Buckweat-Quinoa veggie muffins with lime-vanilla cream-cheese frosting

August is here and so is the middle of summer, not only that actually; August usually brings my whole family to Bonn for a little summer vacation.
My family has been visiting me regularly since I moved to Germany; a subtle way to keep an eye on my doing as well as experimencing new places, people and realities. The days of their visit are though punctuated by visits to some of our canonical restaurants of different extractions and traditions, often joined with some of my friends, but these days ar essentially a continous shopping-spree for the ladies of the family. By now, after more than 7 years, they are rather used to Bonn and so they do not need much attending from my side so I can continue my work as usual.

Buttery secret muffins for a chilly evening

This month Secret Recipe Club has been brought you by Robin of Penny-Pinching Provisions.
When I got assigned Robin's blog as my monthly virtual cookbook, I started going through her posts to look for something that would make me want to cook right away. Can't deny that her Babka's recipes were pretty tempting (what about this Nutella Babka for instance??).

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.

Cupcakes galore – Episode 1

The time has finally come to try my way at cupcakes.
It was Wednesday when, just arrived at my afternoon coffee place, a very excited friend sat beside me and starts telling me of this new store in town that sells only cupcakes and for which people go simply nuts! In effect cupcakes are quite a novelty here in Europe, I guess that after doughnuts it was time for them to come in (conversely, watch out over-sea cousins, macarons will soon colonize even your country!) Talk talk, talk talk, taste here and taste there pondering the possibility of trying my hand at them. No big difficulties in effect, I have been experimenting with muffins since few weeks and really like the texture I got from a recipe I found in Shirley Corriher’s “Bakewise” book.