You might be an overly poshy food blogger when, whilst making deviled eggs during a global pandemic, you think “oooh, I may have stashed smoked salmon in the freezer for an emergency!”
For the record, there is no such thing as a smoked salmon emergency. Ever. No matter how delish it is.
But, the deviled eggs are yummy. And my chives survived the winter.
I know that most people eat Hot Cross Buns on Good Friday and thus I am a day early, but I had time this morning, and won’t tomorrow, so there you have it. Also, in case someone was inspired to make their own and needed a recipe. Every year I make a new variation, but the base recipe stays the same (it’s usually the things that I add — raisins or cranberries or currants or chocolate chips — or this year, apricots) that I swap out. They are actually one of my favorite things and I have to be careful that I don’t snack this whole batch. As you can see, it makes a lot of buns!
So, a couple of different anecdotes to add today. The first one is: in German, a colloquial way of saying “hoarding” is “hamstering” (as in “I am hamstering toilet paper”). Kind of makes sense, right? Hamsters filling their cheeks with reserves (although that is when the whole TP analogy falls apart, because that would be a little gross to have TP in the mouth). I’ve always thought it a cute and funny expression.
The other story is this (and trust me, I’ll get to a point here in a minute): a few weeks ago, a friend of mine had a chocolate squirrel fall out of her freezer (sort of like chocolate bunnies, one of the companies in Germany makes chocolate squirrels around this time of year — wow, hamsters and squirrels and bunnies, all in one post) so she decided to add the now-broken squirrel into banana bread. For some reason, this struck me as funny, so this morning, as I made this Browned Butter Bourbon Walnut Banana Bread, I decided that I was just going to call it Squirrel Bread.
I have a tendency to make chocolates or fudge around holidays. It’s often completely impromptu — like I didn’t plan on making these two types until this morning, and had I not had the ingredients in the pantry, I wouldn’t have made them at all. I am very pleased that I did have the ingredients though, especially for the white chocolate coconut fudge as it is incredibly decadent!
Sometimes, a photo turns out just right — and for some reason, I find these photos just lovely. I have baked literally tens of thousands of linzer cookies in my days and for some reason, the way that I photographed this batch makes me very happy. Sometimes it is all about the visuals — though these do taste pretty fantastic as well!