✧Pice ar y Maen✧ #welshcakes #homebaking #farawayfriend #imaginarytriptowales #TBT

Our friend Y moved to Wales some time ago. The duck and I haven’t managed to visit her yet. But, after she sent us a postcard with a recipe for Pice ar y maen, an enticing Welsh treat, the duck and I knew we had to try it. It only took us well over a year and the passing of the best-before date of the dried currants we had imported for this sole purpose. Despite our unreliable baking skills, the result was worth it. When we devoured our first portion of Welsh cakes, the duck and I almost felt as if we were in Wales for a moment. Five smug powdered sugar flakes for a successful imaginary jaunt to Wales ✧✦✧✦✧

Now we only have to get our physical bodies onto the sofa/spare bed in our friend’s Welsh house. I’m sure that after we eat real Welsh cakes, the duck and I will revoke the favorable rating of my baking attempt. Until then, I will be the one who made the best Pice ar y maen the duck has ever eaten. Ha!

P.S.: I promise the next post of this sort will celebrate a snack we ate outside our home!

♥At home cheesecake♥ #bluberrylemon #delightfullyvegan #cheesecakecravings #theducksbakingadventures #TBT

Today, the duck and I want to share the visual result of one of our past baking adventures. Truth be told, even though we usually improvise our own meals, when we bake, we don’t dare go without a recipe (our knowledge of the chemistry of baking is practically non-existent). Last summer, we wanted to eat bake a dairy-free cheesecake. This recipe from the fantastic Vegan Heaven blog looked simple enough for us to try out. Since the duck loves to experiment, we agreed that, as long as we stuck to the measurements, we might be able to create the exact cake we were craving: a lemon and blueberry cheesecake. The local grocery stores didn’t carry any lemon-flavored soy yogurt. So we added a pack of sweetened lemon peel and a few drops of lemon juice to our vanilla yogurt. We also used cream-flavored pudding powder instead of vanilla and swapped the raspberries in the original recipe for blueberries. The result was a surprisingly delicious (and omnivore-approved) German-style lemon and blueberry cheesecake, worthy of being shared alongside our images of some of the fancier outside foods we’ve eaten. 5/5 blueberries for the experience of baking a vegan cake that (in our opinion as dairy-skeptics) tastes even better than its dairy counterpart and for being able to share it with some of our favorite people ♡♥♡♥♡

At this point, the duck and I would like to thank nope, not Pam for encouraging us to share more photos of our at-home meals! And, if you’re wondering what makes a cheesecake German, here’s the duck and my take on it: There are numerous varieties of German cheesecake. Most of them sport a shortcrust base and rely on quark, rather than cream cheese, for the filling.

Baking to Night Vale

Last year the duck and I assembled our Berlin Baking buddies and baked Christmas cookies to celebrate that we had successfully made it through the ovenless period. This year we are over our oven excitement. So we decided to go back to our tradition of baking Christmas cookies solo (well, duo) which also sounded like the sensible thing to do this year. In the past few years whenever we’d embark on a duo baking adventure the duck and I would put on a fiction podcast to go on an added adventure in our imagination while we combined ingredients, rolled out dough, cut fun shapes, or waited for our creations to be done baking or drying. This year, as we were baking cinnamon cookies, we decided to go back to the origin of our podcast appreciation and caught up on some episodes of Welcome to Night Vale.Back when I lived close to many of my friends, we used to have movie nights that we would not only spend trying to find the perfect silly movie to watch together (we discovered quite a few unexpectedly good movies that way) but also talking about all kinds of (funny, weird, creepy, annoying) things that we had experienced, discovered or read somewhere. One night, while talking about creepy stories, one of my friends mentioned Welcome to Night Vale and recommended we all give it a listen. This has probably been one of the best recommendations I have ever gotten which is why today’s friends’ recommendation post will focus on this wonderfully creepy podcast that began my podcast obsession:

♪ You can’t bake the sky from me

Times are weird and sad and stressful and our puns are increasingly terrible; whenever the duck and I feel like too much is happening, we look at photos of food to calm us down. And, if we’re planning to meet up with someone, we take it a step further and bake cookies to share. Sometimes, if we really crave something sweet and crumbly, we bake a batch of cookies anyway, even if we have nothing planned, telling ourselves that we’ll freeze some, but eating them all before we can, ideally, while we watch a show or a movie that one of our awesome friends has recommended to us. We’re lucky to have friends with excellent taste!

I took this photo of the duck after one of our not-so-recent baking sessions that I want to tell you about about today, combined with our thoughts on a not-recent-at-all TV series recommendation that we finally got to cross off our list a few weeks ago (which is much too late), after having discovered a DVD copy of it at the local library; Firefly, the infamous series of which we only knew that it apparently ended too early and what some of the posters look like, has been recommended to us by many, but not watched by our stingy selves until we could watch it for (technically) free. Here’s a step by step retelling of what we thought and baked: