Advent wreath 2014

It is high time to think about this year's advent wreath. I will for sure have the traditional Swedish one with moss, which I will collect together with my family in the forest close to my parent's home at First Advent. This is a tradition since I've been a child. But I also need a second Advent wreath.
These are some inspirations I have for this year.

 A modern style:

picture mad og bolig

 A traditional version

picture fotoagent

 White and green is also very classic and I like it:

Picture: tuinadvies

I'll show you some pictures on sunday.

Kram,
Isabell

Vanillekipferl- Vanilla Christmas cookies

Since I was a child my Mum has baked Christmas cookies. "Vanillekipferl" is my favorite, that is a vanilla/hazelnut dough that are crescent shaped. I've baked these this weekend as these are also Tim's favorite biscuits:

Ingredients

· 260 gr flour

· 1 pinch of backing powder

· 125 gr sugar

· 2 sachets of vanilla sugar

· 3 egg yolks

· 200 gr butter

· 125 gr ground hazelnuts



· Powdered sugar

· 2 sachets of vanilla sugar

Preparation


Mix the butter with the sugar, the flour, the egg yolks and the ground hazelnut, add the backing powder. Work the ingredients until a smooth, homogeneous dough is obtained. Let it rest in a cool place for 1-2 hours.

Form crescent and put them on a backing plate, bake for approx. 5 Minutes at 200°C , let them cool a little but not too much. Mix the powdered sugar and the vanilla sugar and turn them in the sugar mix.

Let them cool down before keeping them into a cookie jar.

Christmas magazines

Since a couple of weeks I have already been in a Christmas mood. ( Mostly this feeling already starts end of August while others are still enjoying the last sunshine of summer, I simply LOVE Christmas) The first sign of Christmas for me is when the home decoration magazines start to sell their Christmas edition. I can spend hours scrolling though these and getting inspiration how to decorate. I often read them on a sunday afternoon with a cup of coffee and just some time for me. I like the magazine Living at home for example:

picture: living at home

picture: living at home

picture: living at home

picture: living at home

Sweets for Advent calendar

Today I've already bought the first sweets for the advent calendar. I felt like a child again when buying these because I often stood in front of this little chocolate store with it's colorful papers and decoration in the window when I was a child. It has the biggest selection of chocolates and you can get 1 of each which is perfect for the calendar:

Picture: Merkur Online

Rice pudding ready to give-away

Each year I'm inviting my family to a pre Christmas dinner, mostly around the 6th of december. And every year I've had a small present for them standing close to the place card. This year it will be something different to chocolate or gingerbread. I found this rice pudding from a company called Michelsen and I decided that it's going this year's present the moment I saw it:

Picture: michelsen-versand.de

Kram,

Isabell

Old tins

This tin is very old and once certainly contained gingerbreads before I found it on a fleamarket in Munich. It is my harbinger for Christmas as I also use it for gingerbreads and I start to eat them before Christmas :). As soon as I open a package of gingerbreads this is the best way to store it. I especially like the city of Nuremberg on it and the horseman on the top:

Isabell

Pre Christmas shopping Ikea

Every year before Christmas I go to Ikea to get some inspiration. I like the small rooms they are decorating with Christmas trees and ornaments. This year I was a little bit disappointed, they do have traditional colors that I like but I only found one thing which I liked. It ended up in the big yellow bag that you are carrying around while running around in circles. Even if you only put there one single item. :) This is the only thing I bought:

Picture: Ikea

Kram, Isabell

Time to start the countdown for advent and Christmas

You all know that I really love Christmas. And this year I can not wait to finally get all the Christmas decoration down from the attic. It is the most important time of the year for me, the best month of all. Christmas for me is tradition, coziness and spending time with my family. There are only 2 weeks left until I can finally start… so I start the countdown to advent with a video from Nigella Lawson, to put all of us in a real Christmas mood:

Have a lovely sunday evening!

Kram Isabell

Natural Christmas decoration

You don't always need to buy new decoration. When I'm out for a walk I try to collect things from nature and use them for decoration because simple things are often the most beautiful things. You know I love Christmas and I also love to have a mix of new things and old things. This is a good example how to create new things yourself and protect the environment:

picture: skonahem

Blouse with tie

My favorite this autumn are blouses with ties. This is something you can wear at work and you still look feminine. Even when having a business meeting with men, I always choose something feminine to combine it with a suit: Ties, peter pan collars or cap sleeves:

picture: hm

picture: asos

My grandma

Today would have been my grandma's birthday. After so many years I still can't believe that she is gone. I would do anything to be able to sit together with her in her little kitchen just one more time, to bake with her, to chat with her, to ask her questions and to stand at the window and watch the snow while she reads her favorite poems and bible verses to me. She was like my best friend, I could tell her anything and she would understand and had a solution for me and where she had no solution she would simply hug me and be there for me and share the pain. I remember the moment my dad called me to tell me she had passed away, my first thought was to call her and tell her. I know she is there in everything I do, I even reaction like she would have done in some situations. I miss her so much.


1.
Så går en dag än från vår tid
och kommer icke mer,
och än en natt med Herrens frid
till jorden sänkes ner.

2.
Men du förbliver den du var,
o Herre, full av nåd,
och våra nätter, våra dar
du tecknat i ditt råd.

3.
Trygg i din vård jag lämnar mig
när solen från oss flyr,
och gladligt skall jag prisa dig
när dagen åter gryr.

4.
Men om det stilla dödens bud
i denna natt jag hör,
det är min tröst att din, o Gud,
jag lever och jag dör.

Christoph Friedrich Neander

Time to collect pine cones for Christmas

We have had an Indian summer here in Munich this autumn. One of my favorite things to do in autumn is to go outside and have a walk, enjoy the colorful leaves and to collect various things for Christmas decorations like pine cones. There are so many various possibilities to use them as decoration:

Picture: Skonahem

Picture: expli

or just keeping them in a jar :

picture: elbgestoeber

Inspiration for my bathroom

We have one of these standard bathrooms: white, tiny and no window. For me a bathroom should be cozy which is very difficult if you have one like ours. My dream would be a room like this with large windows and grey/brownish colors:

Picture: hemnet

But I can't change the color and the size of the tiles. I might need to work with more white and silver to make it look bigger...

Picture: badrumsdrommar

And to increase coziness, I've ordered a bathroom light similar to this one with fewer light spots :

Picture: casalumi

I hope to get it this week and to show you some before and after pictures soon..

Isabell

Meister Eder und sein Pumuckl - Bavarian series for children

Autumn is a typical time of the year where I start to tidy up. Today it was time for our attic. Some of the  moving boxes have been unopened since at least 15 years, one of them is a box where I keep things I loved when I was a child like "Meister Eder und sein Pumuckl".

Pumuckl is a kobold ( it is the cartoon figure on the right) invented by Ellis Kaut and is invisible to people around him except for the master joiner Eder (the person to the left) with whom Pumuckl lives in Bavaria. Pumuckl loves everything that has to do with the ocean and he doesn't like neat and clean places, so he strands in Meister Eder's untidy workshop where gets stuck on a pot of glue. Whenever a kobold gets stuck to something, they become visible, and must stay with the human who sees them. 

There are a lot of episodes that tell about their life together starting from the way they meet each other and until how the got close friends, which is really not easy as Meister Eder is a man that is happy to be by himself and Pumuckl is quite cheeky sometimes. But it's this interaction between the two that is funny, even for grown-ups.

Unfortunately you need to understand German to be able to watch the series, as it hasn't been translated into other languages as far as I know.  But it is one of the best series for children that I know and I'm looking forward to watching it this weekend again after all these years...

Fig Jam

One of my favorite desserts is warm goat cheese with either honey or fig jam. October is the season for many nice fruits, like apples, pears and figs, so I should hurry up to make some fig jam. I've found a new and easy recipe which I would like to try:

Picture TV4

Here is what you need:

1 litre fresh figs
2.5 dl sugar
1 vanilla bean
2 table spoons of water

Rinse the figs with fresh water and cut into pieces ( do not peel). Split the vanilla bean pod lengthwise into two halves and scrape the seeds. Put the figs, the pod and the seeds together with the sugar and the water into a cooking pot and let simmer for ca. 30 minutes until the figs are tender. The jam needs to cool down a little before filling it into sterilized jars.

Kram,
Isabell

Sporty

I've never been a super active and sporty girl. While others went to the gym or had their team sports, I've always preferred different things like food for example. I simply enjoy baking or cooking more than running and lifting heavy weights and I was lucky to never gain weight. So I've only trained a little every now and then and always found a good excuse not to go.

Last week my company has given free gym memberships to some of their employees for 1 year- I was one of the "lucky" winners. So I've been in the gym to have a look at it and wow I didn't know that even the gym fashion had changed that much! There I was in my old fashioned bootleg shaped gym pants -the latest fashion from 5 years ago- with a washed out t-shirt between all these girls with their leggings and loose-fit tops and top styling, sticking out like a soar thumb.

In my daily life I'm up-to-date with the latest fashion, so I've decided to buy a new gym pant, like the one on the picture:

Picture: Nike

Maybe this will motivate me to do more sports as it is not as flattering as my old gym pant :)

Kram,

Isabell

Autumn at Tegernsee

What a wonderful weekend! We went to lake Tegernsee with our motorbike, driving trough the Bavarian countyside and the colors of autumn. If you continue one of the roads uphill, there are a lot of beer gardens close to the lake which are much better than the ones directly at the lake. Surrounded by old trees with red, yellow and green leaves and mountains we just enjoyed being outside and having another late summer day.

Picture: Sueddeutsche Zeitung