🥨A German Pretzel in Tokyo🥨 #yum #apretzelspeaksmorethan1000words #favesnack #Kichijojiflashbacks #TBT

It’s no secret that duck and I love pretzels. Just thinking about them is relaxing for us. That’s why they made it into our story about Cat, our hat-selling dog, that our friend A. helped us come up with in our early days in Tokyo. So, when we learned about Bäckerei Kaffee Linde in Kichijoji, we were super excited to try their German pretzels. They even had a designated pretzel day with an attractive discount on our baked bringers of happiness. Naturally, this became one of the duck and my favorite shops in Tokyo. One pretzel day, we decided to get an extra pretzel for our lovely housemate Mm. She wasn’t there when we got home, so we left it on the dining table together with a short note in our best Japanese (concerning the Japanese language, our “best” is the average person’s “terrible”). We knew that, when it comes to pretzels, there’s no need for many words or small talk – Cat conversed with the pretzel shop owner using nothing but images! As expected, Mm understood the note. And the duck and I like to think that that day, the universal pretzel fan club gained a new member. 5/5 pretzels for a baked love most pure! ♥🥨🧡🥨♥

Strictly speaking, the picture doesn’t even show a snack the duck and I enjoyed at home (though there was a pretzel in our bedroom when I snapped this quick shot of Mm’s pretzel-to-be). This might be a new low in our series about foods we’ve eaten outside our home.
Well, that’s nothing a delicious pretzel won’t fix! 😀

Snacks: Vegan pretzel chocolate

It’s no secret that the duck and I are obsessed with grocery shopping. As mildly miserly misers, we always know what is on sale at all local grocery stores. So, when we saw that Chocjes bars were offered at almost half their usual price one week, we knew it was finally time to try one. Chocjes is a vegan chocolate bar by Katjes, a German candy company known for licorice and gummy candy. A few years ago, they transitioned to only producing vegetarian and vegan products. Out of the three Chocjes varieties on sale, cookie lover, salty pretzel, and sea caramel, the duck and I didn’t even have to think about which one we wanted to try. We are obsessed with pretzels, after all (why else would we create an animation about them?). And we’ve just recently focused on a cookie flavor. Since we have only done one chocolate-related taste test this year, the duck and I saw this vegan chocolate as the perfect opportunity for another one of our super subjective chocolate reviews:

Flash Forward to the duck and me eating homemade ice cream

Having devoured our last tub of grocery store vegan ice cream, the duck and I decided it was time we made our own non-dairy ice cream. We wanted it to have all of our favorite flavors, not only peanut butter and sandwich cookie pieces that remind us of ice cream sandwich “bread.” Our ice cream would include matcha and pretzels, too! This would be the ice cream of the future, the duck and I thought, as we tried coming up with a recipe while listening to one of our favorite friend-recommended podcasts. Flash Forward is all about “possible and not so possible future scenarios,” as host Rose Eveleth explains at the beginning of each episode.
Today’s friend recommendation actually dates back to the weekend the duck and I watched one of our absolute favorite movies, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, for the first time, together with our lovely friends J and Al. I wonder what our lives would be like had we just stayed at home that weekend. That’s a future that I don’t want to imagine. Let’s talk about more exciting future scenarios instead – alongside a summary of how the duck and my (too-)many-flavors ice cream came to be:

*Ovenless kitchen diaries* #day12 #nobakechristmasbaking #pretzellove #TBT

Pretty much two years ago today the duck and I were getting ready to attend a Christmas party. We wanted to bring some homemade snacks because we’re cool like that. Since we did not have an oven in our Japanese kitchen we had to resort to some other kind of Christmas ‘baking’: We located a foreign food store, grabbed a few bags of our favorite food and some bars of our other favorite food… and began drizzling. We drizzled all night long, one tiny pretzel at a time, listening to one podcast after the other.
Drizzling pretzels with dark chocolate turned out to be a perfect substitute for actual Christmas baking because it gave us the same back ache that we always have after a full day of cranking out Christmas cookies (and eating nothing but an oatmeal breakfast and cookie dough – for quality control! – all day)! Would do again. 5/5 hunched ducks! 😀

Did you ever do any Christmas non-baking? What do you like to bring to Christmas parties?

My dog sells hats 2.0

We finally did it, you guys! The duck and I finally finished the second dog story that we may have mentioned waaay back when we first stumbled across our favorite Duolingo sentence (to this day): 私の犬は帽子を売ります。My dog sells hats. After months of lazing around drawing furiously, we finally gave up on finished the visual representation of the story about our hat-selling dog. Enjoy!

Actually, it took the duck and me so long to work on this that we are not even sure that this gem of a sentence even still exists on Duolingo. But we sure hope so, as within it lies a great potential to save lives (or at least to brighten up someone’s day)!
That shall be it for our 99th post. We’ll sleep for at least 99 days now!

Duck, dog and me – OUT!

Snacks: Green Tea Chocolate Pretzels

This is going to be a shorter one.
The duck and I have a deep appreciation for food in many flavors, shapes and textures. What we really love though (= the star of our pretty specific regular food cravings) are snacks, especially pretzels(!), chocolate and anything matcha flavored. When, during one of our earlier grocery shopping trips, we discovered Green Tea Chocolate Pretzels that were on sale, we could not resist. I mean, this combination of three of our most favorite things in the world already looked like a match(a) made in heaven!
After unpacking and neatly storing away all our more or less healthy food, we just had to try some of those pretzels – of course after taking the obligatory photo with the duck!
And, what can I say… well, actually I’m going to write it – in this not so brief, very subjective snack review: