First outdoor fika of the year

Woohoo for 4-day long weekends (for Stu from his internship, not me...there are no real holidays for the unemployed!) And it is GORGEOUS in Stockholm. So many people are out, and lots of tourists. I guess all of Europe celebrates a lengthy Easter.

We finally had a proper fika outside of a konditori in Gamla Stan. Well, not proper: who drinks light beer with their lemon meringue pie? Stu. blech.

Glad påsk!

So Swedish

Just a quick one...my French friend Anabelle has been staying with us for the week (finding housing in this city is HARD!)  For my birthday this week, she bought me a small box of lovely French macarons. I love those things, they are just amazing. Light green pistachio is my favorite. But she didn't buy them in France before she left, she bought them here in Stockholm. Can you guess which flavor the black one is?

Mmmm hmmm, salty liquorice. Swedes think it is okay to make a salty liquorice flavored macaron. It's an abomination, if you ask me.
But I'll let you know how it tastes...I'm not usually one to let baked goods go to waste, even ones that could have been concocted by Bertie Bott's Every Flavour ;)

Alla Hjärtans Dag

Happy All Hearts Day!

aka Valentine's Day.

Mine started off with fluffy American pancakes for breakfast made by my sweetie.

Its not a Swedish 'holiday' by any means, but Valentine's Day has definitely popped up as a commercial excuse for candy and flowers here. The restaurants in our neighborhood looked busy tonight, and we had planned to go see Where the Wild Things are at the movies, but there were a whopping 8 tickets left to the 5:30 showing, and none were sitting together. Those Swedes plan ahead for their romance!

I particularly liked someone's drive-by-hearting on all the cars parked along our street:

Last night, we celebrated Stu's birthday with a few dozen friends (see photos below), stupid party hats (also below) and a completely from-scratch birthday cake made by yours-truly.

I pat myself on the back for making my first layer cake, with only one spring-form pan. Those things leak. And it was edible!

And Stu wore the pony hat.

The frustrations of flat f*&%ing cookies

Thats it. I am no longer attempting to bake cookies on Swedish soil without Arm & Hammer.

I am in the middle of an art theory class which makes me want to bang my head against a wall, so I have been coming up with lame excuses to *not* read the chapter on semiotics in the late-modern. I know, I'm such a grown-up. Yesterday, I rearranged the living room furniture all by myself for no good reason other than I didn't want to read about minimalism (that pull-out couch is like a ton of bricks, too.)

Today, I decided to make cookies. These cookies, specifically. Needing exactly 1/2 teaspoons of baking soda, which is *supposed* to be similar to the Swedish bikarbonat, so thats what I used. It is rainy and chilly today, and I figured it'd take at least 20 minutes to go buy the walnuts and raisins, and a good chunk of time to grate carrots and make the dough. And because tiny Swedish ovens such as ours are configured with only ONE baking rack (seriously?!?) it would take at least 4 or 5 rounds of 12 minute baking cycles to bake all of the cookies. So I was looking at a nice hour and a half of non-reading time.
I should probably get my head checked, I know. Just read the damn book!

And I felt even dumber after taking that first round of what should have been plump, moist lovely little mounds of carrot cake cookies out of the oven. Flat as pancakes. And not fluffy American pancakes, *Swedish* pancakes (so, flat as crepes.) With little nubs of walnuts and raisins making the only 3-dimensional forms on the sheet.

 

There was no saving them, either. They had started to get brown & crispy on the edges, but the centers were still too soft, so I had to scrape them off the sheet onto a plate in one amorphous pile of carrot-y, cinnamon-y mess.  But what do you do with an entire bowl full of dough? It was good, but I couldn't eat the whole thing raw (I thought of it, though!) I dumped it all into a small loaf pan, and I have a feeling that it too will be an utter failure.

Stu had a brilliant suggestion: to use it as ice cream topping. So I'll stop by and get a tub of vanilj glass on the way home from work tonight. Seriously, no more baking soda disasters. How do Swedes make cookies? They can't all be flat pepparkakor?!?

Moderna Museet Cafe

Last Sunday was gorgeous and warm. Its been really lovely weather here, sunny and about 18c (that's in the upper 60s for the Americans.) Perfect fall days, really.

But I spent most of last Sunday writing a paper (remind me why I decided to go back to grad school again?!?)

Stu & I took a break, though, to go to the big Moderna Museet in the afternoon. They had just opened a Salvador Dali show, and it was the last day of a photography show that I thought he would really enjoy. Its a great museum, situated on a little island called Skeppsholmen (which is actually really hard for me to pronounce in Swedish) with several other museums. They are doing track work on some of the subway over there, so its not the *easiest* place to get to from our apartment (I found that out when I mixed up my course time at the MM last week, and ended up being 45 minutes late for class...I took a very expensive cab ride, and it still took forever.)

Anyway, we checked out the Dali, and then took a coffee break. They have several places to grab a fika in the museum, and the restaurant is really quite good, with a large balcony sitting over the water. But we grabbed coffee in the little cafe between the Moderna and the Architecture museum.



I didn't take a picture because we ate them too fast, but holy, we had some of the best waffles with blueberries and vanilla cream.



We have done the cafe thing at several of the museums, like Liljevalchs and others on Djurgården, and many of them take full advantage of the outdoors...something DC museums don't do very well. Don't get me wrong, the cafe at the NGA is great, and the food at NMAI is fantastic, and the space is fun. I guess there is just so much more rustic green space in Stockholm, and it just feels different. More relaxed.



It was definitely the first museum cafe I had ever seen that sold farmer's vegetables! And the prices weren't too bad, either. It's less than $3 for a big bunch of carrots, $1.50 for the bunch of fresh corn. And I learned a new word from this sign: artichoke in Swedish is kronårtskocka. Hmmm...who knew?



We sat on this rock, since most of the tables were taken up. It was a prime spot...there were little kids jumping all over the place.



Anyway, we caught the end of the photography show (I had only seen Larry Clark's work in his books...its even more disturbing and fascinating when blown up on the wall!) I bought a funky plate and lamented that I couldn't buy the whole set (the museum gift shops here are pretty good, too)

And I managed to mostly finish my paper while Stu went out to an Irish bar on Söder to catch the Eagles game with several of his new American-football-watching friends. They might come here next week to see it...Stu bought the NFL package to stream online. He's dedicated.

Eat this!

Kaffe och princesstårta. Go find this (Ikea has got to have them) and eat them. So friggin good.