to grant credit

So, a couple of you know, that I work in the finance busines but that isn't what I've meant with the title.

I stumbled over this thread on Ravelry about Kiva.org. Kiva is an oranisation giving out microcredits to borrowers all over the world. You can lend from 25 USD upwards to a project you choose. It's not a donation but you are granting a credit, so you get (most likely) your money back. Yes, there's a chance of loosing the money but I figured out, I could happily live with the loss of 25 USD.

So, I helped granted a credit for a young woman on the Philipine islands helping her buying pigs. The credit runs for 5 months and I plan to lend the money to the next project if I get it back.

Feels good :)

Baking galore!

Ha, blogging twice a week and I already have another blogpost planned ;)

I've been baking like a madwoman the last few weeks. The twins christening is coming up and M. Godfather is allergic to eggs, so I've been trying new eggless cake recipes. I found the site egglesscooking.com and it has great recipes.

For the twins birthday I made the whacky vegan chocolate cake and used it as the base for a chocolate-cherry cake

Everybody loved it (plus is actually has no chocolate in it but cacao, so I can have it too :) ) It's moist and spongy. Of course it does not rise as a cake, that has eggs in it but it was great. (My abilities to decorate a cake are open for improvement ;) )

Next I tried the chocolate zucchini bread and boy, that is a total winner. It's again spongy, so rich and so yummy, that I used the recipe to create another zucchini bread with chocolate too and DH and I finished it in no time (zucchinis are so cheap now)

Here's my version (plus it is metric for those in the countries actually using scales ;) )

190gr gram shredded Zucchini (you can peel it if you like but it's not necessary)
100gr all purpose flour
20gr whole wheat flour (I have a bag of whole wheat flour, that I want to finish)
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon natron (baking soda)
50gr cacao powder
1 pinch salt
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
Peel of 1 orange (ground) or 1/2 bottle orange extract
60ml canola oil (rapsöl ;) )
60gr unsweetend applesauce (I use Apfelmark from DM for those in Germany)
100gr white sugar
110gr brown sugar
6-8 teaspoons plain yoguhrt
1 teaspoon applecider vinegar (Apfelessig)
50gr Rittersport edelherb (cut into bigger chunks) or any other dark (60+% cacao) chocolate

Preheat your oven to 160°C (ventilated) and grease a loaf pan. Also line the bottom of the loaf pan with baking paper otherwise you will have a hard time getting the bread out of the pan in one piece

Mix all the dry ingredients exept for the sugars and chocloate in a medium sized bowl.

In another bigger bow mix the liquid ingredients and the sugars.

Fold in the shredded zucchini with the wet ingredients.

Add to this the flower mixture with a big wooden spoon until just combined. Do not use a mixer. Stir in the chocolate chips.

Transfer the batter to the loaf pan and bake it between 55-65 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean when inserted to the bread.

Let the bread cool in the pan for 10 minutes and then transfer to a cooling rack.

The bread is best eaten a day after :)


As for non-eggless things I made buttermilk waffles using a recipe from an older book called "Waffeln".
The recipe just uses 3 teaspoons of sugar, so it was pretty good with my new strawberry-chocolate jam that was inspired by this recipe

The jam is really tasty but the baking chocolate I used overpowers everything, so it's not spicy at all...

For the kids birthday I also made Oreo-Cheesecake cupcakes but they were gone so fast, that I couldn't take a picture...

Next up: Cooking and sewing!

Tour de fleece 2011

So, the tour de fleece (and the tour de France) is over.
This was my first year participating and I had lots of fun and managed to get more spinning done in the 21 days than I did during the last year. I mostly spun during the kids lunchtime nap or in the evenings.

(for those amongst my readers, who don't spin: the tour de fleece is a big spin-along held on ravelry. There are tons of teams starting and basically you set your own goals and you spin every day the racers of the tour the France are racing :))

My goal was to spin every day and get some work done on some gray Merino roving that I had purchased in 2009 or 2010. I had started on the kilo in January, spinning a bit here and there but I guess I started with around 850gr when the tour begann. Now 21 days of spinning later I have around 30gr left, 5 very full bobbins and 4 big skeins of 4ply yarn:

I needed a break from all that gray roving one day and spun up some samples a fellow spinner from Kiel gave me and plyed it with some left over singles from a previous spinning project. That skein is on the right side of the picture ;)

I'm so happy that I participated and will be in the race next year again (since I got a biiiiig honking ball of roving from Sarah Jane in the loveliest burgundy colour. I need to get a picture of that....)

One

So, do you know what you did last year on the 15th of July?
Do you remember?
I certainly do:


It's been a rough start but as these two grew things got better and a lot easier.
Happy Birthday M & E! You two are lovely little girls and we love you so much.

a lot of cooking

attention: lots of food pictures will follow ;)

So I'm still trying to make at least 1 new recipe each week. Some weeks I don't succeed some weeks I make several. It has been pretty warm here, so we mostly have light lunch (read sandwiches) and most evenings I'm just too tired to cook something new but just throw whatever is in the fridge together and improvise but I digress.

What did we have for lunch today? In fact the same thing as yesterday: pasta-salad

The recipe is very yummy. I pretty much followed it as written I only omitted the olives since I just don't like olives. I added mini mozarella-cheese balls instead. We were invited to a pot-luck and everybody thought it was a winner. I agree!

For something a bit more unusual:
Millet with cream



DH and I think, it's a winner too. As you can see I made it with cherries instead of strawberries but since I have tried the strawberry-version and it's great too. The only thing I would (and have) change is leaving the raisins off. Ours were way too hard and didn't enhance the taste at all...

I've been trying new baking recipes as well

This cake is called "Mole-cake" (no moles inside but cherries and bananas) because it's supposed to look like a molehill. The recipe came from "Dr. Oetker Freude am Backen"


The cake is very moist and spongy. Perfect.

And since I do love yeastdough. Apricotswirl-cake


Tonight I'm going to make soup using red bellpeppers and mascarpone... and next week will be baking-galore since the twins first birthday is coming up!

has it been a month?

Wow, time flies by so fast at the moment. DH is on parental leave and we are doing a lot of projects around the house. Plus I've been in the UK to visit Sarah-Jane and to go to Woolfest in Cumbria with her, Malin and Barbro. (Check out their links for more pictures of our adventure :) )

So, what have I've been up to recently?

I made a doll dress for my godchild
(sorry, for the blurry picture)

It's a free pattern from the internet but I need to search the link as I don't have it on hand at the moment. It was an easy project but A. likes it very much ("my faaaavourite colour!!!")

Next I made 2 project bags for a swap on ravelry:
Again:sorry for the craptastic pictures. The twins are standing up now and reach EVERYTHING, so taking pictures is something I usually do in a hurry before they can reach the things I want to take pictures of

This bag is made from a free pattern by machwerk. (At least I could provide you with the link for that one :) )
And this one is Alma by madhatter, a great ebook. I've made a couple now and I use mine all the time!

But I've also been knitting like a madwoman:



Pattern: Sam by Cookie. A from "sock innovation" (great book)
Yarn: Lorna's laces Shepard Sock Multi

I have to admit, that is not the pattern I intended to knit with the yarn. I wanted to make Wanida (also by cookie a. from the same book!) but I had opened the book on the wrong page and just noticed my mistake when I was done knitting the first leg and was wondering why there wasn't any patterning going on on top of the foot. I was pretty sure that Wandia has patterning on top of the foot, so I checked... go figure. I do like my Sam socks :) and it was too much work to rip it ;)




Pattern: Akimbo by Stephen West
Yarn: Wollmeise 100% in "oh Tannenbaum" (main yarn) and some plantdyed BFL that was living in my stash.

The yarn also had another form before :) I had started a KAL on ravelry for some mystery socks by Yarnissima but just did not like the sock at all, so I frogged it and made Akimbo which I really really love. It's one of Stephen Wests lesser known designs but o so great and pretty easy (if you are not me and have to cast on 5 times because you can't get your head around on how to M1R and M1L because they "don't look right....!")

I've started knitting a sweater (sahara by Wendy D. Johnson) and another pair of socks but don't have pictures yet. I hope to post another post with cooking pictures soon too!