that.

Basically you mix the dough, roll little balls and with your finger make a little hole in the middle which you can later fill with something. The recipe uses a cocoa-icing sugar mix, I melted chocolate instead. But when my lovingly rolled cookies came out of the oven, they had spread and there was no sign of an indentation to fill up with the chocolate. I am not sure if this is our oven or the recipe, but needless to say this was a bit of a fail. They are also not that great tasting. So onwards goes the quest for the perfect cookie.

Hello ingredients.

Everything still running smoothly in the cookie assembly line. 

Then this happened, and I had to press little holes into the cookies with a spoon. Joy.

Still pretty though. 

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Where Are You Now

In limbo. That's where I am. That's where I have been for all 269 days of this year. And it feels like that is where I'll remain until I move into my own place, the university starts and my life heads somewhere again.

In the meantime I am sorting through old postcards and photographs. A pipe burst in the basement where everyone in the building stores their stuff. Nothing is inundated, the water just slowly drip-drip-dripped out onto the boxes containing old books and photo albums.

Now it is my task to sort through my great-grandmother's obsessive collection and see what can be thrown away and what should be kept. Fun fun fun.

As a distraction from sitting and sifting though damp papers I baked cookies. They should've been salted caramel Nutella stuffed double chocolate chip cookies, but I didn't have all the ingredients. It is strange how you know your own kitchen (or rather, my mother's kitchen) and by comparison cooking somewhere else does not cut it, entirely. Our kitchen at home is spacious and well-equipped. Here it is more cramped and only the most basic of utensils are available. Anything for cookies though.

Adapted from Top With Cinnamon, here is the recipe:

1/2 cup (110g) butter

1 1/2 cups (350g) light brown sugar

1/2 cup (55g) cocoa powder

2 eggs

1/4 tsp salt

3/4 tsp baking powder

2 cups (260g) all-purpose flour

1 slab of the cheapest milk chocolate, chopped into pieces

1 handful of hazelnuts, also chopped

flaky salt/ fleur de sel/ maldon salt, for sprinkling

approx. 1/2 cup (8 tbsp) nutella

Line a baking tray with parchment paper. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees F (180 degrees C)

In a medium saucepan, melt the butter. Take off the heat and stir in the brown sugar and eggs. Then add the cocoa, salt and baking powder and stir until well combined. Add the flour and stir until no floury patches are left. Lastly stir in the chopped chocolate and hazelnuts.

Take 1 heaped tbsp of dough, use your finger make a large indentation the centre of the dough and fill the indentation with a small blob of Nutella (like 1/2 tsp ish). Top with a flattened tablespoon of dough, and seal the edges.

Sprinkle with fleur de sel and bake for 8-10 minutes.

And then you get this: 

Top with Cinnamon adds salted caramel or a piece of chocolate containing caramel and omits the hazelnuts in the original recipe. I couldn't find chocolate with caramel in, so that is why I replaced them with hazelnuts. It worked out quite tastily, like a harder brownie with a Nutella centre. Om nom  nom. 

I can see a lot of life in you

There's a book series called City-lit, where a city is explored through excerpts from various other books to chart the feeling of a particular space at different times. I just finished reading the book on Berlin, and together with watching 24h Berlin, and my father totalling his car in Berlin, well, the city is coming to me although I am very far removed physically from it.

This waiting around for something, anything, to happen is making me feel like an animal trapped in a cage that it could pimp out and make super comfortable but now cannot leave until a freaking earthquake comes and shatters the bars. Slightly over exaggerated, sure, but waiting for things to happen is not programmed into me. Fuck all the chilling and cleaning and baking and cooking and planning Taaltandem (which takes 3 minutes) because I'd rather be busy.

On the other hand, I know this is the moment to be patient. Pro-active, yes, but patient. Wait to hear from Japan, wait to hear from Goethe, wait to hear from Germany, wait to hear from Sandton, wait to hear. WAIT. WAIT. Ugh. Wait.

Enjoy the chilling, who knows when you can chill again and won't have to get up before 10 AM on a weekday. Enjoy the possibility of nothing. Tell yourself stupid things like this to somehow infuse your life with the tiniest level of importance.

Ja. And in the meantime be thankful for friends like K who keep you in the loop and organise jobs for you and drink wine with you in the cinema because otherwise Lincoln would be unbearably boring and give you Macadamia-nut-butter and help you make a gift for your grandmother and are really great.

So great they make you bake cookies with hearts, from this recipe, which fails a bit but remains tasty.