Kotaku's list of Top 5 board games of 2012

Every year the last few days are spent of summarizing, remembering what good and bad we've been through.   Kotaku, a gamer site, has made a list of top 5 board games of this year and it makes me happy to see a fellow Czech, the boardgame designer mastermind Vlaada Chvatil, snatching the first place with his (as I heard) fantastic game called Mage Knight.

Raving reviews speak of fantastic puzzle-like card fantasy game with a lot of planning... which reminds me a lot of Dungeon Petz, another of his games. However, I love Dungeon Petz so I wouldn't mind another game of a similar style. The only bad thing about Mage Knight is that it costs about 1600 CZK, which is about $80 or €65. Phew, way too much for a blind purchase. (And I've been sorta saving up for Mansions of Madness...)

Amongst other items on the list include an interesting friendship-wrecking zombie game City of Horror or a Magic: The Gathering's designers another card game Android: Netrunner which is also getting universal praise.

The list can be found here on Kotaku.

Mince Pies

My first encounter with mincemeat pies was several years ago in Britain (where else?) as Christmas drew closer. They were store-bought but still they were delicious. When I visited Britain again this November, mincemeat pie was one of the first things I purchased and it still tasted as good as I remembered.

I realized it can’t be that difficult to make mincemeat pies of my own, after all I know more or less show to make pies and the filling couldn't be too hard to make. As I looked into the ingredients for the filling, I learned about its history as well. Originally traced back to the Crusades, it seems the pie was brought back to Britain from the Middle East. The recipe used to contain mutton or beef meat with spices and fruit but nowadays the meat tends to be omitted. Some people use beef fat instead of butter for the filling so that „the meat part“ is kept in the recipe but since I'm not such a big fan of animal fat in baking, I decided to stick to using butter.

Lokum

When I had my latest CouchSurfing guest over last month, a guy from Turkey, I asked him what do Turks bake traditionally that could be reproduced elsewhere in the world. Apparently, baking is not a big thing in Turkey but they do a lot of different stuff. Like Lokum which is also known as Turkish Delight to the western world. Similarly to muffins, lokum is a type of a dessert that can be made with different ingredients.

I've had Turkish Delight before and I was never too crazy about it (though I made cupcakes from it once and those were great), it just tasted too... artificial to me. I was surprised how mine turned out. The artificial "too sweet" flavour was nowhere to be found and although the rose water flavour was a bit strong (I halved it for the final recipe), my Lokum was delicious and perfectly fitted my idea of a non-traditional Christmas cookie. And while not technically being baked, I was willing to make an exception and publish it here because, in the end, I was quite proud of what I was able to make. :)

Christmas Gingerbread Cookies

There's no recipe this time.

This weekend I got together with Jana, a friend of mine from work, and we baked some pretty neat gingerbread cookies. Now, we only had three cookie cutters - two shaped like squirrels (mine) and one shaped like a star (hers). I didn't feel like making a gingerbread dough since it is MUCH easier to just go and buy pre-made one in a store (I dunno about store-bought dough in other countries, but Babické dough is fantastic here in CZ). Maybe I'll make gingerbread dough from scratch next year but not having to deal with the procedure and having to keep it in the fridge overnight gave us more time to play with the shapes and decoration.

We split the dough into quarters. One became large squirrels, one small squirrels, one stars and the last one we made into custom shaped Tetris blocks. There's a little video shot by Jana.

This year's Christmas will be like no other... cookie-wise.

Ingredient substitution - In dire need, use this

I'm sure it has happened to everyone - you pick a recipe you like, you go gather all the ingredients and you find out that you are one egg short, there's less cornstarch then you thought or that the honey jar is nowhere to be found. So instead of baking you're looking for Winnie the Pooh or making a shopping list since you're going to the supermarket now and the baking is left postponed.

a TV chef known for substituting fish with sausage

Balls!

Well, fortunately there are tricks how to substitute certain ingredients to achieve a similar result. I went through several pages and picked out some of the most useful and interesting substitutions. Turns out that some of the less-available ingredients can be substituted easily and surprisingly many of the standard ingredients as well. However, as many of the sites note, nothing should be overdone and more than one substitution may yield quite a different product in the end - flavour-wise and quite probably consistency-wise too.

Ginger and Spice Pear Cake

Last week it was quite cold here in Prague. I met up with a friend of mine after not seeing each other for a very long time and to hide from the cold weather, we popped in a café of sorts where I ordered a hot pear juice with cloves. It was so good that I wondered if I could make something like that but in a cake.

Turns out I can. I found this one recipe and changed more to my liking. The original called for some ingredients I had to substitute (which gave me an idea for another post). It also looked like a pie-cake hybrid... The way my cake turned out was almost traditional cake. The high amount of liquids in it give the cake a very soft and moist texture and the spices complement each other phenomenally. I just wish it looked a bit better because I'm afraid its looks won't attract any attention.

Also this recipe marks the very first time I made a video recipe. There is a Boardgames & Baking Youtube channel and the first video is me making this cake. I don't know how well and how far this will go but I found out that making videos is easier than I had thought.

Mushipan

From time to time I host a guest from abroad at my place through a site called CouchSurfing. Last weekend I had a Japanese guest who told me about a kind of Japanese muffin. It is highly customizable and easy to prepare just like a muffin but it is actually not baked.

Mushipan stands for "steamed bread" (roughly translated) and it figures that it is prepared over steam. This was my first time actually making something by steaming it if I don't count the times I warmed up jam filled dumplings... It's a Czech thing.

I had my expectations about mushipan and I must say that in the end, I estimated it's taste pretty well. It IS similar to fruit dumpling but it lacks the fruit in it. As I researched mushipan more, I found out that they don't really fill them with anything, not fruit. Sweet potato maybe but not fruit. Also no cinnamon or anything, it seems.

Virtual Boardgames

Something that struck me as I browsed Google Play Store's recommended apps for my tablet. Among a myriad of copies of Angry Birds and various skill calculators for Blizzard's games, a shining gem named The Elder Sign: Omens appeared, fittingly named. In that app I saw an omen of board games leaving the tops of tables and settling on our screens - be it a desktop, tablet, phone or a console.

Some games tend to go the opposite way - first there is a video game and then they make a board game based on it (World of Warcraft, Doom 3, Civilization) but I think we are going to see more of "board game-turned-computer game" games soon.

Autumn Muffins

Yesterday was the first snow of the season day in Prague.

It means that the winter is coming and that the autumn is gonna turn soggy and crappy and all unpleasant and everything. I liked it so far - the colors, the weather, the smell of fallen leaves... I really wanted to preserve this autumn-y feeling for at least couple more moments and muffins seemed to me like the best way to do it. They are easy to share with others, they are easy to make and they are extremely customizable in terms of ingredients.

A quick search for autumn muffins yielded a great recipe - cranberries, figs, apples and hazelnuts work great as autumn fruit. I added a bit of rum to it for extra flavor and it really pushed the whole comfy feeling of a still warm muffin to another level. I was thinking about adding raisins too but when I saw how much there was of the fruit in the end I decided not to. The muffins are already chewy enough... Perhaps if the amount of  cranberries was halved and raisins filled the other half... Hmm.

Postcard from Quicksilver: The Great Airship Race

Today I got a postcard from Split Second Games as a thank you for helping to fund their board game called Quicksilver: The Great Airship Race. I didn't cover the game here in my blog in my summer post about the then-current games of Kickstarter but I did send them a small amount of money since the concept seemed cool and it would be a pity if such a nice game didn't get made.

As the name suggests, the game is an airship/blimp race set in a steampunk-ish world. You can check out its Kickstarter page here. The players have several waypoints they must pass on their way to the finish line and during the play they adjust speed of their aircraft and customize it to their own play style, sabotage other players's blimps, resolve conflicts with the use of various action cards and generally try to stay in the air... and win of course, because Queen Victoria is watching.

If you are interested in an unusual race game and missed the opportunity to pre-order (and help fund) the game on Kickstarter, you can definitely contact the designers on their webpage or just wait until spring 2013 and get it online.

PS: They wrote "Děkujeme" - a thank you in Czech on the back of the postcard... Aww!

Peach Triangles

It's been my father's nameday recently and I wanted to bake him something different instead of a traditional bábovka. At the same time I didn't really want to bake a cake since nameday doesn't carry the same weight as birthday does and looking back at the things I baked in the past month, I saw that all of them were pretty big projects. I was deciding between muffins or cupcakes but I eventually decided to go for something with fruit as the season is almost over (and it's still not time for plums, or is it?) and it would be a pity to pass up on the last fruit baked thing.

When I was looking into small fruit pastry recipes, there was this option to make couple of tarts but I didn't want to make a small pie so soon after the very successful berry pie from couple weeks back. I decided to go for Peach Triangles.

A new game: Village

Last week I decided to act on an impulse and buy a new boardgame. I checked a list of nicely rated new-ish games and compared it to the offers of several e-shops that have their stone branches here in Prague.

Village or Kronika Panství (The Chronicle of a Domain as it could be translated) is German this year's Game of the Year. It looks like a standard  worker placement game but in fact it is not.

Each player has a family and each round chooses what actions to take from a selection of places around the eponymous village. Some actions need a member put on them, some don't. Players collect little cubes standing for different kinds of influence that need to be spent for performing certain actions. Most of the actions need also "time" spent on them which eventually makes one of the family members die of old age.

Ultimately, each player strives to make their family be remembered the most - place their deceased members in the village's chronicle and the younger ones to attain importance for the village in a church (as monks) or a town hall (as local politicians or something).

I've played it once so far. I will write a proper post once I get to enjoy it more.

Berry Pie

Although I've already made pies (one of them not so long ago), until last Friday I never made one of the two crust variety. You know, those that are usually baked in all those American TV shows.

I have been watching a really good TV series called Pushing Daisies. It is about a man who can bring dead back to life by touching them, however if he touches them for the second time, they become dead again but forever this time. The story follows him as he develops a romantic relationship with his childhood sweetheart... that he resurrected after she was killed during mysterious circumstances which means they cannot touch each other or she will die for the second time. Although the plot might seem a bit morbid, the show is actually lighthearted, bright and full of brilliant humor. Also, the main character owns a pie restaurant.

Red Velvet Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

Recently when I was hanging out with a friend of mine, he showed me this one TV show about really really expensive cakes. It was part documentary, part reality TV, the producers always tried to create tension with the bakers not having the cakes ready minutes before the deadline and since cakes aren't exactly exciting, there were three teams making crazy cakes for their clients, all edited so the deliveries happened at the end of the show with success music playing in the background.

Anyway, I noticed that the show wasn't really that much about baking cakes as about decorating them. They used little variety of the cake corpuses and focused on what was sitting on them. They used Red Velvet a lot and it reminded me that I haven't baked Red Velvet cake yet even though I had come across it couple times in the past.

It's more popular in the English speaking countries while in the Czech Republic it is practically unknown. No wonder, it's traditionally an American dessert. It has a chocolate flavour due to cocoa powder being used but the batter is coloured red. I imagine it being a gimmick as to differentiate one cake from other chocolate cakes.

Elder Sign

It was not so long ago that I ranted about how I dislike the high amount of luck that decides the outcome (and enjoyment) of Settlers of Catan. I still prefer strategy over luck in my games but at the same time I enjoyed playing Elder Sign quite a lot. Why? Are really the tentacles of eldricht horrors powerful enough to make rolling dice transcend the unavoidable legacy of Yatzhee?

Let's start with the basics. Elder Sign is another take on H. P. Lovecraft's beloved tentacly mythos by the same people who brought us the immensely popular Arkham Horror with all its expansions. Elder Sign is a standalone game that reuses some of the graphics from AH but its gameplay is different. At the beginning of the game, each player chooses/draws a character that he will play as. Also the Great Old One is drawn, an evil creature that wants to break out to our world from its horrible dimension. Okay, so far it's all the same but here comes the twist. The game itself takes place in a museum and its surroundings where something uncanny is going on. Weird shapes move from a room to room, mad people serve dark evil gods, portals to other worlds open and not even dreams are safe anymore.

Apple Cider Pie

Since the apple pie has become the go-to pie and everyone more or less knows it, I decided to bake it somewhat differently. There are no actual apples used in this pie but it still has a distinct sour apple flavour that complements the delicious custard filling. The original recipe says to use 1 litre of apple cider but I wasn't able to find any except for a half a litre bottle of cider at the local farmer's market. I just added a half a litre of genuine apple juice and used that instead. The result still has the cider taste in it but it is weaker and I think it makes the pie sweeter than it would originally be.

The pie crust is the exact same as from my previous pie and it's super easy to prepare. Just, as usual, it needs couple hours to stay in the fridge.

Rainbow White Chocolate Brownies

This Saturday marks the second time that there will be a Pride event held in Prague. To celebrate diversity and a little extravagance I've decided to prepare a batch of rainbow coloured brownies since I had to do it before the weekend and brownies are so easy to make, they were perfect for a last minute baking project.

I wasn't nervous about using the food colouring as it wasn't my first time working with it (that would be the cute heart muffins) but I hoped the colours wouldn't mix and spoil the result. Eventually, that didn't happen and the colours stayed separated, layered and the brownies looked great when cut.

There's 6 colours to the LBGT flag and colouring 6 batches of dough turned out to be quite lengthy. I suggest you start preheating the oven halfway.

Boardgames on Kickstarter: They Need You!

Recently I've learned about the Kickstarter site/project. In case you haven't heard about it yet, here's a quick summary: Kickstarter lets you advertise the project of your dreams to the internet public, asking them to fund it. You set a funding goal (let's say $10,000) and if enough people chip in and your project reaches the goal in 30 days, you get the the full amount of funds that might be well over your goal. In case the amount of money doesn't reach your goal, you get nothing, the money goes back to the people who chipped in.

You, however, don't need to have a project to participate in Kickstarter. You can browse hundreds of ongoing funding requests and if any catches your eye, you're invited to help by spending any amount you think is right. Projects usually have several levels and spending certain amount of money usually gets you something from the project owner. For $1 you might get a mention in the credits, for $10 you might get the mention and a promo poster mailed to you, for $20 you might get the product itself. There is anything from Fashion, Computer games, Music, Comics, Film to, what is the focus of this post, Board Games.

I've watched several projects for some time and here is a selection of several Board Games that deserve your attention.

(I am in no way related to Kickstarter or any of the projects. This is merely an enthusiastic post about something really really cool.)

Dungeon Petz

I always wonder why Vlaada Chvatil, perhaps the best known Czech board game designer, chose to spell the name of his successor game to his earlier Dungeon Lords with 'z' in the word Pets. In my opinion, using 'z' instead of a 's' is a cheap way to convey craziness and zaniness, and to target child audience. The original name – Příšerky z podzemí (literally Little monsters from the underground) strays from the cheap area of misspelled words and still carries the message of cuteness and being set in the same universe as Dungeon Lords – Vládci podzemí.

And yes, Dungeon Petz IS a cute game. The illustrations are very well made, the little monsters themselves are adorable and the game manual is written with so much wit and humour that the whole package makes you want to hug the box and squee in delight. However, the stark contrast between the light-hearted facade and the deep, complex (complex but not complicated) gameplay is what makes the game unsuitable for kids. Or kidz.

Banana Chocolate Cake with Ricotta

As my brother's birthday happened when he was still in Ghana, I grabbed the opportunity to bake him a birthday cake during his brief stay in Prague. I've missed baking cakes from my days in Barcelona too so I took this as a reason to go to IKEA and get their round cake form and also look for the perfect recipe for a grand cake. I came across a promotional leaflet from a supermarket that contained a recipe for a cake which looked appetizing, however, could be improved. How? Well, I decided to substitute the original fruit with bananas.

Eventually, there was a lot of cake. I split the work into two days - baking and filling the cake took a large chunk of a day 1, so I left the frosting for the other day and let the cake set in a fridge overnight. That allowed the filling to enter the corpus but the sliced bananas turned slightly unsightly brownish and the filling turned a bit yellow. But I haven't noticed anything wrong with the taste so I guess it was just a cosmetic change. In the end I had to come up with a way to transport half of it to my brother but some clever adjusting of a large shoebox took care of that.

Saboteur

I've mentioned before that I'm not a big fan of card games. I was pleasantly surprised that Saboteur, a 3+ player card game, is actually a neat little fun game you can play with easily with a group of people who are relatively new to gaming. Saboteur puts each player in a role of a member of a group of gnomes that are trying to dig a tunnel to a gold nugget. The catch is that one player (or with more players even two players) is secretly a saboteur, who is trying to thwart the party's plan and get the nugget only to himself.

At the beginning, each player is dealt a hand of cards (depends on the number of players) and a loyalty card which he secretly checks to see if they are a saboteur or not (like in BSG). Then the basic card are placed on the table. On one side, there is a ladder, which is a starting point for the party, and on the other side there are three cards symbolizing the goal, two of which are worthless coal and one which is gold. These goal cards are shuffled and placed face down so that the gold is always in a random place and no one knows where.

Chocolate/Rosewater Muffcakes

During my trip to Vienna, I visited this one cool Indian grocery shop and I came across a bottle of rosewater for an unusually low price. See, in Prague, the only place I could find a bottle of rosewater was Marks & Spencer and it was expensive as hell and there wasn't too much of it. So I didn't have to think for too long and  got it.

Fast forward to this Sunday, I had a hard time deciding what muffins should I bake for the Monday morning. I had cocoa powder and chocolate ready for some hot baking action and then I still had this bottle of rosewater sitting on my shelf, unopened. So after a while I decided to use both, just to try it and see if it works.

Diablo 3 Teacakes

You must be at least lv 60 to take on these bad guys

In celebration of Diablo 3 coming out in couple hours, I've made a little something to make the time go by faster. These Diablo 3 "devil" teacakes are balancing on the sweet and darkly bitter line of chocolate flavour that would make even personalised Gluttony's mouth water. Adorned with cute red horns, they are best enjoyed with a cup of tea (or black coffee if you prefer) since they're as dry as the parched ground of the deepest Hell.

Now, only couple more hours till it begins.

Star Trek Catan

On my recent trip to Vienna I found this peculiar modification to Settlers of Catan. The back of the box showed that it practically is still Settlers of Catan just with the Star Trek theme. I guess Trekkies need more
Catan love than we thought :)

Brownies

These brownies really are something.
I was told that you can't really make bad brownies unless you burn them. But some brownies are just better than others.

I've made brownies couple times and never they seemed to live up to my expectations. I mean, brownies do have this aura of being extremely yummy and every time they turned out to be "just okay".

Not this time though. The recipe I got inspired by says these are the Perfect Brownies. Perfect - that's a word that comes up often with recipes from google search and rarely the final product really delivers perfect results. But in the end, even the sceptic in me was surprised how *GOOD* these brownies were.

A Game of Thrones

This franchise is all the rage nowadays. The books are bestselling, the TV show is universally loved and there is even a board game that has found its way to me. When I first played it, I hadn’t read the book (and so far I still have to read any of them) and hadn’t seen the show. The only thing I knew was that there are medieval families that are fighting over a throne and that there are dragons in it somewhere. I gave it a go with a group of friends who knew what was going on and kept quoting phrases that I didn‘t understand. Well, I thought, at least I can focus on the game itself and abstract from the theme, look into the design.

Mini mazance

After the last week's Easter holiday, I felt like I haven't baked a proper thing in a long long time. I mean, sure, muffins are great and everything, but I missed the challenge of the more advanced baked goods. As I looked for some inspiration on the internet (and all I got were fruit cakes), I remembered that I saw this cooking show on TV where they were making these tiny mazance. Mazanec (that's sg., pl. is mazance) is according to Wikipedia hot cross bun, the sweet bread that's eaten on Easter but I can imagine that being the only thing hot cross buns and mazanec have in common..

Mazanec has a cross on its top that is made with scissors, not frosting. It tends to be large, a loaf of bread large, while hot cross buns are... well... buns. The mazanec is traditionally made with raisins and almonds. As far as I know, there are no substitutes but I guess the raisins could be omitted if you for some reason don't like them.

Now, as I said, mazanec is normally much bigger. I guess this recipe could be used for one standard mazanec but mini mazance are so cute and everything's getting smaller and smaller nowadays anyway. These guys are fragrant, stay yummy for a long time and they are great with butter or simply on their own.

Apricot and ginger muffins

For my newest muffin experiment, I chose dried apricots to be the primary flavour. I also wanted to use biscuits somehow. I remember I used crushed biscuits for the bottom of the nanaimo bars once but muffins don't have bases really so I used the biscuits on the top. In the end it didn't have the effect I had had in my but it did give it a nice chocolate-y hint.

I used the ginger just because I found a root lying in my kitchen. Honey covered its sharp flavour, toned it down and it's almost unnoticeable in the final product, yet still there. I must say that I am very pleased with that outcome :3

Banana Chocolate Chip muffins

I bought 6 silicone muffin cases so that I might do some muffin baking at home in my remoska. Even though only 3 fit inside at a time, I made a small batch of six to test things out and hell yeah! It worked!
A new age has dawned upon my kitchen.

Anyway, I know I didn't discover America by combining banana and chocolate. This pair is bested only by chocolate and cherry combo (as many ice-cream companies have noticed) which is something I should combine in about two months when the season is right. But for now - banana and chocolate chip muffins.

A new game: Dungeon Petz

After some thought I decided to buy a new game. Vlaada Chvatil, the game designer behind the wonderful Galaxy Trucker and Through the ages, designed a spin-off game from his Dungeon Lords (which I hear was met with some mixed feelings) that tasks the player with managing a group of imps and breeding different monster pets.

I've played Dungeon Petz (Příšerky z podzemí in Czech) once so far and while the rules were a bit complex, I believe I understand about 90% of them and other sessions will go faster. The game is both a worker placement thing with some micro management. As you can tell from the box art, the game's graphics are lovely though the game board is slightly cluttered (though still keeping the graphics mostly functional).

After I play it some more, I'll write a post about it, as usual.
EDIT: Here's the post

Race for the Galaxy

I don't play many pure card games. The couple I've played can be counted on fingers of one hand. It's because I didn't see much originality in their core systems - you have cards in your hand, you use them and draw new ones. The games I own usually have cards as a side system - they either give you some kind of ability to work with the pieces on the board, work as items or actions in RPGs or add an extra layer of strategy (Loyang, LNoE, Agricola) but on their own, cards don't go further that a game of Crazy 8s, as in reacting to cards in a certain pattern, or Poker, as in working on your strategy while deceiving your opponents.

And then one day I played Dominion which did something original with the concept of cards - you were building your own deck of cards with cards that were immediately useful and cards that were useless but counted as points at the end. It was like the pre-game part of Magic: the Gathering you do at home being a part of the game itself. No wonder Dominion became such a hit. It did something, as far as I know, different with the whole deck-hand concept. Race for the Galaxy, while not turning the whole deck-hand thing upside down, achieves something similar. Something refreshing that makes it a very enjoyable game.

Rose Delight cupcakes

I made these cute cupcakes with my friend Vero almost two years ago. I remembered them as I went on a trip down the memory lane and realized I haven't shared the recipe. These are actually one of the first cupcakes I've ever made. We followed a recipe from a book (that I got from Vero) called 200 cupcakes by Joanna Farrow and I confess I haven't really made any changes to the recipe. We actually went to Marks & Spencer and bought some of the less available ingredients like the Turkish delight and rosewater. I gotta say it was definitely worth it!

The cupcakes are lightly sweet, Turkish delight has a unique flavour that might not be to everyone's liking but believe me when I say that it works as a great base for the cupcakes. As for the pomegranate seeds on the top - it looks gorgeous and very professional. While I'm not a big fan of whipped cream on cakes because it seems kinda cheap to me, here it delivers a fluffy, light feeling to the sweet rosy base and carries the seed that are both fun to eat and a treat for the taste buds.

Zabaione

I went to Rome a week ago an while it was my first time in Italy, it certainly wasn't the first time I had come in contact with it. While everyone knows that pizza and many different kinds of pasta are Italian cuisine, the Italian desserts are somewhat overlooked. I guess that anyone is able to name the ice-cream "gelato" (which actually means ice-cream but is much different from what can be bought in a store) and tiramisu but other than that? 

I've come across a recipe for Zabaione, or alternatively spelled Zabaglione, in a search for more Italian dessert recipes after I made Cantuccini about 2 years ago. I've made Zabaione couple times now because it is simple yet challenging, incredibly rewarding and infinitely customizable. See, it's only egg yolks, sugar and wine. And a lot of whisking. A LOT! It is usually served with fruit like strawberries and blueberries but you can also use soft sweet bread like panettone or a soft sponge cake. Yum.

Valentine Vanilla Heart Muffins

As the 14th February rears its heart-shaped head, you too might crumble under the pressure of being all romantic and decide it's time to make something for your significant otter. The way to a man's heart leads through his stomach (unless you plan to stab him, in which case it's better to start a bit higher) but I'm quite positive that anyone enjoys muffins especially if they are enhanced by a cute heart inside.

I discovered the idea for these muffins at a really cool site dedicated to stuff inside cupcakes and adapted it to an easy muffin recipe. Eventually, I tried to make frosting but once again it didn't end up well and I am a proud owner of a delicious cream spread that's good on cinnamon toasts but is too runny to be used as frosting. Anyway, here's the recipe!

Custom baking: what ingredients do in a cake

There's chance that these guys will rise

Do you ever wonder how things work? How come a CRT screen while showing black is still emitting light? Why does it make sound when I crack my knuckles? What is yawning all about? What does milk do in a cake and why does it take a whole cube of butter to make the battenberg cake?

We don't live in the ol' days of analog knowledge where you either had to pick up a huge book and (gasp!) flip pages until you found the answer, or ask your grandma (because they sure know a lot). Anything you want to know is just a Google search away. I've recently pondered, as I closed door to the oven and saw an unopened bottle of milk and remembered that I forgot to add it to the batter, what is milk good for in a cake anyway? The batter was gooey enough and the cake turned out alright in the end, only perhaps a bit too crumbly.

Battenberg cake

Recently, I have been exposed to a chocolate bar that had two colors - a pink one and a white one. It reminded me of a cake I made almost two years ago. It too mixed pink and white and what's more, it was coated in a delicious layer of apricot jam and marzipan.

Today, I tried making a slightly modified Battenberg cake, using 70% of a traditional recipe with some ingredients (rum and coconut) that you normally don't find in it. Also I used different coloring since Prague decided not to have any shops selling food coloring open on weekend and they had only yellow at Tesco. Durrr.
Anyway, for my version, I used a high quality marzipan that was both expensive and sold in small packages. That's why my layer of marzipan is so thin. It should be thicker like on the last picture (that's the one I made years ago) but it doesn't really matter since it's there mainly to hold the constructed cake together. And one more thing, it might not be a bad idea putting more than 4 spoons of rum in it. Its taste was almost indistinguishable and the aroma was merely slightly there.