Happy Valentine's Day

This our chocolaty chocolate cake with red sugar hearts we had for breakfast this morning. Well, not the whole cake but the slice that is missing in the picture. It's a very soft and moist chocolate cake that we love a lot. So today was the right occasion. I will share the recipe in a later post.

And a bunch of red tulips to make it a perfect Valentine's breakfast. Happy Valentine's Day for you too!

Two little owls and the beginning of a new blanket

The companion for the first owl is finished! I blogged about the first one here. Now there are two happy fellows who already found a new home. A friend of mine who came over to our place loved them so much I gave them to her.

So there is room for more amigurumi projects :-)

 

But first I am working on a new blanket project. It is a mixed pattern, stripy blanket. There are great tutorials out in the net and I am following the ones from the talented crocheters Hannah, Jules and Carina and Jessica. And my first few rows are looking like this:

I am using my stash of Schachenmayr Original Bravo that I blogged about earlier. I love working with this acrylic yarn as it is easy to crochet with, stitches are clearly defined, it is soft and machine washable. I chained 241 stitches using a 4 mm hook and doing the rows back and forth. Having so many colours to choose from I hope they will go together nicely.

Winter moments

The last couple of weeks I took pictures for my blog posts. Having various topics to blog about in my mind I just find myself assembling pictures and typing text only now. So here are some winter moments:
This is what it looked like two weeks ago when looking out of my office window. Snow, snow, snow

 

Then a few day later: Even more snow!

While we in the North were under a heavy blanket of snow, the western part where my sister lives had no snow at all. At times the temperature gap was 16 degrees Celsius and we are only 330 km apart. Fortunately the snow melted away after a week. As I am dependent on using my car I was very happy about that.
Here are the colours of our winter walk in the forest: grey skies, green conifers and and brownish soil. I am actually more an indoor type of person, especially when it's cold and grey outside.



And so are the ragdoll cats of my sister, indoor cats! I helped her moving places. Her cats found it all very exciting and adventurous. They are so gorgeous, their fur is very fine and soft and winter coloured - and is sticking to all of your clothes too ;-)

To bring some bright colours in here is a curry dish I cooked together with dear friends of mine:
chicken curry with coconut milk and coriander, cucumber salad in a joghurt-ginger dressing and some chapati bread.

So this were my winter moments of the last weeks. As you can see, it all ends with something to eat :-)

Books and films

I love reading books. Fictional books. All kind of fiction, especially fantasy and books on a historical basis. I love it so much that I cannot stop reading once I dived deep enough into the story and I am absorbed by it completly. It has always been like this ever since I learned how to read. When I was little I even used to read with a flashlight under my blanket at night so my parents couldn't see me reading and stopping me. Fortunately these flashlight-reading-days have passed, but the passion stayed.
I am now using the one-book-one-weekend strategy, which means that I have to start reading a book on Friday or Saturday latest in order to finish reading it until Sunday night. Because on Mondays time for leisure reading is scarce. Besides reading all through Sunday, Monday or even more weekday nights does not help to get through the week. So the number of books I am reading per year has declined dramatically as there are not so many weekends with nothing to do than reading.

The other weekend though I felt like reading. It was already Saturday afternoon, still I got started. I got a novel for my birthday half a year ago called "Gone Girl" and I was really curious what it was about. The book contains lots of suspence and is divided into three parts and each part is more surprising than the one before. I really got caught.

Then I googled the book title to find out more about the author. What I found out was that the author, Gillian Flynn, stated that the movie would end different from her novel. Oh, wow, there is going to be a movie! It will be released in autumn in the US. So I have to wait patiently until it will be shown here as well. And I am already very very curious how the end will turn out in the movies!
And there is another book I read which will turn into a movie as well: "The hundred-year-old man who climed out of the window and disappeared". I love this book a lot. It is written in a very unpretentious and funny way. And the ending came as a big surprise for me. It will be shown in Germany March 20. So in less than 2 months. Looking forward to it so much!

Little owl

After crocheting one lovely hexagon after another for the last couple of weeks, trying out lots of new patterns and playing with colour combinations, I tried another amigurumi pattern once again.
But firstly here are the new hexagons I did for Natasja's crochet for kidneys project I blogged about earlier.

As it is time to send them in, I started to follow a pattern of the talented Becky for a little owl. Actually I thought the owl would be much much smaller. But for this I have to use a very small hook size and much lighter yarn. Still the size is ok for decoration. The little fellow below just measures 6 cm in height. I filled half the body with rice to give it better stability. The other half is filled with stuffing material.

 

Now I am crocheting another owl for the first one to have a companion :-)

Baking Bread

As you may know I follow lovely Lucy's blog called Attic24. She introduced a bread recipe (no-knead bread) which seemed to be very easy to follow and which looked so scrummy that I had to try it.
I already baked bread, but only with the no-fail, easy bread recipe I blogged about in September. The main difference to the easy bread recipe is the amount of time for the yeast dough to rise - and it really takes time for the no-knead bread, around 12 - 18 hours! And it's worth every hour waiting: the taste is terrific and the texture wonderful. It reminded Peter and me of the white bread we have eaten at an Italien restaurant.
I baked this bread twice already and I can confirm that it's really quick and easy to set up the yeast dough. The first time just plain. The second time with some olive oil and black olives added.



You have to be patient again when taking the bread out of the oven and wanting to cut off a piece of it. The better it cooled the better to slice.

So this was my breakfast on Saturday morning: freshly baked olive bread with butter, orange-banana juice and green tea with lemongrass. Oh what a great way to start the day!

Crochet for kidneys

First things first: Happy New Year! Have a great, creative and joyful 2014!
We had a very relaxed turn of the year, having a simple but yummy dinner with smoked salmon, potato pancake and salad. We spent the evening on the sofa watching TV, and at midnight we were gazing at the many fireworks around our place.
So now one week into the new year daily routine is back. Except for crochet projects. Last year I wrote about my new stash of yarn. So what to do with all the new yarn? Actually I planned to crochet another blanket for a long time already. And then I read about Natasja's crochet for kidneys project - and I knew exactely what to start to do with it!!!

 

And I love to crochet hexagons. So this is what I did the last couple of weeks:

 

I used the hexagon pattern compilation from moogly and Natasja's hexagon in bloom pattern. It is so much fun playing with the various colours and pattern. If you would have visited me on a weekend evening you would have seen me on the sofa covered with lots of yarn balls, scissors and a measuring tape and a heap of crocheted hexagons. What a joy! :-)))