Eierdeutsche

I'm pretty chuffed with my baking skills right now. It helps to start with pretty foolproof recipes. Move over, Mark; Mimi's bread pudding blows yours out of the water. There's a lot less milk and a lot more bread, so you end up with the consistency you're supposed to have. To keep things interesting, I added not only black walnuts and dried cherries reconstituted in kirschwasser but also a nice big hunk of Callebaut. I also started with multigrain bread. I think I've gone from being crust-neutral to being anti-crust, but the Old Man likes them so I'll keep leaving them in.

When he asked me what I wanted for dinner tonight, I said, "Pancakes!" Half as a joke, really, but then it reminded me how much I've lamented the lack of good savoury German-style pancakes around here. So I Googled a recipe and it turned out fabulously. I did my best imitation of a Walker Brothers Danish Garden by topping it with a sautée of garlic, portobellos, zucchini, green onion, bell pepper, and spinach. Plus, to ramp up the savoury element, I put cheese and sofregit in the batter and replaced some of the butter in the skillet with the oil it was cooked in. Oh, and of course I couldn't resist substituting a little buckwheat flour. Deee-lish!

At dinner I had a glass of Maiwein, but beforehand I wanted to reward myself for killing off Bovary with a Calvados-based cocktail, so I went for the Royal Union. Very interesting! First you get the nut (not Nux Alpina in the house, so I substituted amaretto), then the amari take over with apple notes in the background, and you finished with the taste of the chocolate bitters. At first monshu thought it was too desserty, but it grew on both of us. I dearly wanted another, but I feared it would do me in, so instead I made a stripped-down version with only the Nonino, amaretto, and chocolate bitters.