this and that

photos taken by Robby in Pilanesberg, South Africa

more coming next week!



the past few weeks I have ever-so-kindly pushed the internet to the corner (that needs dusting) and just kind of forgot about it (as evidence of my lack of posting).....

....and it's been kind of....

...awesome.

The internet can be an exhausting place! 

SOmuchSTUFF.

EVERYTHINGsoPERFECT.

And it's all just LOOKING

A long weekend in Stockholm

De senaste veckorna har troligen varit de galnaste i mitt liv hittills. Helt galna verkligen. Som ni märkt så har jag inte synts till så mycket här.. boken har nu kommit ut, jag har bakat en sisådär tio tårtor, åkt till Stockholm med sex väskor (och en sisådär tio tårtor) och så har jag varit med på tv. I nyhetsmorgon för att vara exakt (här kan du titta på det). Jag har även träffat massa roligt och intressant folk; författare, fotografer, stylister, formgivare och såklart några kära vänner. Inte en helt vanlig vecka precis! Här nedanför delar jag med mig av några bilder från min vecka i Stockholm. Tänkte även passa på att berätta att jag snart är tillbaka med fler härliga blogginlägg!


In English: The last couple of weeks have probably been the craziest weeks in my life so far. And I really mean crazy. As you may have noticed I haven't been around much. My book is now out (no English version, but I'm working on it..), I've baked like ten cakes, travelled to Stockholm with six bags (and ten cakes) and I've also been on tv (now that is crazy, you can watch it here)! I've met lots and lots of interesting and talented people such as writers, photographers, stylists, graphic designers and of course dear friends. Not exactly a regular week. Below are some photos from my stay in Stockholm. I thought I'd share and let you know that I'll be back with more delicious blogposts very soon!

worth 1000

Isn't that what they say?

A picture is worth 1000 words.

words. 

feelings. senses. memories.



I was able to quickly snap this one photo today,

and it overflows my brain with all the images from our day.



summer on its way.

a breeze.

sprinklers.

swimsuits.

sunscreen.

digging.

muddy toes.

dirt. on my fingers, elbows, knees, face.

the taste of it on my lips.

tomato plants....in the

Breakfast Apple Pie

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe."

- Carl Sagan

It's 7 o'clock at night and there's nothing to eat! I thought. I needed ideas. I wanted something different. I had been craving fruit, but the only fresh fruit in the house was a few lone apples, almost past their prime.

chopping the walnuts

Luckily I picked up this peculiar cookbook from the 80's entitled, "Where's Mom Now That I Need Her- Surviving Away From Home." It was still sitting on the counter, not yet put away in it's place on the shelf, since I had just purchased it a few days earlier.

apples down, starting to add the topping

 This is a cute and clever cookbook meant for those just moving away from home with hardly an idea how to cook, or take care of themselves for that matter.

ready for the oven

The book covers a lot. In addition to being a cookbook, it teaches you things like how to read labels and how to save on energy costs. It even lets you know how to make everything from drain cleaner to ant killer with every day household ingredients.

The recipes are simple, as they should be. But not boring, like I anticipated.

Our free range chickens on the left sharing a nibble with a deer on the right. In the middle is the windmill my husband made.

This recipe for example. What a splendid idea! Breakfast apple pie. I love it! I did change so much about the recipe that it is no longer recognizable. Theirs has biscuit mix, mine doesn't. Mine has oats, theirs doesn't, and the list goes on.

I could only hope that it would turn out well with all the changes. Yes, hurray! It did. Very well indeed. It's a moist nutty cake with oats and brown sugar, topped with apples and cinnamon. This would be great served at brunch with other savory items like an omelet and some bacon.

Or eat it alone as your dinner like I did. Still delicious, easy and heartwarming.

Breakfast Apple Pie

General idea from "Where's Mom Now That I Need Her" by Betty Rae Frandsen, Kathryn J. Frandsen and Kent P. Frandsen

This recipe by me, Melissa aka The Alchemist

Ingredients

For the pie

1 egg

4 Tablespoons cooking oil, (vegetable oil, or grape seed oil, something with a neutral taste)

1 cup (237 ml) milk

2 tsp. vanilla extract

1/2 cup (75 g.) brown sugar

1 cup (100 g.) flour

1/2 cup oats (50 g.) (quick or old fashioned, don't use instant)

2 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. baking soda

1/2 tsp. salt

1/2  tsp. cinnamon

1/2 cup (50 g.) chopped walnuts, or pecans - unsalted


For the Topping


2 large apples - peeled and sliced

4 Tablespoons brown sugar

1/2 tsp. cinnamon

2 Tablespoons butter cut in small pieces


Directions

Preheat oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit, 190 degrees Celsius, or Gas Mark 5.

In a large bowl beat the egg with a whisk. Add the oil, milk and vanilla and whisk together. Add the brown sugar and whisk again. In another medium size bowl add the flour, oats, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon and salt and whisk together. Add the dry ingredients to the wet and mix with a whisk or a wooden spoon until blended. Stir in the chopped nuts.

Mix together the brown sugar and cinnamon in a small bowl for the topping, set aside.

Grease a 9 inch pie plate, and have your apples sliced and topping ready.

Pour the pie batter into the greased pie plate. Add the apple slices decoratively slightly overlapping in a circle and then arrange more in the middle.  Sprinkle with the cinnamon and brown sugar topping. Dot the butter in small pieces around the top of the apples.

Bake in the preheated oven for 45 - 50 minutes, until a knife poked in the center comes out clean.

This is best served warm the same day it's made.

over the weekend.....

This was the best weekend ever in the history of the world.



"but how can a weekend be so fabulous?", you ask?

let me tell you.



where to start.......

Friday the kids had a birthday party, which meant a quick date for us--we hit up sushi. 

mmmm....

We then fell asleep at 9:30. 

on a friday night. 

go us.

soccer all saturday morning for the kiddos.

yard work....mowing.

For the love of Cupcakes. 700 of them!

This is my dad's minivan, full of 700 happy cupcakes.

This will be one of those photos in my memory where I can say, I remember when....I delivered 700 cupcakes out of a minivan.

or when..hundreds of childrens at Pathways Church in Wisconsin ate cupcakes that looked like puzzles. Made by Amanda Cupcake and friends.

The theme: Believing there's a bigger picture.

So we made edible rubix cubes out of colorful m&ms.

and if you lived in a mini cupcake world, you could play Twister on these cupcakes. 

The colors of a rubix cube swirled on top of every cupcake. ♥

I love that my mom was my assistant.

She made these glitterized rubix cube cupcake toppers!

700 Orange Dreamsicle and Chocolate Cupcakes, before we decorated them.  Since this was a charity event, Waupaca High School let us use their kitchen.  (Right now the kitchen I bake out of every night only has one single rack oven.  7 ovens sounded better than one)!  We literally ran from oven to oven making sure the cupcakes didn't burn!  Another one of those "I remember when" moments...

Cupcakes on a cart. We rolled them over to the table to start decorating ♥

The decorating station, before we made the real mess.

Cupcakes on a cart!

Can you find the one random Pac-Man we made? I bet the one child who ate the Pac-Man cupcake felt lucky ♥

Sharing the cupcake love♥

700 cupcakes at a time! (instead of just one this time..yay!)

♥

It wasn't just me who was a part of this cupcake mission!

A cupcake holla! to:

God ♥ Who oversees all my cupcake superhero rescues!

Angela Jean of Angel Cakes

Megan Darvin of Majik Cupcakes

My Mom & Dad

Cupcake Mixmasters (they helped with the batter!):  Michelle Rashke & Heather Knapp ♥

Strawberry Crumb Cake

"For beautiful eyes, look for the good in others; for beautiful lips, speak only words of kindness; and for poise, walk with the knowledge that you are never alone."

-Audrey Hepburn 1929-1993, Actress

I've been away, but baby I'm back. It's spring and I've been busy with spring time happenings. Gardening, cleaning and new adventures abound. Plus I've got a new endeavor I'm working on, but more on that later. Now for this delicious spring time dessert, strawberry crumb cake.

Gorgeous strawberries

I saw this recipe on Food and Wine and I was smitten. I love any crisp/cobbler/brown betty/slump, all of it, I'll take it. Yes please. Sign me up. Warm fruit with topping, I'm there. So as you can see, I was excited to try this one.

cut berries waiting to be utilized

Even though generally I love warm fruit with topping, warm strawberries alone I wasn't so sure about. I make fruit crisp all the time, in fact Any Fruit Crisp is what I called it, boasting about how you can use any fruit you'd like. And in fact I have even eaten it with strawberries alone, (somehow I feel strawberries with rhubarb is a whole different ball game) and remained on the fence. There's something about fresh strawberries that is so perfect. How can you mess with perfection?

macerating the berries

Then I read the description of this recipe on Food and Wine where the author of the recipe, Gerard Craft cooks the strawberries till their "warm and jammy." Warm and jammy? Are you kidding me? I love strawberry jam and make it often. So when you put it like that. Sold.

Before spreading on the cake batter.- note- my cake batter is so yellow because I have free range chickens who lay eggs with a bright orange yolk. If you get eggs from the grocery, yours won't be so bright yellow, FYI.

First you start with strawberries, lots of them. Three pounds to be exact. Macerate the berries, add some cake batter then to top things off you add a sweet crumbly topping. I was skeptical if that extra step of adding the crumb topping was going to make all that much of a difference. But I discovered oh, it does.

spreading on the cake batter

The strawberry portion of this cake isn't all that sweet. Sweet enough, don't get me wrong, it is a dessert. But when paired with the cake and crumb topping it is divine. A symphony all playing together to create a lovely dessert that is better than the ingredients alone.

added the crumb topping, now headed for the oven

This dessert is incredibly delicious. In fact my husband who doesn't really eat dessert, ate this and after one bite said, "this is good", took one more bite and said, "this is really good", another bite, another exclamation of it's goodness, till the whole bowl was gone.

Straight from the oven, warm and jammy indeed.

The new endeavor I mentioned earlier, is that I've started my own Etsy shop! I'm pretty excited about it. I will sell vintage dishes and housewares. Even though they are considered vintage, many are timeless. I've been collecting vintage serving ware and dishes of all kinds for years. In fact I bought my first set of dishes at a second hand store in Big Bear, California while vacationing long before I had my own kitchen to use them. I fell in love with them and had to buy them. I don't know what comes over me. I feel like it's my duty to rescue them. I still do that, search and rescue. Now I have a place to share my findings so I can keep collecting. I'm still adding items to my shop, so it's not finished, I am just starting. To get a sneak peek, my Etsy shop is called, House of Lucien. (Lucien is my precious little papillon.)


Strawberry Crumb Cake

This can also be made with a combination of raspberries, blackberries or blueberries.

adapted from Food and Wine, recipe by Gerard Craft


Ingredients

Fruit

3 lbs fresh strawberries, (approx. 8 cups or 1 1/2 kilos) hulled and halved

1/2 cup (100 g,) sugar

1 1/2 Tablespoon fresh lemon juice

2 Tablespoons cornstarch dissolved in 2 Tablespoons of water

1 vanilla bean, split and seeds scraped out, or substitute 2 or 3 tsp. of vanilla extract


For Crumb Topping

1/2 cup (75 g.) lightly packed light brown sugar *note- if you don't have brown sugar either make your own by mixing some white sugar with a little molasses, or you can substitute white sugar, although the flavor of the topping will be better with brown.

1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons (60 g,) flour

Pinch of salt

4 tablespoons unsalted butter, room temperature


For Cake

2 1/4 (225 g.) cups all-purpose flour

1 tablespoon baking powder

3/4 teaspoon salt

1 stick (1/2 cup) (8 Tablespoons) (113 g.) unsalted butter, softened

1 1/4 cups (250 g.) sugar

3 eggs

1 1/2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

3/4 cup (6 oz.) (177 ml) buttermilk *note- if you don't keep buttermilk in the house just use some soured milk by taking regular milk and adding a Tablespoon or 2 of lemon juice or vinegar and let it sit for 15 minutes.


Directions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Farenheit, 180 degrees Celsius, or Gas Mark 4.

In a large bowl, toss the strawberries with the sugar, lemon juice, cornstarch slurry and vanilla seeds or vanilla extract, and let stand until the berries release some of their juices, about 30 minutes. Pour the fruit filling into a 9-by-13-inch glass or ceramic baking dish set on a sturdy baking sheet.

Make the crumb topping. Place all crumb topping ingredients in a medium bowl, use a fork to mash all ingredients together until the butter has mashed up with the other ingredients enough where pea sized pieces of crumb topping appear. Set aside.

Make the cake batter. Using a hand held electric mixer, or use a stand mixer, cream together the butter and the sugar until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Add the eggs one at a time, mixing well between each addition. Add the vanilla and mix again. Mix together the flour, salt, and baking powder in another large bowl and whisk well. Scrape down the bowl and add the dry ingredients to the batter in 3 additions alternating with the buttermilk or soured milk, if using.

Spoon the batter over the fruit, smoothing the battter to the edges. Sprinkle with the crumb topping. Bake in the center of the oven for 1 hour and 15 minutes, until the fruit is bubbling, the crumb topping is golden and a toothpick inserted in the center of the cake comes out with a few moist crumbs attached. Transfer to a rack to cool slightly. Serve the crumb cake warm or at room temperature with whipped cream or ice cream if desired.