Mevrouw Cupcake

After my temporary resurrection from my sick bed, to make last week's peanut butter torte, I hope you'll all give me a break about opting out this week. I went from my sick bed to the airport last Wednesday night and flew off to Edinburgh with E to visit my best girlfriend. A good time was had by all and with the help of some spicy curries and fabulously decadent cocktails, I was soon feeling right as rain again.

All in all we had a lovely long weekend and enjoyed Edinburgh at its most beautiful, under sunny and cloud-less skies, a pleasant surprise and a rarity according to the locals.

I have several addresses to share with all you food connisseurs, but want to give them the full praise that they deserve, so I'll be posting about them later this week. In the meantime, please stop by the Tuesdays with Dorie blog to find out what all the other TWD bakers got up to!

Well, there it is ladies and gentlemen.  I'd love to go into a big story about this beauty, but the truth is, I'm sick as a dog. Tomorrow this rich and decadent peanut butter torte (as chosen by Elizabeth of Ugg Smell Food) will be served up as a treat for E's colleagues, but for now, I'm just happy to have posted and be on my way to the bath.

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Spring has finally arrived!!!

It's sunny and beautiful outside and a balmy 21ºC (70ºF) with not a cloud in the sky. Too lovely for baking, blogging, and any other inside activities, so I leave you with this image from our 4pm brunch (we're very slack and obviously don't have kids, huh?).

Enjoy your Sunday where ever you may be, and I hope it's sunny there too! 

This month the theme "ingredient" for Cupcake Hero is Earth Day, as chosen by Tempered Woman, partner in crime to Cupcake Hero's founder and hostess-with-the-mostess, Laurie of quirky cupcake. With such a broad and interesting topic to portray using the cupcake as my medium, let me tell you, I found it difficult to come up with an idea. I thought about it and thought about it and thought about it some more, and when I couldn't come up with anything, I decided I'd better pick the brains of my nearest and dearest. So a big shout-out to my darling friend Liz who suggested using flower pots as baking cups and to my lovely boyfriend who came up with idea of a farming theme, after their input everything else just fell into place. In my case, the egg came before the chicken, in that it was only after thinking about the subject of Earth Day and farming, that I started thinking about sustainable agriculture and locally grown foods and how my opionions on the subject were shaped by my parents. In honor of Earth Day and my wonderful parents, I present to you my organic farm cupcakes in a reusable baking cups!

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As you are probably well aware, the whole point of Tuesdays with Dorie is to bake our way through Dorie Greenspan's baking bible, Baking: From My Home to Yours. Every week a different member of TWD chooses the recipe of the week and we all give it a go, posting about our experiences on the following Tuesday. I love the fact that I'm working my way through an entire cookbook, a task that until now, I've never accomplished. Hell, I have cookbooks on my bookshelf that I've never made even one recipe from, for that matter. The only draw-back to this otherwise fabulous initiative is that you're not always going to like every recipe and you're not always going to be in the mood for the work that some recipes may require.

I hate to say it, but when I read the recipe for this cake, I felt pretty lukewarm about it. First of all, I don't like dried figs. Fresh figs are lovely and they taste like watermelon, but dried figs and their tiny crunchy seeds, hmmm...not my thing. I was contemplating substituting some other dried fruit, like apricots or dried cherries; but then my strange and wonderful boyfriend, who is notoriously a picky eater, told me that he loves dried figs. What a weirdo, my guy, but in the end I decided to follow the recipe to the letter and leave the figs in. I could always eat around them, right?

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Yesterday E and I spent the day out and about in our city, on what was the first really beautiful warm and sunny day that Amsterdam has seen this spring (and it's about time too). First stop, one of my favorite breakfast/brunch/lunch spots, De Bakkerswinkel (their Amsterdam Zuid location), to fuel up for our day out.

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