Sunday, February 26, 2012

Pancake week

This week we were celebrating Maslenitsa - the analogue of Mardi Gras and Fat Thursday in other countries. The other name of this holiday is Pancake week, so the traditional dish during this week is pancake. We decided to follow this tradition at work. We agreed, that everyone should cook pancakes and bring them for the coffee break. It was so much fun all the week. My turn was on Friday and I decided to make special pancakes. I added cocoa powder to the dough and had chocolate pancakes.
The recipe is very simple:
1 liter milk
2 glasses flour
6 eggs
6 tbls sugar
3 tbls cocoa powder

Mix eggs with sugar. Then add flour and cocoa powder and mix well. After that add milk and mix again. Cook pancakes.
Actually the original recipe includes twice less ingredients, than I've written above, but I needed to make a lot of pancakes, so I multiplied it. It took me about 3 hours to bake all pancakes, that you can see on the picture, they were eaten in less then 10 minutes by 7 people :)

Also I wanted to share the picture of the Dude that lives on my table at work. This is a cute gerbil boy - my coworker's pet. He asked me to watch for him while he was in a business trip. Two weeks passed since then and this Dude is still on my table. He likes sweets and seeds and also likes to make noise, but I love him.
Yesterday I was in a special mood and decided to visited Kiev Pechersk Lavra - I wrote about it earlier here. The views from there are still snowy, but at least our river Dniper is not covered with ice any more.
A few new masterpieces appeared on Lavra's territory. You can see one of them on the picture below - sphere made of wooden Easter hand-painted eggs.
Hope you've had a good weekend! See you.

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Happy Valentine's!

Here is our Valentine's heart shaped breakfast.
I've found this awesome idea on pinterest, it comes from this lovely post - quick, easy and nice. All you need is bread, eggs and a little bit of time.
Happy Valentine's! Wish you all a lot of love, piece and understanding.

     Have a lovely day!

Friday, February 3, 2012

My January 2012

It's time to recall passed month - January 2012.
It was a month of New Year and Christmas, snow and frost, crochet creations and baking, and my returning to writing the blog.
I'm happy to return to this nice tradition of monthly mosaics making. So here it is - my January 2012 mosaic.
Let's go through the mosaic photos.

1. A crochet star motif - I found this nice pattern here.

2. Christmas cookies. I used the same recipe, as last year. Baking gingerbread cookies for Christmas is my newly developed tradition. Last year I had my first experience of baking gingerbread cookies and it was so adorable, that I decided to keep baking them every year. This year I've made some technology improvements, that made the whole process of baking easier and more pleasant. For example, I used baking parchment, that allowed me to quickly refill pan before baking the next batch of cookies. Also I didn't repeat my mistake with frosting. Last year I made it from sugar and egg white and it came out not very good. This year I used sugar powder instead of sugar and the frosting was perfect. It was smooth and easy to work with, allowing to draw thin lines.

3. Crochet snowflake - a pattern from this beautiful book.

4. A snowflake that landed on my windowsill.

5. Our New Year Tree. First we decided not to buy any new year trees, but then suddenly came across small decorative new year trees in a pot while making final shopping in the supermarket on the New Year's eve. They were so small and cute, that we decided to buy one. It is about 50 centimeters high and successfully growing on our windowsill. A lot of fresh green branches appeared on it since we brought it home - I guess it likes here more, then in the supermarket.

6. View from my window - sunny snowy and freeezing weather.

7. Feature lying on the sun.

8. Baby Ripple Blanket, that I finished this month.

9. Apple pie - sweet and easy. I'll post the recipe shortly in a separate post - it is really super-easy.

January was good - a month of winter holidays, presents, snow and extremely low temperatures. The first month of the year ran pretty quickly.
But we have one more winter month left, so welcome February!