Salmon with chocolate-soy sauce featuring Linwoods’ Flaxseeds, Cocoa and Mixed Berries

 Few weeks ago Bethany of Dirty Kitchen Secrets launched a recipe contest on the new Linwoods’ product: Flaxseeds, Cocoa and Mixed Berries sprinkle.
I have come to know Linwoods’ products since last year Food Bloggers Connect conference. In our goodie bags we found few nice pouches of their healthy products featuring flaxseeds, goji berries, hemp, sesame and other yummy and nutritious seeds to sprinkle almost on anything that comes to your mind. For instance, lately I always add them to my healthy sweet fix of the day: sweetened quark cream with nuts, honey and sometimes also herbs or berries depending on what I have in the fridge.

Mint: my nemesis

Mint.
Few weeks ago this word appeared in an email I received as the chosen ingredient for the next Velveteers challenge.
Mint; one of the readily available ingredients that never made it into my pantry. Why? I suppose I got scarred by all those medicinal tablets with mint flavor I had to employ to heal my sore throat; I think I liked more the raspberry flavored cough syrup.
That freshness coupled with the chemical taste of medicines was quite a nightmare. Not even bitterness or extreme sourness made me shrivel into a gothic grimace like menthol.
I like mint’ scent, I have always liked it but keep the shrub out of my mouth please!

Sweet sweet sugarworks

It was the beginning of April when a friend of mine asked me to prepare a cake for an event he was organizing. As an art historian he is involved, with some of his colleagues, in trying to save the local concert hall the Beethovenhalle; there are in fact plans of building a new one on the same location.
The first plan was to bake a cake in the shape of the building itself so I started collecting pictures to build a 3D model of the cake and plan this way the baking. The building itself isn’t really articulated but it has different parts at various roof heights plus a nice fancy-shaped dome above where the actual concert hall is located in it.