Mini Raspberry Cupcakes

It´s Summer Sale season here and the first thing I thought is to go to a bookstore. The other day, when I got the chance,  I stumbled into a local office supplies store and found a book called Muffins & mehr ( Muffins & more) from Compact Verlag.de

Though, I already have a few muffin books, I still got this one as the price was only 2 Euros, it was a  give-away price, snapped it, bought by me,  and done!

And so I tried one of the recipes and adapted it into my own...

thus, I baked the Mini Raspberry Cupcakes which you are

 now seeing in the photos! It turned out very yummy!!!

I didn´t have cherries yesterday as what the recipe called for, I used raspberries....frozen raspberries!!!

Mini Raspberry Cupcakes 

Ingredients: 

12 smaller Cupcake paper forms

 50 grams Butter if you´re using muffin trays

150 grams of frozen Raspberries

100 grams sugar ( I used 8 spoons of Stevia powder)

2 medium size-eggs

50 grams coarse semolina grains

1/2 pack baking powder ( about 1 tsp)

1 pack Vanille sugar

1/2 pack Vanilla pudding powder

250 Curd cheese

1-2 Teaspoon lemon juice

Preparation:

1.

Preheat the oven at 175°C.  If your using the muffin baking tray,

 coat each form with butter or margarine first. You can also set the paper forms in the muffin tray for easy handling instead.

2.

Place the butter and sugar in a bowl and with the use of electric mixer, beat until fluffy.

Add the eggs,  semolina coarse grains, baking powder, vanilla sugar and vanilla pudding powder into the mixture. 

Fold in cottage cheese, add the lemon juice

and blend well with just a spatula til well blended.

3. 

Fill each muffin form with 2/3 of the batter... top each filled form with around 4 frozen raspberries and bake for around 30 minutes.

4. 

After baking, take the cupcakes out of the oven and let cool for a while.  Remove the cupcakes from the form and let them rest

 on a wire rack. Sprinkle the top with sugar (optional). 

Can be served warm or cold with coffee, tea or cold juice.

Enjoy your Raspberry mini Cupcakes!!!


This post is linked to :
Show & Tell Friday
Feathered Nest Friday

weekend gardening and lots of wildflowers

a roadside planted peony

We are certainly lucky to be living in the outskirts of the city of Vienna... We have cornfields, wheatfields, self service flower cutting fields, and farmlands and yet , we are close to all amenities a city could offer.

We are still in the city, but it feels like we live in the countryside with natural creeks, vast land where one could go horseriding, biking, swimming, etc.. right at this very moment, the Donau Inselfest (Danube Island Festival) is going on and we can even hear the rockbands roaring in their concerts... 

Today, it had been a busy day... after a very long holiday of about 4 weeks in Spain and an extension of 1 more week spent in Vienna, I have to have most, if not all,the chores get done before the new week comes and it´s gonna be a busy day at work unpacking cartons of files in our new office..

You know how it is after having a holiday, it feels like I need to have a holiday from my holiday..LOL! 

Part of the chores had been gardening.. and I planted strawberries, bought 2 varieties of chillies and bell peppers and some flowering plants.

Today, I also fertilized the geraniums bought before my holiday commenced and had a watering system that really worked using an empty plastic lemonade bottles. It really worked!!! mind you and the geraniums you see here survived.

Self service flower cutting field near my home.

On Saturdays, as I previously blogged before, I take my walk, it´s a 30 minute footwalk down to the Kiosk for the morning papers... and I took photos of the wildflowers along the fields... I don´t know their names, I´m very bad at this,  but here are some of those pics I took...

Hope you enjoy the photos !!!

Here´s hoping all is well on your side, 

enjoy your Saturday!!!

COMING UP in my next blog.....Mini Raspberry Cupcakes

nothing but a spanish fireplace - part 2

Sometime in January this year, I was blogging on a spanish fireplace we´ve installed in our 2^nd home in Andalucia, Spain.

We left the hood of the fireplace unfinished because the tiles ordered didn´t come on time and my holiday was about to end.. It´s June now and we came back to finally finish the tiling part.

If you´ve been following my blogs before, you´ll notice that the projects I´ve done were mostly in blue & white ..

 I´m a big fan of  both colors! Quilts, pillowcases, ceramics, bags.etc.

They´re simply so peaceful and so pretty to look at!

It´s the love for these colors that we thought of reflecting the same

 on the tiles we  wanted for the fireplace.

This time, the tiles ordered came after one long week of waiting. But, there had been a problem, not all were delivered because the factory producing the tiles shut-down and will resume their production only in 3 months. 

The building business in Spain has gone down due to the financial crisis. At the moment, builders/workers are almost jobless and many real estate offices closed down as property buyers are so insecured and scarce since 5 years and are not buying any property at all.....

….. going back to the blue & white tiles... I ended up getting the order without the flower border below...which means I had to find a solution so the fireplace gets to be finished before my holiday is over.

Despite, the missing border part above, the mason made the tiling, but (!!!) the design of the tiles proved to be a disaster.

First, the size of the tile is 20cm x 20cm, just too big to handle...not only that, the flower design was very difficult to place in both sides of the hood as the design had to be carefully considered without breaking its continuity.... the tile design was a „no go“.....aaaargh!!!

....so what happens next?

After all the measuring and cuttings of each tile, ( it took the mason one whole day!)....I was very disappointed :-(( as we had to remove everything and started from scratch, 

and my poor blue & white hood is gone!!! Tschak, finished!!!

and so instead,  we had the hood done in a very rustic looking style that was  in a finished in a short peiod of 1 hour and using a special cement for that purpose.

 We are still considering which paint color the hood will get, but I´m sure it will compliment the wood and the yellow stone....

How about cream or beige?



This post is linked to :

Show & Tell Friday
Feathered Nest Friday - 26

delightful roadside flowers

.

In my walks, I always take my camera with me. The drive to the Kiosk would normally take me about 10 minutes by car including coming back.

The walking compensates my lack of movement during the week when I´m at work.... my thoughts are to move move move!!!

Nowadays, especially on Saturdays, when it´s not raining, I walk 30 minutes to the Kiosk to get my magazines and hubby´s Financial Times and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. We have a local newspaper subscription though that´s being delivered right on our door, but my magazines are my source of insprations and ideas.  

  

Well, you might think.... why don´t we use the internet for news updates?

We are not so fond of reading the news over the internet. We want to hold the papers in our hands, flip the pages while sipping our coffee or tea at breakfast. It´s simply enjoying our time..

The main road to our Kiosk has open fields planted with wheat & corns, and so wild flowers are also in abundance popping up right there in the middle and in betweens... our roadsides are also full of wild flowers.

These thistle are so beautiful, no matter how wild they are, nature proves it has many beautiful creations! Of course, beauty depends on the eyes of the beholder.

As of this writing, the wheats are already for harvesting.

You can see the beauty of nature everywhere,  you only have to look

carefully.

Every bits and pieces are just Nature´s wonders.

The images of roses included in this blog were all taken from the roadside the other day. They were planted by homeowners whose houses are facing the road.

I love exploring nature,  for it has many things to offer. All those natural wonders relieve me from all forms of stress.  Flowers make me smile... Every single little  thing in one´s life has meaning,  I guess you will agree with me, too!

Til next,

Mercy