Springele

UPDATE: It turns out I am ahead of the Christmas cookie trends this year in making Springele... the Wall Street Journal just ran an article today calling them the "crown jewel of all holiday cookies." Check out the article here (and thanks to my mom for bringing it my attention).

So while Brooke and I were in Freiburg we happened upon a little market in front of the cathedral. One of the vendors was selling hand-carved wooden molds (as in for cookies or bread), and Brooke wanted to check them out. She has been trying to find some ever since she saw some really cool ones being used as decoration store in Brugge, but the store-owners refused to sell them to her. This stall-owner was really friendly, and explained that the different depths of mold were used for different types of cookies. He even gave us free samples of the two different types of cookies (good marketing technique).

I ended up buying a small-ish mold with a swan carved into it. The depth of my mold was for making Springele, a biscuit-like cookie flavored with anis seeds. The stall vendor gave me a recipe card along with the mold, so I could make them myself. Although I had the intention of making the cookies much sooner, I just got around to doing it last Wednesday/Thursday (the recipe called for letting the cookies dry overnight, which made the timing a little tricky).

The process took a lot longer than I expected, and the later cookies turned out a lot prettier than the first ones -- this kind of dough required lots of kneading and I'm used to the dough for scones and banana bread, which you're supposed to touch as little as possible. But once I figured out that a liberal amount of flour and lots of rolling and rerolling made the dough more workable, the swans came out clearer. And the mold made quite large cookies!

Here was the result:

The backdrop is a watercolor Mom did for me -- I thought it was an appropriate setting for the swans:

The recipe made 39 cookies, and I took most of them to École Bourgogne on Monday to share with the other teachers during the récré (recess, in this case the afternoon one at 3pm). The teachers take turns bringing some kind of cookies or biscuits to go with the coffee, tea, or hot chocolate most of them drink during the pause. The cookies were gone very quickly, so I think the teachers enjoyed them as much as I did. I plan to make them again in the future.

Here's the recipe, in case you're interested:

Ingredients

• 500g flour
• 500g super-fine sugar (or 'SUPA fine,' if your name is Peter Dayton)
• 4 eggs 
• grated lemon rind (the recipe doesn't specify, I used half a lemon's worth)
• 1 knife-tip baking soda (after extensive internet searching, I found no definitive translation for '1 knife-tip,' so I used about half of a teaspoon, which seemed to work)
• 1 tablespoon rum 
• Anis seed, for decoration

Preparation
Preheat oven to 200 degrees Celcius / 375 degrees Fahrenheit (this wasn't listed on the recipe, so I sort of winged it). Whisk the eggs and sugar until foamy, mix the rum and baking soda and add with lemon rind to the egg mixture. Fold in the sieved flour and knead until the dough is smooth. Now cover with a towel and leave the dough to stand for an hour. Then cut small pieces of dough and roll them out to about 1cm thick (the dough is easier to work with if you roll it and reroll it multiple times, adding flour generously when needed). Dust the mold with flour and then press the rolled dough into the mold; turn the mold over and carefully remove the dough. Separate the shapes and cover and leave to dry overnight. Cover a greased baking sheet with anis seed and place the biscuits on it. Bake for 15-20 minutes or until just golden. If necessary prevent browning by covering with aluminum foil.

Riding and Raclette

*Note: this blog entry was composed on Thursday, December 1, but for one reason or another I'm just getting around to posting it now.

So my riding lessons have been a bit of a grab-bag of late. My afternoon lesson last Friday was great! I rode at the usual time, and this time there were four of us total (me plus three adults). We got to ride outside in the stadium jumping arena with the beautiful jumps! I rode a horse named Kippa who was a bit of a handful, but who I enjoyed quite a bit. He wasn't mean, but as Beatrice explained in the beginning of the lesson, I had to pay attention because otherwise he would take advantage of my lapse in concentration, stick his head down, and buck. It was quite chilly here last Friday, but since we hadn't had any precipitation, it was alright to ride outside.

Lo and behold, our third or fourth time warming up over a vertical, I asked Kippa for a bigger-than-usual jump (I had a choice between a very short distance and a longer one and picked the longer one). My instinct was of course to push my hands forward, to give him a bit more room for the longer jump. In this case however, that was the wrong answer. Just like Beatrice told me he would, Kippa stuck his head down and I went tumbling off. I wasn't hurt at all, just a bit sandy. It actually felt sort of good to fall. I haven't fallen in a long time (not including the 3 years or so I haven't been riding regularly), and I'm a bit relieved to have it over with. The rest of the lesson was great -- we got to jump a lot, and I stayed on my horse.

Then I went again this past Monday to make up the lesson I missed the weekend of the tournament in Tongeren. As with the lesson I made up on a Saturday, Marie (the director) didn't mention anything about the class size. I arrived for my 19h00 lesson and discovered we would be 11! We rode in the same ring, which was quite large enough for all of us, but when it came to jumping it took forever for each of us to take our turn. I rode Kippa again, and he was quite sluggish and not much fun. I was quite disappointed, because my Friday lesson had been so positive. I found it a bit unprofessional for the management to allow the lessons to become so big -- if I had known we were going to be 11 people, I probably would have waited for a different time, or used my lesson for one of the two-hour weekend stages (seminars). Oh well. I'm not going this Friday either, because I'm leaving to go Bruges, Belgium with Brooke!

So recently I have started dating a guy named Colin, who I met through the Ultimate team. Unfortunately I do not have a good picture of the two of us yet, but those of you who are curious can look back through pictures from tournaments (he's next to me in the group picture from Tongeren). He's my age and in his second year of a masters program in computer science at the university here. He joined the Friz'Bisontins the same night I did, so we're both relatively new to the team. On Tuesday some of his friends from his promotion (university program) invited us over to their apartment for a raclette dinner! Raclette is quintessentially Franche-Comtois. It's both the name of the cheese and the name of the aparatus you use to heat it up... and the name of the event which is consumption of said cheese, using said aparatus. Here's a pic of the aparatus:

Each person has their own mini rimmed-spatula, upon which they place a slice of raclette cheese. Then they stick it under the heat to fond (melt). When it's appropriately gooey, you take a potato from the bowl sitting on the top tier (not pictured), place the potato on your plate, and pour the gooey cheese over it. See picture below:

The result was, predictably, delicious. There were also assorted charcuterie (red meats, as in sausage and ham) which we could grill on the top layer. And of course we washed it down with some blanc du Jura, white wine from the Jura region. The whole experience was quite convivial, not unlike fondue, another Franche-Comtois favorite. They're really into melted cheese and potatoes around here.

It was also neat to meet some of Colin's friends from the university, and their girlfriends/friends. In total we were 6, which was a manageable number for me. When the group gets bigger than that, sometimes it's hard for me to follow the conversation, or I feel like I get lost in the different conversations which start up. That's not always the case, but I feel more at ease in a smaller group.

What else is new? I got my hair cut today! I've been scouting around for the cheapest places, and I couldn't find any which could beat Salon Gomina's 20 euro shampooing-coupe-brushing. Plus it's located at Place Flore, a 5-minute walk from my apartment. I was a bit nervous about getting my hair cut, although I really only wanted a trim (how bad could it be?) But it seemed like a situation in which a language barrier could have serious consequences, so I did a little research beforehand -- i.e. I asked the other teachers at lunch today. Here's what I learned:

Trim = couper les pointes
Side bangs (diagonal bangs) = une frange coiffée à la côté
Part (as in, how you divide your hair) = la raie
Hair straightener = un lisseur

And here was the result:

It was exactly what I wanted! In this picture, my hair actually looks longer than it did before the trim because the stylist straightened it afterward.

*Note from Monday, December 5 -- this afternoon I got a compliment from a bashful, blushing 2nd grade boy in my last class of the day: "Teacher, tu as une belle coiffure" ("Teacher, your hair looks really beautiful"). Haha it made me smile!