Snowman Themend Birthday Party

Two weeks ago our little boy turned two and we' ve decided to throw a snowman party for him because he loves them so much.

Unfortunately I'm not a full time party planner, but I'm very spoiled by us-american catering and party-planner websites. Hostess with the Mostess is such a site which I follow for years now and I love their ideas. So, although I had only the evenings to plan and craft everything I've tried my very best. And we had a lot of fun! My birthday boy danced, nibbled some sweets, played and was the happiest 2-year-old. The invited kids played and had fun, too, their mommies were relaxed and I was exhausted but satisfied and happy to see that everything was working out so well. 

Vor knapp zwei Wochen ist hier bei uns der Kindergeburtstags-Wahnsinn ausgebrochen :-) Lucas ist zwei geworden und ich hatte beschlossen eine Schneemann Party zu veranstalten, weil er sie so liebt.

 Nun ist es allerdings so, dass ich, was Mottoparties angeht, total verdorben bin. Seit Jahren verfolge ich amerikanische Partyplanner bzw. Eventplanner Webseiten - allen voran Hostess with the Mostess. Leider, leider bin ich keine Vollzeit-Party-Plannerin... leider, leider. Aber ich habe alles gegeben und abends geplant, gebastelt und gebacken.

Und die Arbeit hat sich gelohnt. Das Geburtstagskind hat getanzt, gespielt und viel genascht, die eingeladenen Kinder hatten auch Spaß, die Muttis waren entspannt und ich war selig, dass alles so gut angenommen wurde und alle glücklich waren.

Here's my to-do-list/ Hier ist meine To-do-Liste:

• First of all invitations

• Erstmal ein paar Einladungen basteln

• Sew a snowman-birthday-outfit and a N°2 medal for last year's birthday crown.

• Ein Schneemann-Outfit und einen neuen Nr. 2 Orden für die Geburtstagskrone nähen.

• It's time for Party Food! 

A snowman birthday cake (Sacher torte, cream, oreos and marzipan for the nose and scarf) snowman cupcakes (in this case black forest style - chocolate, cherries and cream), cute snowflake and snowman gluten and lactose free cookies ('cause one guest had a gluten and lactose intolerance).

Oreos, Coconut-Marshmallows, Rafaellos, meringues, snowman plates and cups, table decorations, Cupcake-Stand...

• Zeit für ein paar Leckerchen

Geburtstagstorte (Sachertorte, Sahnecreme, Oreos und Marzipan für Nase und Schal), Schneemann-Muffins (Schwarzwälder-Kirsch-Muffins), Gluten- und Laktosefreie Plätzchen (für einen kleinen Gast mit einer fiesen Unverträglichkeit)

Oreos, Rafaellos, Kokos-Marshmallows, Baisers, Schneemann-Teller, Schneemann-Becher, Tisch-Deko und eine Muffin-Etagere

 

 

•  Create a little party lounge where everybody can eat some cake.  There's no big table in the middle of the room so that the little ones have plenty of space for playing and dancing.

• Eine kleine Party-Lounge gestalten, wo man gemütlich ein Stück Kuchen essen kann. Kein großer Tisch mitten im Raum, damit die Kleinen genug Platz zum Tanzen und Spielen haben.

• Playing Time!!! Grab some adherent white paper and glue some snowmen-blanks onto the wall. Make some accessories that the kids can stick to the snowmen. 

• So! Jetzt brauchen wir noch ein paar Spiel-Ideen. Aus selbstklebendem weißen Papier Schneemann-Rohlinge ausschneiden. Lauter lustige Accessoires ausschneiden, die die Kinder an die Schneemänner kleben können. (Wir haben übrigens wieder ablösbare Klebe-Knete benutzt) 

 

 

 

• Toddler-activity N°2:  Snowman-Bowling! (Snowmen made of shipping tubes)

• Kleinkind-Spaß Nr. 2: Schneemann-Kegeln ( Die Schneemänner sind aus alten Versanhülsen gemacht)

 

• Finally some Party-favours: A snowman-colouring-picture, window-sticker, some sweets, a ballon and a noisemaker

• Zum Abschluss noch ein paar "Mitgeb-Geschenke": Ein Ausmalbild (ganz leicht selbst designen und ausdrucken), Fensteraufkleber, Süßigkeiten, ein Luftballon und eine Tröte.

Conclusion: Easy to make, unexpensive and a lot of fun! Snowmen make for a great partytheme!

Fazit: Einfache, günstige Ideen und eine Menge Spaß! Schneemänner sind wirklich ein sehr dankbares Motto :-)

Yummy - The second one

I found this recipe some months ago. I cut it out of a girly magazine on 1996 (!) and forgot about it ever since. But I vaguely remembered that it tasted good back then and so I tried it out.

I like it because it looks original and tastes fresh and fluffy. And it's a fast recipe... you knead the dough, you roll it out, cover it with jam and almonds or hazelnuts, wrap it, chop it, put it into the pan and bake it... that's it... no long waits, no difficult moves... So give it a try!

But before I post the recipe, here is a whole other subject: Many followers of the blog are from Germany and I know that some of them use to check only the pictures because they don't like to read in English. And I've kept wondering for a while now if I should write in German, too. But how? There is no elegant solution to this problem, I guess. I would love to have two tabs, an English and a German one, so that you can switch between the two languages... or two flags to choose the language of the blog. But I didn't find these possibilities in blogspot. So I've decided to simply post the different versions one after another in different colours. I hope you don't mind that there will be some differences between the two versions because German is my native language and, who knows, probably I'll get a little chatty :-). Well, I will give it a try, see how it works and  check out whether I feel comfortable with it or not...  And I would appreciate your feedback by the way ;-)  Tell me if you like it or not, please.

So! Los geht's! Jetzt probier ich mal mein Glück und schreib auf Deutsch! 

Ich weiß ja, dass einige von euch nicht gern auf Englisch lesen, und ich hoffe, Ihr habt auf diese Weise mehr Spaß an diesem Blog. Aber ich will auch nicht verhehlen, dass das Ganze ein bisschen eigennützig ist, denn ich würde mich freuen, ab jetzt mehr (deutsches) Feedback von euch zu bekommen. Es würde mich interessieren, wie euch der Blog gefällt, wofür euer kreatives Herz schlägt, was euch inspiriert, was ihr für Entdeckungen gemacht habt... hach... das wär' schön!

Und bevor ich jetzt ins Plaudern gerate, fange ich lieber gleich an und poste das versprochene Rezept!

Tataa! Ich präsentiere den ersten zweisprachigen Blogeintrag auf yencamade:

 

 

Wrapped Curd-Cherry-Cake 

Quark-Kirsch Wickelkuchen

 

 

Ingredients

Curd-oil-dough:

250g curd (should contain 40% fat)

8 tablespoons oil (a neutral one like sunflower or corn oil)

6 tablespoons milk

1 egg

100g sugar

450g flour

1 sachet vanilla sugar

1 sachet baking soda

additional flour to dust your working space

Filling: 

225g cherry jam/marmelade

100g minced almonds or hazelnuts

butter and breadcrumbs for the pan

1 yolk and 1 tablespoon milk to coat the cake

confectioner's sugar   

Zutaten

Quark-Öl-Teig

250g Sahnequark (40%)

8 EL neutrales Öl

6 EL Milch

1 Ei

100g Zucker

450g Mehl

1 Päckchen Vanillinzucker

1 Päckchen Backpulver

Mehl zum Bestäuben

 

Füllung

1/2 Glas Kirschkonfitüre (225g)

100g gehackte Mandeln oder Haselnüsse

Fett und Paniermehl für die Form

1 Eigelb und 1 EL Milch zum Bestreichen

Puderzucker

• Drain the curd about 15 minutes.  
• In a bowl stir curd, oil, milk, egg, sugar and vanilla sugar. 
• Mix flour and baking powder and gradually add the flour mix to the batter.  
• Knead until you get a nice elastic dough. 
• Roll out the dough (approx. 30 x 40 cm)
• Coat the dough with jam and dust with almonds/hazelnuts. Leave some margin (approx. 2 cm) to the long edges
• Roll up the dough from the long side and cut the dough into 12 even slices
• Lay the slices into a buttered and dusted pan (approx. 22 cm diameter)
• Coat the cake with yolk-milk-mix
• Bake for 35 minutes in a preheated oven (200°C)
• Dust with confectioner's sugar before serving
• If you like serve vanilla cream with it

• Quark 15 min abtropfen lassen
• Quark, Öl, Milch, Ei, Zucker und Vanillezucker in einer Schüssel verrühren
• Mehl und Backpulver vermischen, nach und nach zum Teig geben 
• Teig mit den Händen kneten bis ein elastischer gleichmäßiger Teig entsteht
• Teig rechteckig ausrollen (ca. 30 x 40 cm)
• Mit Konfitüre bestreichen, dabei an den langen Rändern ca. 2 cm Abstand lassen
• Mandeln oder Haselnüsse darüber streuen.
• Von der Längsseite aufrollen
• In 12 gleich große Stücke schneiden
• In eine gefettete und mit Paniermehl bestäubte Springform (22cm Durchm.) legen
• Kuchen mit Eigelb-Milch-Gemisch bestreichen
• Im vorgeheizten Ofen bei 200°C 35 min. backen
• Nach dem Abkühlen mit Puderzucker bestäuben
• Lecker dazu ist Vanillesahne 

Sundays like these...

... are precious. Sitting in the garden, sipping a cup of tea or coffee, talking to friends or family and enjoying a nice juicy slice of cake.
Here is one of my favourite cake recipes (another one follows in a couple of days):

Redwine-Cake (looks a little boring but ... ohhhhh... sooo gooood!)

Ingredients:

175g dark chocolate

300g butter

300g sugar

6 eggs

3tsp cocoa

2 sachets of vanilla sugar

1-2 tsp cinnamon

400g flour

1 1/2 sachets of baking soda

1/4l redwine

•  Preheat oven to 150°C
• Chop the chocolate
• Cream butter on low speed until light and fluffy
• Gradually beat in sugar until light and fluffy
• Separate the eggs and drizzle the yolks into the butter-sugar mix one by one
• Add cocoa, vanilla sugar and cinnamon and beat until the batter is smooth
• In another bowl sift together flour and baking soda
• Alternately add flour mixture and redwine to the batter, a little of each at a time, beginning and ending with the flour mixture.
• In another bowl beat the egg whites until stiff
• Carefully fold in the egg whites and the chopped chocolate
• Butter a bundt cake pan and dust it with breadcrumbs
• Fill in the batter and bake until a cake tester inserted into center of each layer comes out clean, aproximately 1h 15min. 
• Dust with confectioner's sugar before serving
•  Enjoy!

Birthday party part II

Phew! Mission accomplished!

We've just thrown Lucas' first birthday party. Today came grandmas, grandpas, aunties, uncles and cousins. It was an exciting, exhausting, cheerful, festive, funny, chaotic, turbulent and lovely party. 

Our little birthday boy has experienced so many new things today that he went to bed voluntarily and fell asleep almost immediately. 

My self-imposed job was to make some fun birthday cakes and try some new recipes. On Martha Stewart I found this incredible looking cake called Moist Devil's Food Cake:

It looked fantastic and there was a picture of the cake layers, too. They were about 5cm thick and the whole recipe sounded easy to do. So I started converting ounces, cups, sticks, inches and fahrenheit into grams, mililitres, centimetres and celsius and began baking. But when I took the first pan out of the oven I was kind of disappointed. My layer was only about two centimetres thick and I didn't know why, so I decided to repeat the whole process twice to get three layers. This took much more time than I had planned, but I must say that the cake layers turned out to be very juicy so that it was worth the effort.

The moist devil cake cream scared me a little bit. I was afraid that it would be too much chocolate (if this is possible). And I wanted to make a funny looking cake and the chocolate frosting wasn't exactly what I was looking for. So I whipped some cream and added a little mousse au vanille mix. After arranging the cream and the layers I covered the whole cake with a marzipan coat. Because of its yellowish colour I covered the marzipan with a thin layer of white frosting. Then I dyed some marzipan with food colouring and cut out a few dots which I put on the cake. Finally I formed a bow to complete my present birthday cake. And tataaa! Here it is: 

I was really satisfied with the result and found it tasted good. Even though my sister-in-law found it a little too rich - well, she didn't know the original moist devil's food cake recipe with all the chocolate :-) 

It really was a "light" version of the original recipe! :-)

But the second cake I made was a dissapointment! 

I found this great idea on smittenkitchen.com and immediately wanted to give it a try:

But again I don't know what went wrong... instead of juicy brownies I got superdry crumbly cakes. :-( I had problems when I cut out the stars because the edges broke easily. My only explanation is that either my dough was too thin so that the cooking time was too long or there is another kind of flour in the United States - what would also explain the flat cake layers of the Martha Stewart cake. Well these are my "brownies" which were more a birthday table decoration then a tasty treat: 

But I didn't want to finish this baking report without giving you my favourite marble-cake.recipe. Do you know marble cake? It's really popular here in Germany and got its name from the nice effect you get by mixing a chocolate and a vanilla dough. 

I made this for Lucas birthday on tuesday and as always it was a success: 

Ingredients: 

250g unsalted butter, plus more for the pan

1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla sugar or 1 tablespoon of pure vanilla extract

1 pinch salt

250g sugar

4 eggs

500g flour

1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda

1/8l (125ml) milk

50g minced almonds

50g minced dark chocolate 

40g  dutch-process cocoa powder

2 tablespoons rum or a few drops of rum flavour

4 tablespoons milk (for the dark batter)

2 tablespoons confectioner's sugar (to decorate)

Preparation: 

• Heat oven to 180°C and butter the cake pan.

• In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream butter on low speed until light and fluffy. Gradually beat in sugar, vanilla sugar and salt until light and fluffy.
• Drizzle in eggs, one at a time, beating between each addition.
• In a large bowl, sift together flour and baking soda
• With mixer on low speed, alternately add flour and milk to the batter
• Put half of the batter into another bowl. 
• Add the almonds to one of the doughs and mix all.
• In another little bowl mix the chocolate, the cocoa and the rum. Add milk and stir.
• Add the chocolate mixture to the second batter and stir until everithing is mixed.
• Fill in half of the vanilla batter into the pan, then fill in the brown batter and finally fill in the rest of the vanilla batter. 
• With a fork or a little woodstick stir spirally through the batter in the pan to obtain the marble effect.
• Bake for 90 minutes. 
• Let cool the cake and decorate with confectioner's sugar.

And there was a little sewing, too, this week. I made a birthday garland. I thought it would be a nice little fast craft but again it turned out to be more work than I thought. At first I wanted to sew some letters on the triangles but I wouldn't have finished right on time for the party. And now I think that it's prettier without them because they would have covered the nice fabric. So here it is:

Although it took some time because of the many parts it was really easy to sew and it embellishes every party location. So give it a try!