Although time is precious and I don’t get to blog-hop as much as I want to, I always try to leave – meaningful – comments at other blogs. With ‘meaningful’ I don’t mean essays filled with scientific terms, but, well.. errm… not sure how to explain it :p
What’s meaningful to me can be totally useless to someone else, so it’s rather subjective. Let’s just say I try to add more than “yeah, I agree” or something along that line.
Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate every comment I get, whether they’re oneliners or not. Lol – why did I ever start explaining what I mean?
Anyway, Karen from Scraps of Mind surprised me with the “Scraps of Mind Outstanding Commenter Award for September”.
Thank you so much Karen, but it’s easy to leave comments at your blog as your posts always have something interesting to reply to 🙂
It doesn’t look very appealing now, does it? Well, looks can be deceiving. Let me explain…
Herman is a friendship cake. I googled and found that it’s known all around the world. Not necessarily as ‘Herman’, but the friendship cake itself.
It’s a batter that will ‘grow’ by natural fermentation. Although some people think it’s not healthy, having the batter sitting outside the fridge for 10 days, I can assure you it is. It’s a natural process and no one got sick after eating it (at least not to my knowledge :p)
If you want to start Herman up from scratch, here’s what to do.
Ingredients
– 1/2 teaspoon active dry yeast
– 1 ounce warm water
– 1 tablespoon white sugar
– 1 tablespoon vinegar
– 1/2 teaspoon salt
– 3 cups all-purpose flour
– 3 cups milk
Dissolve yeast in warm water. Add 1 tablespoon white sugar, 1 tablespoon vinegar, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1 cup of the flour, and 1 cup of the milk in a non-metal bowl and stir with a non-metal spoon until creamy. Cover bowl with a clean tea towel (it has to be able to breathe) and let stand in a warm place for two days to ferment. It will become bubbly and have a sour odor. Do not place in refrigerator.
On second day, third day, and fourth day: stir.
On fifth day, add 1 cup flour, 1 cup sugar, 1 cup milk, and stir.
On sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth day: stir.
On tenth day add 1 cup flour, 1 cup sugar, and 1 cup milk. Devide into 5 equal cups. Keep 1 cup for yourself, to make a cake; pour remaining starter, 1 cup each, into 4 containers to give away to friends, along with the recipe (they can skip the first part and just stir on day 1, 2, 3 and 4).
To make the cake:
– 1 cup starter
– 2/3 cup vegetable oil
– 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
– 3 eggs
– 1 cup white sugar
– 2 cups all-purpose flour
– 1 cup chopped nuts
– 1 apple, grated
– 1 cup chopped chocolate
– 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease a loaf pan (or any other baking tin).
Mix all the ingredients.
Bake at 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) for 45 minutes to 1 hour. Bananas, dates, coconut or raisins can be added for variety.
Serve warm or cool as is, or add your choice of topping (I used powdered sugar).
And here’s the result, now don’t you think it looks delicious? It was! I gave away 3 cups of batter to 3 friends, used 1 cup to make the cake and kept 1 cup to start another Herman. You’ll never know how long it takes for Herman to get back to you, so better safe than sorry 🙂
If your company name becomes a verb, you must have done something good!
When I went online this morning, the first thing I noticed was the wonderful Google logo, celebrating their 10th birthday.
As Google is my homepage, that logo is the first thing I see every day and through the years I noticed the special logos celebrating Holidays and special events. Today there was a link to the history of Google and I learned that the special logos are called doodles, created by Dennis Hwang. Wow is all I can say. Very creative, considering the limited space and the fact that the logo must be recognizable as “Google”.
I’ve collected some of my favourites, and as it’s hard to choose, this post will be looong :p
All images belong to Google and credit goes to the awesome artist Dennis Whang. If you go to the 10th Anniversary page, there’s a timeline, click the logo above the first timeline and you’ll get a popup with a whole bunch of them.
In random order (hover over the image to see the event and date):
