iki and her dreams

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I've been so moody this last few days I almost think I'll get my period soon. That would explain a lot. But I think the real, major cause is a boss with too much to do and too little time to listen.

Anyway I did a cheesecake today for the work party tomorrow. Somehow, spending an hour in the kitchen just helped me leave most of the stress behind. It was the same recipe that I used for my vegan birthday two weeks ago (yes I've been a vegan for over seven years now! hooray!). Here comes the cakes I made then. I had planned to take photos of them 'cause the all looked really nice, but as usual I was running late and my guests had started to arrive so I skipped that.

I'm lacking some baking words in English so if you want to, enlighten me :D

Cheesecake with rum and cherries
(from veganvrak.blogspot.com)
bottom
12 digestives
60g milk-free margarine
a little (a teaspoon or so) vegetable oil, optional
a teaspoon of lemon juice

main layer
400 g Tofuline original soft cheese, or some equivalent
0.5dl white rum or 0.5dl over-diluted cherry squash and 10 drops of rum essence
1dl oat cream
2dl jelling sugar multi

top layer
2dl cherry squash
2dl jelling sugar multi

This is one of Sara's (the creator of the veganvrak blog) latest cheesecakes and it's really nice. I made another one for the Christmas Party in Sussex and it seemed to be appreciated. Sara's cheesecakes takes about an hour to prepare and as with most cakes they're better if made the day before they are to be eaten, and left in the fridge overnight.
The top layer for this cheesecake is obviously a bit more boring than using raspberries or smth, but then again it has to be a more subtle flavour to go well with the rum taste. I decorated this cake with kiwi fruit, but it would probably work fine to make the top layer from passion fruits and water instead of cherry squash to make it more aesthetically attractive.
I guess that the jelling sugar is called different things in different countries, but when I scroogled 'jelling sugar' I found a sugar forum (!! :D) mentioning 'jelling sugar multi' which is a direct translation of Swedish name, so that should be it. You know, the kind of sugar you use for panna cotta. Anyways here we go!

bottom
preheat the oven to 175 degrees Celsius. melt the margarine. you can use 75g of margarine or 50g of margarine and some sunflower oil (doesn't need melting, obviously).
crush the digestives by hand. add melted margarine and some lemon juice, and add sunflower oil if needed to create a digestive paste.
spread the paste in a sponge pan, preferably one where you can remove the sides (springform?).
bake in the middle of the oven for 7 minutes. allow to cool.

middle layer
mix the soft cheese with a spoon to make it smooth. this mixing is especially important if the cheese is fridge cold, you want it to be room tempered and nice. add rum or rum essence and some overly diluted cherry squash (some cherry taste is good but this layer should mainly taste of rum). mix the cheese and the liquid.
i couldn't find tofuline cream cheese in UK, so there I used 4/5 tofutti cream cheese and 1/5 silken tofu, and then added a bit of sour supreme. I'm sure there are better and easier combinations, only tofutti might work fine but that cheese is a bit more firm than tofuline so maybe it's good to add some extra liquid (cherry squash or oat cream) to this layer then. it's not as complicated as it may sound! :D

pour the jelling sugar and the cream in a pan and bring to a boil. allow to boil for 30 second, then remove from the heat. mix with the soft cheese mixture, and spread this in the sponge pan. place in the fridge to cool down.

top layer
mix the cherry squash and jelling sugar in a pan. I used cherry squash that was twice as concentrated as the recommended, but that might be a bit too much.
bring to a boil and boil for 30 seconds. cool down a little and carefully spread this on top of the main layer. if you pour it too quickly onto the middle layer, the layers will mix which is not the point. try using a spoon. you'll notice that if you're too quick it becomes uneven and if you're too slow the mix solidifies in the pan before you're done, so I think it's useful to decorate the cake with sliced kiwi fruit or strawberries or so.


Chocolate cake with a hint of orange
I haven't found a good English word for 'kladdkaka' - it's a chocolate cake made with less flour than a normal sponge cake and no baking powder, so it ends up being a bit muddy in the middle. If you bake it for too long, it bets chewy and then hardens, which is good too but not really the point.
My sister recommended me to do this cake and then melt orange-flavoured chocolate and spread on top. My local supermarket didn't carry such chocolate that was vegan, or maybe I just didn't find it, but anyway I used 70% chocolate and orange peel which was fine too.



Muddy chocolate cake
(dagensvegan.blogspot.com)
1.25 dl soy cream (not oat cream)
3dl sugar
1 teaspoon orange peel (or vanilla sugar)
4 tablespoons cacao powder
a tiny bit of salt
1.5 dl flour
1dl melted milk-free margarine

Top layer
(vegania.net)
100g chocolate
1 teaspoon orange peel (if you didn't find orange-flavoured chocolate)
50g melted milk-free margarine
1.5dl icing sugar

Cake
Preheat the oven to 200 degrees Celsius.
Mix all the ingredients. Use soy cream, not oat cream, I don't know why but it just doesn't work.
Spread some oil (another word I'm lacking! how do you call that?) in a sponge pan and add finely crushed bread, cereal germ or whatever you normally use to get a non-sticky surface on the pan.
Pour the mix into the pan and bake in the over for about 30 min. If the pan is wide and the cake is thin, it's obviously done quicker.
The cake is great like this, with ice cream or vanilla sauce or so. or you can make it with orange peel and then make an orange-flavoured top layer.

Top layer
melt the chocolate, add the margarine, mix until everything is melted and well mixed, then add the orange peel.
slowly add the icing sugar and mix well.
spread on top of the cake

Sauce
I made a raspberry sauce to this, by simply boiling raspberries and orange peel for a few minutes.



Muffins
(vegan.nu)
I'm just way too lazy to make cupcakes, so I make muffins. It's exactly the same recipe as for sponge cake, but 15 min in the oven (225 degr Celsius) instead of 45 min (175 degr C)
It's also a wonderful basic recipe, and then it's easy to add whatever flavour you want.

4dl flour
1.5dl sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
100g milk-free margarine or 1dl sunflower oil
2dl soy milk
flavour of your choice, e.g.
- 1 teaspoon vanilla powder, 200g crushed pineapple without the juice, 0.5dl dried coconut flakes
- 1 teaspoon cinnamon, 0.5 teaspoon cardamom, 1 finely sliced apple, 0.25dl dried coconut flakes
- 2 teaspoons cinnamon, 1 teaspoon ginger, 1.5dl lingonberry jam (tehn use only 1dl soy milk)

Preheat the oven to 225 degr Celsius (muffins). Mix all the ingredients and bake in the oven for 15 min. Sooo simple!



Whatever-berry Pie
Aough I didn't use a recipe and I'm getting really tired so I won't give you a recipe for this one. But it's simple. Might add one later.
I made a raspberry pie late Friday night after my sister had gone home, but then the next morning when I had breakfast I couldn't find my lingonberry jam in the fridge... but I found an unopened raspberry jam in the cupboard. I never tried the pie, I hope it was okay :D

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my heart is still bleeding, and i'm emotionally exhausted. i watch the stars emerge and the new day come. i'm careful not to feel too much. i watch the weather change and the hours pass and i don't see the point of anything. i avoid loneliness but sometimes i'd be better off seeking it. the ultimate loneliness is when speaking to someone and they just don't understand. but still, as time passes, i know that some damage will heal and some ache will fade.

so i listen to anna ternheim and i wait for the tide.

if i dwell on like this much longer, i'll start feeling sorry for myself. and that's not very attractive, is it? last year when i couldn't sleep - for other reasons, for work - H was such great company and support. sometimes, he'd walk with me for hours in a sleeping Stockholm, until i was physically tired and could sleep a little. sleepwise (is that a word?), i'm better now than i was then. and my self esteem is better than it was a couple of years ago. i know i will survive this. it's just that now, being in the middle of the mess, i so need that ease, and i don't see it happening.

i've deleted the last three entries. i still mean every word i wrote. maybe, some things should not be published. maybe, i'm censored.

i'm walking on such a thin line now. i'd need some time to just be me, with no expectations from others. or maybe all expectations are from me? how do i know?

ok this will just be a short note before going back to work. no i'm not 'celebrating' easter :) but apart from eating animals and eggs, there is another obscure easter tradition that belongs to the past - the idea of decorating our homes with feathers from turkeys and other birds.

if you're considering buying feathers, or eating chicken, watch this short documentary first. it's only four minutes. (and don't consider buying those things anymore!)

some good news: http://www.city.se/ the issue from 1st of April, page 8-9

Last week was lovely, skiing in Norway with friends and colleagues (sometimes they’re both, which makes working nicer, but maybe I would leave the lab earlier if I didn’t have so much fun there). We’ve been doing this for some five years now and it’s getting better every year, with more people joining. K had her first days ever on skies, did really well – she even tried a blue slope for a bit! - but got a fractured leg on the second day and was stuck in the cabin for the rest of the week, jumping around on crutches. I knew that she has a positive attitude but I didn’t realise just how positive she is until then; she didn’t complain even once, her joking kept us all happy. Lovely girl she is.

I fell more in the red slopes than in the black ones.. Maybe I’m too careful in the black slopes, going too slowly. It was nice to see that I’m improving – that’s the good thing about being a beginner, it’s easy to improve. I’ll upload photos once my computer is working again. Still haven’t had time to reinstall everything after the virus, and yes I’ll install Windows again, and no I don’t like it, of course I should use Linux and support open source but wtf, both Linux and Windows works perfectly fine normally, but if something goes wrong, I won’t be able to fix it. So I’ll stick to an OS that I have friends who are competent in. Even though I really, really don’t like supporting Microsoft.

The recent (well, couple of weeks ago now – haven’t written anything for quite a while, combination of the lack of a computer at home and too much work lately) study visit to a brewery in Stockholm was interesting. A couple of years ago I tried to find out if crushed bones from animals are still used in the clearing of beer, to know what types I could drink, so I called two different breweries and spoke to two or three people at each, and they all said different things, so I just gave up and first only had what I knew (believed) was safe and later had whatever I wanted. Now the brewery master assured us that crushed bones are never used in Europe except UK where it’s still used in some small breweries and in some American breweries too. Seems so very .. old-fashioned.

Anyway he also said that expensive beer costs more because the label has more colours, or they’ve had more ads for that beer. Apparently the difference in costs when making the beers is minimal. The next week I went to see a documentary about the straight edge community, if you can say that there is still such a community. And I can really understand why people chose to live like that. Although several sXe people I’ve met tend to judge others, which repels me.

... is NOT a day to 'celebrate'. Nor to buy gifts for yourself because some company wants you to think you're worth it; we don't need their products. It's a day to act, as is every day in this society... I've been stuck in the lab all day, but now it time to meet the sisters out there and take the night back.

I've been thinking about this for days but just haven't had time to write... but this will be another post of news that I either like or dislike.

First the news that I believe will affect the most people. I can say loads of positive and negative things about the European Union - and I tend to bring up more negative stuff - but this is really, really stupid. It is, of course, the proposal that women should be ensured money for staying home the first six weeks after giving birth.
This new directive is part of proposals first unveiled in October 2008 but the decision still hasn't been made. The point of the directive is to give mothers a longer and better paid maternity leave just after a baby is born.

Now, don't get me wrong here. It's great that parents are home taking care of their newborn kids. I do strongly believe that kids should have good parents (which is a good reason to allow any reasonable person to adopt children, no matter who they're fucking). But mothers are not necessarily better parents than fathers. So why limit this parental leave to mothers? Why force women to stay at home? This may be better than the current situation in many countries, but it would be a downfall for Sweden. And if we aim at a more equal sitation, why make laws that inhibit that? Why not just write a law about parental leave, rather than maternal?

In some cases, I do believe that we have to use the law to encourage people to make decisions that are good for the society. Like the two months of parental leave that can only be used by fathers, a directive in Sweden that shouldn't be needed since fathers should take their responsiblity (and how could anyone -not- want to be home with their kids?), but since fathers only take 22% of the parental leave, directives like thate one are apparently needed. However, the new EU directive implies that women are more suited for taking care of kids, and excludes fathers from the little family. Why not just make it a non-specified parental leave? Mothers will still take the majority of the parental leave, but at least fathers and maybe even non-biological mothers in lesbian relationships would have the chance to stay home with their little baby. Why limit people? Equality standards that were out of date in the 1950's won't ever help the baby.

From that, let's switch to something good! This is a funny news post, I have a very random way of selecting news... But this is something that made me happy, it's somehow reassuring that people do non-profit actions to gain and spread information.

Latvia suffered a lot from the recent recession, and the unemployment rate at 23%, is the highest in the European Union. Banks and companies have asked the government for help. Now there's a hacker, believed to be a man and calling himself Neo, who's been downloading data from loads of companies and banks, and who is now slowly leaking this information to news sites. Depressingly, he's found that bank managers have not taken the salary cuts they've promised to take, and companies have paid bonuses but at the same time asking the government for economical support. This isn't good at all, but the lovely thing about this is someone investing a lot of time and effort in finding this information and spreading it, so that everyone gets access to it. I'm impressed.

Another man taking a fight for a good cause - a man who should not have been given the Nobel Peace Prize, although he's taking many important fights - is Barack Obama, who is now trying to change the policy that openly homosexual men are not allowed in the American army. I didn't even know they have that policy! But apparently homosexual men aren't even allowed to mention their sexual preferences. That's. simply. ridiculous.

Someone else had a fight a couple of days ago. A killer whale named Tilikum killed a 'trainer' in Florida. Of course I'm not happy about someone's death. But wtf, killer whales belong in the ocean, not in a pool making performances. Leave them alone.

I've finally sent the angry email I've known for a couple of days I'd have to send, so I feel a little relieved now :) Even had to ask M (not the usual M...) to read it before I sent it, I'm so awfully afraid of conflicts, it's ridiculous. And I don't want people to think of me as the bitch I truly am... ;)

And after all, if my tenant leaves a crack and a hole (!!!) in the washbasin, why am I afraid she'd be upset if I email her about it? I hope I can have it replaced without anyone of us having to pay for it, but I doubt that. And considering the usual standard SSSB, they'll probably refuse to exchange it and then charge me for it when I move out :)

My friends who are handy with their cameras should be in Stockholm now, the snow is beautiful! And the frost on the windows at uni is simply stunning. I forgot my camera today but will bring it tomorrow and see if it's still there. One of the patterns look just like a feather.. pretty pretty. It's -15 degrees where I live, it was -32 at my colleagues place out on the countryside yesterday morning, the water in his house has frozen. Saturday I had frost in my hair after being outdoors for only an hour. Looking at snow from the positive side, my lentil-apple-curry pie yesterday cooled down in just a few minutes when I placed it on the balcony.

Apart from that I'm not overwhelmed by the cold and the Swedish handling of snow.. I kindly laughed at England but even though Sweden is a lot better, it's not that impressive. And I'm not the only one who's tired of the snow - a man in southwest Sweden even punched a snow removal man in the face. And apparently upset people in the same area have attacked snow removal machines. I can't see how that would improve the situation... people are stupid. Guess they've gone mad from living in the cold and darkness for so many months. I miss spring.