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.