![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Let's catch up with bullet points!
- It snowed today! Alright, it was only a dusting, but it enough to make me feel like a little kid again, if only for a moment. For years I've been making a point of noting the first real snowfall of each winter season, and according to those informal records, this one is about a week behind. It seems to have started as freezing rain and ended as powder, which is just bad news all around.
- Unfortunately my bliss was somewhat tempered by the fact that the SVT came back. Not as bad, and less frightening now that I know it doesn't mean I'm about to die, but still annoying. It kept me up past midnight last night (well, having an involved phone call with my sister that ended after 10 probably helped) and didn't completely go away until around 8 this morning.
- The lebkuchen for the staff part were a disaster. I've finally figured out what I'm doing wrong--overworking the dough--now that it doesn't matter any more, since I don't think I'll bother making them again. Only when they began to harden into little gingerbread roof tiles did it come back to me that the same thing happened when I first tried the recipe several years ago now. The taste is alright, but it's poor value for money given the price of the honey that goes into them.
- The staff party itself, however, was a success. Lower turnout than last time which works out to more salmon and premium beer for me (even if I was too late for the Mathilda). Besides, it's not the number of the people, it's the quality, and I enjoyed splitting my time between teasing the public services people about the new reorg, crashing the sausage fest in the boardroom, and getting quizzed on martyrological iconography.
- Sadly, the joke was on me the next day when I learned about the pending demolition of my division. For what seems like the umpteenth time, a high-level search has been declared "failed" and the mooted solution is to redistribute tasks among the remaining managers. I saw this destroy my previous workplace and I'm worried it will end up ruining this one, too.
- Fortunately the mortgage refinance seems to be on track. The final savings should be on the order of $300/mo. which will more than compensate for the increases in my health insurance costs. I may even manage to build up some savings? Oh, wouldn't that be a joy!
no subject
no subject
no subject
Christmas German Peppernuts (Pfeffernüsse)
300 ml honey, 150 g sugar, 300 g butter, 700 g flour, 4 tsp baking powder, 1 tsp ground cinnamon. 1/4 tsp each ground white pepper, cardamome and cloves, zest of 1 orange and 1 lemon
icing: juice of 1 lemon 300 g icing sugar
Heat butter with honey and sugar in a big pot, bring to boil and let the mixture cool to body temperature. Stir in flour with spices and baking powder, knead well. Roll smallish balls of dough (3 cm diametre) and put into a preheated (360F) oven on a lightly buttered baking tray. Bake for about 20 minutes till done (they shouldn’t colour too much). Mix lemon juice with icing sugar and glaze peppernuts with this mixture while they are still warm. Let peppernuts cool. Do not panic, they’ll become quite hard. Put away in tightly closed tins or jars and forget for two or three weeks. After that time they’ll become soft and melt-in-your mouth delicious. They keep fresh at room temperature for months – if they get a chance that is.
This is from a nice East (!) Germany book on Christmas food traditions - by a parson too! I know you would have liked it in German but it will take me ages to dig it out from my bookcase right now and type it, sorry. The result is lovely and very muerbe as you might imagine...
Or is your heart set on real lebkuchen? I have another (more expensive) recipe from the same book, but this time in Russian somewhere in my lj. Would you perhaps like it? Es ist auch super.