'Nother Tablescape (no kitteh this time)

Would you like to have a cup of tea while I go and slay medieval dragons? Then come in and take a seat (and be sure not to sit on the kitteh!). Look, there's even a little brown birdie to welcome you.



This is my first tea set, which I got from my parents several years ago. Can you see the rice worked into the china? The tea spoon was a recent thrift store find.

Unfortunately I don't have any freshly baked cookies at the moment (on account of all the time-consuming dragonslaying), but I hope you'll like the little chocolates. And if you insist, I might even fetch the misshapen Butterkeks-cinnamon-cream-cheese truffels from the fridge. :-)

While I'm busy slaying dragons, you could listen to the audio sample from Georgette Heyer's SYLVESTER, read by Richard Armitage. You can find a ten-minute snippet on RichardArmitageOnline.com (scroll down to the middle of the front page). Enjoy!

Making Chocolates - U R Doing it Wrong

Yesterday, I got the Bund tea cake and candy mold and I had the brilliant idea to make some chocolates for my greataunt today (her birthday is tomorrow). After all, the chocolate-sunflowers, -hearts, -other-flowers, -itty-bitty-cake-shapes would look earth-shatteringly lovely and would thus be admired excessively. Right? Right.

Well, have a look at the title of this post. Then have a look at the picture below.

Uh-oh.

Making Butterkeks-cinnamon-cream-cheese filling? No problem.

Filling mold with chocolate, Butterkeks-cinnamon-cream-cheese balls, and even more chocolate? Still no problem.

Mold goes in fridge. Chocolate hardens. Sandy takes mold out of fridge and tries to remove chocolates from mold.

In vain.

Sandy has the brilliant idea to put mold in hot water for a few seconds (that's supposed to help with ice cream, so it should help with stubborn chocolates, too, shouldn't it?) - DISASTER strikes.


Argh!

Aaaargh!!!!

AAAAAAAARGH!!!!!

*sob*

Traces of destruction in the kitchen ...

Adventure ended with death of chocolates.

Moral: Don't attempt to make chocolates with the Bundt tea cake and candy mold. Even if it is called a candy mold.

902nd Post ...

... let's celebrate! Here's a goodie for you:

Hedgehog in the Fog

Collecting Ideas ...

... for the perfect sitting room tablescape. :-)


For Saturday next week I've invited a few people for tea. It's been ages since I did some entertaining. Last year and the year before were so utterly horrible that most of the time I simply didn't have the strength for any kind of entertaining. Heck, some days I didn't even have the strength to go to other people's parties. And before things became so very awful, I generally felt rather self-conscious about my flat when I invited people. I mean, I had two cats and thus there was the problem of cat hair, the smell of fresh cat food as well as the smell of fresh cat poop. (Dinner parties or movie nights inevitably clashed with the cats' dinner and potty time.) (They still do, btw.) In addition, I felt that my flat needed to look perfect before I could let other people step through the door. As a result I got a reputation of being very tidy. (Ha! If only they knew!) As you can imagine, entertaining became something rather stressful, and I usually couldn't even relax after my friends had arrived.

I'm not quite sure what had happened between living in Hofheim and moving to the new house to make me so uptight about entertaining. Back at the old house, I was usually much more relaxed when friends were coming over. (Or at least, I remember it that way.) But perhaps that's no big surprise, given that the people I invited were usually very, very close friends, whom I had known for years.

Now fast forward to 2009. As you might remember, one of the reasons for buying lots of tea sets was to make me force to entertain more (after all, you can't really justify buying china if you don't plan to use it, can you?) (the other reason, of course, was that I fell in love with that tea set and then that tea seat - Wiesengrund & Bergeshöh'n, sweet! -, and then - oh my gosh! - the Burleigh tea set). In addition, I (re-)discovered my love for home decorating magazines and blogs (the "re-" refers to the former) like Little Red House, The Nesting Place, Southern Hospitality and 4 Reluctant Entertainers. While reading these blogs I had a major epiphany. Or perhaps it was more of a slow dawning, a prolonged a-ha! moment: Entertaining is not about making your home look perfect, it's not about making it squeaky clean, it's not about impressing people with either your decorating or your culinary skills. It's about, well, people. It's about having a good time with friends.

Of course, I will vaccum my flat, clean the bathroom and remove cat hair from the couch next Saturday. But I will not worry about stray litter tray stones in the bathroom after I've vaccumed it. I will not worry about the state of my sitting room windows which I ought to have cleaned ... uhm ... months ago. I will not worry about Cara joining us on the couch during tea. (If people don't like my cat, well, that's their problem, not mine.) And I will not worry about whether the bit and pieces sitting on my library shelves make the room look like a child's place. (More or less all of the decorations in there have been presents from family and friends, and they always make me smile when I walk into that room. So who cares about what other people might think?)

Instead I will enjoy making lovely coconut-and-cranberry cookies and itty-bitty tea cakes, creating a beautiful tablescape in red in my sitting room, and then I will enjoy using my beautiful Burleigh china for the first time and visiting with my new friends. (I will also enjoy the cookies and the tea cakes, of course.) And I will have a great time and I hope my friends will, too.

I've already started planning the tablescape, and when I went food-shopping earlier today, I had another (tablescape-related) epiphany: It's almost Easter! There are Lindor easter eggs! Red Lindor easter eggs! Which would look rather fine on the white, 3-tier cake plate next to the itty-bitty tea cakes. And so the cake plate with the red eggs in turn would look extremely fine next to the Red Calico and Red Prunus Burleigh china. :-)

Woohooo!

And now I need to get back to that horrible chapter I have to proofread. Argh! Hate proofreading!

In Proof-Reading Hell

I hate proof-reading. Hate, hate, hate, HATE it! It's worse than marking papers, 'cause when you mark papers you've got at least the consolation that you're reading other people's crap. At the moment, though, I'm forced to read my own crap. Bah.

I had such a good start on this chapter: 64 pages of the odd red squiggle. Then - bam! - I hit the chapter on Terry Pratchett's Guards! Guards! and the pages start looking as if cut my pinkie off like the good sister in the fairy tale, and dribbled blood all over the page. (The good sister in the fairy tale doesn't dribble blood since she's a depthless character and thus lacks any kind of physical and psychological dimension.) It's horrible. It's a massacre. (Have I already mentioned that I hate proofreading???)

Kitteh-picture is from I Can Has Cheezburger. Of course.

More Bakeware

Last night I fell victim to the allure of another Nordic Ware pan. The tea cake and candy pan. Which will produce the most adorable itty-bitty mini-cakes and chocolates. And these in turn will add their adorableness to any let's-have-tea tablescape (without the kitteh, this time). I love Nordic Ware! :-)

(Pictures taken from the Nordic Ware website; I hope my chocolates will turn out just as sweet!)

Mamma Mia -- with giggles *g*

More Tablescaping with Teh Kitteh

Helloz U zere ...

I couldz read U somezing from teh magazine ...

or we couldz pretend zat zere's a birdie sitting on me head.

Oh lolz! Teh birdie iz not sitting on me head after allz.

Itz a springtime morningz tablescapez! :-)

Have a lovely day!

With lovez

from Sandy & teh Kitteh

Food & Memories

Next Saturday my greataunt will celebrate her 98th birthday, and so, earlier this week, I was looking for some nice cake recipes. After having mused over my own cookbooks, I went to my parents' to sight my Mum's recipe collection. And there, in her handwritten cookbook, I found the recipes for my grandmother's famous "Streuselkuchen" and "Rehrücken." Whenever my grandmother (my Dad's mother) invited people for coffee, she would bake these cakes (as well as cheese cake and sometimes "Grindkopp" made of a yeasty dough covered with almonds). Finding these recipes gave me quite a pang because I realised how much I miss these afternoons at my grandmother's.

It also made me realise that my memories of specific people or situations are often connected to food in some way.

For example, when I think of my other grandmother, I inevitably remember her salad: not only did she make the salad dressing with condensed milk and a little bit of sugar, but she also served the salad in these pretty, red-rimmed glass bowls. She got the set of bowls as a wedding present from the family of an American officer for whom she was working after the war. And now I have the remaining three bowls. And whenever I open my kitchen cupboard and spot them, I can't help thinking of my grandmother and her salad.

Her best friend, whom I called "Tante Herr," made the best goulash soup in the whole wide world. She and my granny would often have a late breakfast together. They would sit in my grandparents' tiny, tiny kitchen, eating rolls, drinking sparkling wine and having the time of their lives.

When we lived in the Black Forest and my Mum would take me to Freiburg for a shopping expedition (which in itself was pretty awful, because I've always hated shopping expeditions unless they involve bookstores ... *g*) (well, by now, shops that sell china or tableware are fine with me, too *ggg*) to Freiburg, we would always buy "Nußecken" (nut triangles?) at a bakery near the multistory car park. Sometimes I still dream of these wonderfully fluffy, nutty "Nußecken." :-)

Cake!

Romance Writers Do It & Write About It*

And thus make romance readers happy, I should imagine. Well, this romance reader anyway. :-) After having spent the past weeks reading nothing but Heyer novels, I woke up this morning, craving a romance with sex in it. Don't get me wrong; I'm not necessarily in favour of the recent sexing-it-up trend. When reading a straightforward, mainstream romance novel, I don't need the characters to jump into bed on page two, to have wild bunny sex every twenty pages, or to indulge in any kinky sex games. The hero most certainly doesn't need to have a monstrously big penis nor one with any retractable appendages. Nor, heaven forbid, any body parts that glow in the dark (even if this might help to cut the cost of electricity!).

I like sweet romances, but I also like to read about characters getting physically intimate. After all, physical intimacy forms such an important part of a relationship. So as a reader I want to be shown that the characters also click on that level.

In my late teens, I read a lot of historical novels and I found most love-scenes included in those rather off-putting (e.g., the goat-sex scenes in "Die Kinder des Gral," or the voodoo doll scene in "The Wise Woman"). When I stumbled across historical romance, I was enthralled by the love scenes in those books. Active women? Check. No off-putting descriptions? Check. Men who love pleasing their women? Check. Female point of view? Check, check, and check again.

One of the first romance novels I read was Stephanie Laurens's "A Rake's Vow." I positively adored that first love scene, in which Patience secudes Vane to secude her. Strong woman gets hunky hero, and in the end they live happily ever after. And don't die on top of some stupid tower with arrows raining on them. Ha!

And who could forget that wonderfully funny love scene in Jo Beverley's "The Devil's Heiress," in which the heroine is comparing what she feels and sees to what she read about making love in a book called "The Annals of Aphrodite" ("'It was rather alliterative.'")? I mean, who could forget something like this:

"Men have books, and women steal them." She was still looking at his Rod of Rapture, wondering if the book was right, and he would like her Felicitous Fingers.

*g* Beverley should get top marks for coming up with the most hilarious euphemisms in the history of the romance novel. (And they are hilarious on purpose, not by accident! *ggg*)

A love scene doesn't even need to be explicit to pack a nice, emotional punch. Dorothy Dunnett's "Checkmate" anybody? When Pippa and Francis finally made love, I cried buckets. It's such a beautiful scene, and I was so very happy for them.

And then his true courtship of her had its beginning; and to the worship of his body, he joined the fairest garlands from the treasure-house of his mind, and made a bower for her.

*happy sigh* It doesn't get any better than that! :-)


* The Valley Forge Romance Writers RWA chapter sold tee-shirts with this motto at the 2005 RWA National Conference. I met a lady wearing such a tee-shirt at my stopover in Dallas on the way to Reno. I still remember this meeting not just because of the cool shirt, but also because she remembered that I had won the chapter's Winning Beginnings contest in 2003. As a result of that first place in the historical category, I sold my first novel to Chris Keeslar. :-)

Got Dishes, now what?

That's easy.

Bakeware! :-)

After having been holed in in my home office for over a week, I reached a serious crisis (= as in "If I have to spend another $&/("§& minute in this §$%()$/ room, in front of this $%/)§=$" computer, I'll go raving mad") on Friday night. So drastic measures were called for, and on Saturday morning I hurried to the station to catch the train to Frankfurt in order to go shopping! Wheeeee!

Went to Lush first to buy shampoo and a Buffy. Afterwards on to Hugendubel (= big bookstore) to look for Martha Stewart cookbooks. Or some nice design book. No such luck. Left with book about dogs of the British royal family. Now on to Cri Cri aka the Shop in Which Sandy Always Spends an Awful Lot of Money. This time I resisted the lure of beautiful tablecloths (it was a bit depressing that the special offer Leitner tablecloth still cost 278 €!) and instead ventured into the basement to the cookware. Where I fell under the spell of Nordic Ware's bakeware. But who could possibly resist such beauties? So you see? it's so not my fault!


Flowers! And still more flowers! It's beginning to look a lot like spring time!!!

I've already made a list of other Nordic Ware bakeware I'd like to have ... Their designs are simply fantastic: among other things, there are castles, palaces, Christmas trees, and carousels. Oh yes. And flowers. :-)

OH MY GOSH!

Like Heyer? Check.

Like Richard Armitage? Double check.

Like Richard Armitage reading a Heyer novel? Yes, of course!!! :-)

This summer a new audio edition of Heyer's Sylvester will come out - read by Richard Armitage. *swoon* How cool is that? Now RA is not just a wonderful actor, he's also a great reader - he's got a pleasant voice, cute accent, and he really manages to bring the story he reads alive for his audience. (*whispers* I've got two of the Robin Hood audio books read by him and he's doing a great job) (okay, and now you can forget what I've said about owning two Robin Hood audio books ...)

Creamy Vanilla Pudding

Unfortunately, I forgot to take pictures, and by now me and teh kitteh have devoured all of the pudding. All I could show you is the empty bowl. Anybody wants to see a picture of an empty bowl? (Pink transferware, of course!)

• 1 l milk (can be partly replaced by cream, according to taste)
• 3 eggs (most recipes demand egg yolks, but I always use both yolks and whites -- it works just as well, and I don't have to throw away food)
• 5-6 table spoons of sugar (or more, or less, according to taste)
• 4 heaped table spoons of cornstarch/cornflour (more starch will result in a firmer pudding, but I like my pudding creamy, so there)
• a few drops of vanilla essence (you can also use a vanilla pod, but I always have difficulties to get the black stuff out of the pod - inevitably I end up with vanilla and bits of vanilla pod; vanilla essence works just as well, especially if you replace some of the sugar with vanilla sugar)

Whisk eggs and sugar, add about 0,2 l of the milk, the cornstarch, and the vanilla essence, and whisk until smooth. Bring the rest of the milk to the boil, take the pot from the stove, pour the egg-mix into the milk and stir, stir, stir, stir.

And now we come to the tricky part, or rather, the part that takes a lot of patience: put the pot back onto the stove - on low heat! - and stir, stir, stir, stir, stir with a cooking spoon. (This is also a good time to check whether your pudding is sweet enough or not.) Stir, stir, stir, stir, until the mixture begins to thicken (which can take 15 minutes or more - cooking pudding is a good exercise in patience *g*).

It's important that the mixture doesn't boil because that will cause lumps to appear (and we don't want lumps in our pudding!). If the worst happens, you can always pour the whole through a sieve into a clean bowl and quickly clean the pot before you put the pudding back into the pot and onto the stove.

If the pudding has thickened and gained a creamy texture (dip spoon into pudding, take spoon out, blow on the pudding-coated back - if a rose pattern appears, you've got the texture right), you can pour it into a clean bowl, cover with cling film (or skip this step if you like your pudding with skin on top) and let the pudding cool down. Eat warm or refridgerate and eat cold. Enjoy!

Tablescaping -- the Sandra Way

Helloz, U Zere ...

Whut R U doing?

Tablezcaping ...

with Teh Kitteh!

Duties of Honorary Aunties

1. Cuddle the baby whenever you visit your friends.
2. Make cooing baby-noises at baby.
3. Kiss baby's head.
4. Buy super-sweet baby blanket. :-) (In case you're interested, it's from David Fussenegger. Isn't it adorable?)

Still there ...

Haven't been et by dragons yet (lucky me!) but am happily scribbling away at the dratted diss (~ 205 pages in TNR, 1.5 spacing + 39 pages of bibliography so far). Am NOT moving -- despite the recent increase in furniture & dishes shopping. :-) This increase is entirely due to the influence of all the decoration blogs I've been reading lately: they've been a great inspiration for me to start tackling certain problem areas in my flat.

Like, the sitting room!

Item: one sitting room, painted in lovely shade of warm yellow and furnished with lovely red couch (Ektorp from Ikea), antique Chinese table, three square black chests in lieu of coffee table, plus nice wooden cabinets with a slightly antique look.

Problem: Didn't spend much time there, and when friends came over we usually sat in the comfy armchairs around the dining table.

Hmm.

Solution:

Step 1: Put pretty, but elegant pillows into one of the square black chests, and get those old, round pillows from the 1970s out of storage. They might look funny with those flowers and frills, but I love them to pieces: when I was little -- very, very, very little -- we used to have a caravan, and those pillows are from the caravan and thus are true childhood treasures. Just looking at them makes me happy. And I guess it's not a bad idea to surround yourself in your home with things that make you happy. :-)

Step 2: Buy fluffy yellowy-beige throw. Doesn't look that good on the red couch, but the cat and I love it to pieces (especially the cat!) because it's so warm and fluffy and snuggly. When I expect guests, I can always put it into the ottoman and get out the red throw instead.

Step 3: Add bookish tablescape = instant cosiness!

Plus I followed the rule I found on one of those aforementioned decoration blogs, and worked with what I already had (um ... books ...) (okay, I bought the two Bunny Williams books and one of Charles Faudree's French country style books after I had read about them on Little Red House -- it's all Mary's fault! *g*) and sat one of my old cat figurines on top of one of the piles.

By now I've replaced one of the Heyer piles with THE LORE OF THE LAND (love, love, love this book!) and THE FOLKLORE OF DISCWORLD (have I already mentioned that I'm in love with Jacqueline Simpson? She's my new favourite folklorist!). (Who says you can only use coffee table books as decoration on your coffee table? I say, put books you love on that table, books that reflect your personality, books you're likely to take up yourself in a quiet minute.)

Step 4: Buy small, cute iron shelf. Add books. Admire. :-)

Step 5 and 6 (yet to be taken): Get rid of junk. Put the picture on the wall and decorate with berry-garland.

I now spend so much more time in the sitting room, snuggled up on the couch with my cat, a cup of tea, and a nice book. In other words, Beautification Project No. 1 was an instant success! Yay!