Cakes and more

Warning: lots of pics to follow* (and I am not responsible if you are hungry afterwards)

With Christmas approaching fast (and as always totally unexpected) I started my annual tradition of baking a ton of christmas cookies again. This year it all started on Nov. 20th, because it was a national holiday and the kids were home from school and kindergarten all day. So we invited friends over and baked the first sugar cookies (two moms and four kids aged 1 1/2 to 6 - glad the mess wasn't that bad).The last few days we continued baking with the kids and now have a few tin boxes full of yummy cookies and brownies.

While baking and later sharing pics online I remembered that I always wanted to write a blog post showing off my creations. I wouldn't say I am a pro, more like far from pro, because I can't really practise and have no professional background (and if I practised more someone would have to eat a lot of cake). Also unfortunately in Germany it is not possible to open up a business selling Cakes, Cookies and more from home if you are not a "Konditor" or "Bäcker" which means a licensed baker, which also means you had at least a three year training and went to school. I would totally love to open a small shop or cafe and sell baked stuff...but that's a different story.

When I started writing this blog I wrote a post about how I started to get into baking, you can read it here. It also shows a few pics of the things I baked back then (which will show up here again probably).
Let me show you some of the things I have baked during the last years, I hope that the will show my progress and that I did get a bit better and practised. Feedback will therefore be greatly appreciated.

Birthday Cakes for my daughter when she turned 4, she wanted a Barbie- and a Horsecake (like I already showed in the other post, I was so damn proud of the horse - mad out of fondant so it is edible just like the fence and grass, it took me one whole evening). The Barbie skirt is also fondant.

Cherry Cake with Marzipan, I made it for my own birthday brunch

 

Like seen it the other post, 50th birthday cake for our former neighbour, also the detailed fondant flowers on the side

Triple Chocolate Muffins and Pineapple Cake, these are also shown in details in the other post

  

Barbie Cake for my daughters friends birthday, everything edible except Barbie herself
 

Baby Shower Cake I made for a friend of a friend

 Rainbow Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting and Sprinkles, I made this for one of our New Years Eve Parties

 My daughters 5th Birthday Party Theme was Ballerinas, so I baked a Ballerina Cake and Ballerina Cookies to also take home for her friends

 Cinnamon Rolls with Glaze as a sunday treat

Christmas Cookies (Caramel Shortbread, Chocolate Chip and Vanilla Stars)

 Birthday Cakes for my Sons Birthday

 

Birthday Cake for my husband when he turned 30, he loves to Barbeque (all edible, the Steak and sausages are chocolate cake, the corn is a marshmallow with fondant)

Butterfly Cupcakes

 Vanilla Cupcakes with Cream Cheese topping and Strawberry Sauce

 Yet another Barbie Cake for a friends daughter

 Double Chocolate Cupcakes with cherry whipped cream, chocolate glaze and fresh cherry on top

Cookies with Strawberry and Lemon curd, a Blueberry-Lemon Cake and a Tiramisu Cake. I made these for a Birthday Party where we celebrated my Dads and Sisters birthday, they are born only two days apart. 

 30 Seconds to Mars Cookies

 homemade Samoas (Girl Scout Cookies)

 Chocolate Cupcakes with white chocolate Cream and chocolate covered Coffee beans

 This one is my favourite and most awesome cake and I am so damn proud of myself. My friends daughter wanted a Zoo Cake and she loves monkeys. Everything is edible. Making the monkey took me like 3 days I think.

 

Cakes for my daughter when she started school, carrot cake with cream cheese frosting and nuts, dark chocoalte cake covered in white chocolate whipped cream and the other one is lemon cake with pink lemon mousse.  

Hope you enjoyed my creations!

Irene

Work

So I am sitting at work right now, alas I should be working, right. But to be honest, I don't really feel like it and therefore I decided to at least start a Blogpost, telling you why I don't feel like working and why I don't really like my work anymore. This wasn't the case all the time, I used to really love working here.

I started about two years ago, after I had been sick for a while and also lost my job in December 2010. I had been home for about 9 months and started to feel bored and anxious to get out of the house. I searched the Internet for a while because I didn't want to have a long commute because I knew I didn't want to work more than 3-4 hours a day. So an hour or more to commute would have been pointless.

I found this really small Start-Up Company and applied for a 20-hours a week part-time job at which I also had the opportunity to work from home if necessary and it was only a 10 minute drive from home. Basically it was my boss, his assistant, one sales rep and me, plus the wife of my boss who came in every once in a while to help with office stuff like sorting documents, xeroxing and scanning. I liked it a lot and even though I had lots of stuff to learn I felt comfortable in what I was doing.

About 4 months after I started my boss's assistant had to quit because of health issues and therefore we ended up alone at the office for a few months before finding an intern who stayed 6 months. During that time work was overwhelming and I ended up working overtime, sometimes even on a saturday, plus about once a month I had to work evenings for meetings. Things started to become hectic and then a private disaster happened. My daughter, who was 5 at that time, needed open-heart surgery. I started to be sick again on a regular basis,probably because of emotional stress, my immune system wasn't the best, I worried and had depressive episodes. Through all this time my boss was very understanding, he always said family comes first and health is more important. Whenever I talked to someone about my work, I said how much I appreciate him as my boss, knowing others have a lot more problems at work.

In the end I had to take time off for about 5 weeks to care for my daughter, but as my boss asked a few times if I couldn't come in at least a few hours or take stuff home to work I agreed, arranging with him that those hours will be handled as overtime. Back then it all worked out fine for everyone. As my husband also works from his home-office it wasn't a problem to go to work for an hour or two while my son was at the kindergarten in the morning and my daughter was at home watching TV. In the end I had enough overtime for about 10 days and took some over the christmas holidays because most of my vacation had been used up during the year already.

But, as mentioned before, life sometimes throws you a curve ball and you have to deal with lots of unexpected things all of a sudden. Psychologically I felt better, healthwise not so much and in the end I decided that I need to quit working. I do have a huge surgery coming in September and all in all, even though the job isn't that stressful, I feel like it is draining my energy. I get up, get the kids ready for Kindergarten, go to work, come home, have about 2 hours to do stuff like laundry, bills or whatever the heck needs to be done and then pick up the kids again. Those two hours are just not enough. Throw in a surgery that has an estimated recovery time of around 6-8 weeks and the fact that my contract would have had to be renewed in September I decided to tell my boss I do not want to renew it right away and am unsure if I will ever return.

NOW, we are at the point I am right now. Boss knows I am leaving, we do have a girl here now who came as a 3 month intern, was suppossed to leave in June but has extended her stay until October and is doing a pretty damn good job, so I am basically useless right now. And boss has started to treat me that way. As soon as I tell him I have a problem and need his help I am snarled at, he once told me he thinks "I am playing dumb because I don't want to do it and I am leaving soon anyways". I am getting all the work on my desk that he doesn't feel like doing and he constantly is annoyed if I ask him something or tell him I have a problem with stuff.

Worst situation was when we had a huge Summerparty together with some Business Partners and a) I wasn't asked to work there because it was on a Sunday and he assumed I didn't want to because I have family (and I would gather overtime hours) b) when I showed up anyways because I wanted to help and my kids wanted to see what I was doing he told me I wasn't needed and c) I later found out everyone else including Business Partners, Interns, Sales Rep and himself plus his wife and daughter had gotten some nice Incentive for working on a Sunday (basically everyone except me). I have worked my ass off, spend lots of extra hours at work and usually didn't say no. And that's the way to thank me...plus he argued about my overtime and vacation trying to give me less than I still have left.

I am sooo done with him and the job, just glad I only have 6 more days. At the same time I am sad it turned out this way.

Did something like that ever happen to you? And how did you deal with it?

Irene

Gardening

Honestly, if you would have asked me a few years ago if I would ever see myself in shorts and a shirt, all sweaty and dirty, crouching under a tree removing weeds or moving the lawn or cutting back bushes I would have laughed at you so hard I probably wuld have fallen off my chair.

Gardening, that means digging up dirt, watering plants, having all kinds of creepy bugs lazily crawl over your feet, mosquito bites, dark rims on your fingernails and lots more...never in a million years would I have imagined I would actually think that is fun, or relaxing, or something I look forward too.

Last Summer, having just gotten over my first bad episode of depression, I found that doing work in our backyard, removing all the weeds that had been annoying me ever since the first few sunny days had started, was actually something that I liked. While doing that you can either think about everything going on in your head, debating pros and cons while violently yanking out those pesky dandelions growing in between the cobblestones on the walkway to your front door, or you can just not think about anything at all, humming the melody to the last song you heard and getting a tan, or more likely in my case, sunburned.

While growing up I never really had to do any gardening. I grew up in a house with a yard in the front and a yard in the back, it was the middle one in a row of Town Houses. The yard in the front had a lawn, some bushes, trees and flowers and a small Hedge in the front so strangers couldn't easily see anything going on in our yard. The back was paved and we had a table tennis table there. My parents didn't believe in doing any work except maybe mowing the lawn. For cutting back trees or bushes and planting flowers the would hire someone. My dad owns his own law firm and therefore worked a lot, around 12 hours a day, 6 days a week.To compensate all the hard work we spend every vacation going to some (far away) place to relax on the beach. Not one vacation was spend at home, so we basically never used our yard.

My husband grew up totally different. His parents lived in a small apartment and owned a "Schrebergarten" (Leo.Org translates it with Garden Plot). I don't really know how common that concept is in other countries but in Germany it is very popular. People living in apartments (some even without a balcony or in the downtown areas) rent small areas on the outskirts of the city as their own yard. These yards are actually quite big and almost everyone has a small Cabin on it, complete with a camping toilet and a small kitchen. Some only have a huge lawn, a small pool, swings and sandbox for the kids or a pond for fishes, some also have plot to grow vegetables and trees to grow fruits. People go there every weekend for barbeques or to relax in the sun. A lot of them have a middle class or lower class income so spending your days in the Schrebergarten is their kind of vacation because they might not be able to afford going somwhere.

My Parents-in-Law grow their own Tomatoes, Potatoes, Asparagus, they have an Apple tree and I think a Cherry Tree too. My husband learned very early on to help with gardening, planting stuff and harvesting it later. So when we were looking for a house to rent he insisted on a yard, the bigger, the better. The place that we live in right now has a small yard, too small for him so he is constantly complaining. In the beginning I didn't really care, I never thought I would every help him do anything and basically didn't care how it looked, if the grass was too long or green enough and if there were weeds and leafs everywhere. During the really hot summer days I preferred to spend my time inside, drinking Iced Coffee and reading.

To me it is kind of amazing how I have changed in the last year, I have started liking things I never would have thought possible.

So what do you do when you need time to think about stuff. And do hey have the concept of Garden Plots where you live. Did your parents have one if you are from Germany?

Irene

It's been a while

So...this blog was kinda quite for the last...ummm...8 months. On the one hand it is not really tragic because, to be honest, one like 2 or 3 people actually read it currently. On the other hand I am mad at myself for not writing more because every once in a while I have caught myself thinking "hey it would be helpful to write/talk about your problems/ideas/opinions and maybe someone will have an advice." When I started blogging it was for fun, I wanted to do it on a regular basis, I love blogs and enjoy reading those that I read a lot. I am fascinated by being able to take a sneak-peak into the life of other people around the globe. And I thought if I keep this up and running regularly, maybe someone might enjoy sneak-peaking into my life.

But like someone, apparently John Lennon, once said (it's one of my favourite quotes)

"life is what is happening while you are busy making other plans"

So life has been busy, hectic and stressful in the last few months. I have been sick a lot and had to stay in bed a lot and basically was unhappy with myself, my health and my life. I'll spare anyone reading this the details, first of all they are personal, second of all I don't want to remember it and start dwelling on it again and third I don't want to sound like I am whining about stuff that I can't change anyways.

I have been seeing a therapist once a week since September last year because I have been suffering from depression and anxiety attacks regularly. I had been sick and in the hospital for a lot of different reasons almost every 6 months since October 2010 and at some point I started to feel so insecure about myself and my health that even thinking about leaving my house and doing something outside of my routine scared the shit out of me because I knew/thought/feared I would become sick again. In reality this wasn't true, no one has to go to the hospital because they don't follow their daily routine of getting up, going to work, cleaning and doing laundry. But my immune system was so weak that I got a flu as soon as some sneezed next to me and I just didn't dare do anything out of the ordinary. Being faced with challenges scared the hell out of me and led to panic attacks making it impossible to do anything on my own.

Those weeks and months were challenging because the job my hubby has usually requires him to go on business trips overnight almost every week. Not being able to deal with stuff on my own made it impossible for him to leave me and our kids home alone and so he only left us alone if he really couldn't avoid it. I became more and more dependant on him and felt like I couldn't do anything alone anymore. Needless to say that led to lots of fighting because he just didn't understand (he'd never been in a situation that scared him so much that he couldn't face it alone or had felt sick and weak as much as I did). He felt like "I should just get my shit together" and I felt like he is not supporting me and leaving me alone (after once promising me "in sickness and in health"). To sum it up, the last 6 months basically sucked!!

But somehow through a lot of talking, analyzing, and also asking my hubby to come to my therapist with me we sorted out the fears I had and found some solutions we both could live with. I learned a lot about myself and had the change to realize some things that happened in the past which probably led to me being the way I am today. I learned to live with the fact that I can't change the past and I can't change the way people are and how they treat me. I have learned (but still struggle with actually following through with it) that I can't and don't have to please everyone and be nice to people that don't give a shit. My health is a bit better, not perfect and I am still facing a huge surgery in September (maybe even two). But I have learned to cope with my problems by myself and so two weeks ago my threapist and I agreed that we think I made so much progress that we will stop the weekly meetings, I will come one more time right before the summer vacation starts and then we will see how it goes when we come back in September. I am really really proud of myself for reaching that point.

I would say I am far from being perfect, flawless and totally content but I am far more happy with myself and my life that I was a year ago. Now out of 7 days a week I am happy on 4 or 5 out of them, a few months ago it was the other way around.

Let's hope I will get back into the routine of writing about some more or less interesting things that happen in my crazy yet kinda boring life. If you read this (and maybe go back through the bits I have written before disappearing from the blogosphere) and like it come back and maybe tell your friends, I'd love it if someone will give me feedback.

Irene