Baumkuchen!

I have negelected this blog, I apologize. I just haven't really gotten any time to cook anything fun lately! School has been disgustingly overwhelming lately and just has not left time for slaving over a stove or oven. Except for last night when I decided instead of working on my urban historiography, I would make baumkuchen. I was originally going to make it for my German nationalism class, but they don't deserve it as much as my urban class did.

I was hoping that making Baumkuchen would put me in the mood to read a lot of books about culture politics in the GDR (I don't think it worked). However, it did challenge my culinary skills. Baukuchen (literally "tree cake" for the layers it makes when cut) is a German holiday cake that is traditionally cooked over an open fire on a turning spit. I do have the ability for an open fire but not a spit, so I went the cheating way and did it under the broiler. Because it is not built over a stick, it does not make such nice tree-esque rings, but it still shows all the layers.

As I found out this is an EXTREMELY time consuming process. I worked on it for 3 hours! But it seemed to be worth it since it was all consumed in class today (possibly aided by the glorious beer provided by another classmate). I think I was less enthusiastic about it than I am about most of my cooking, simply because after three hours the smell was getting to me. It was still tasty anyway.

So this is how it begins:

12 eggs!

Follow the link for more!

Bacon!

So, in keeping with the title of this blog, I made something with bacon today! It wasn't bacon wrapped, but there was indeed bacon involved. I don't get to eat bacon all that often. Especially not real bacon with nitrites and pork and all that good tasty stuff. Despite being a good German household that eats all sorts of pork product (there was even blood pudding in the fridge a couple weeks ago...I did not partake), bacon is not in our house all that often. If ever.

Since it is "Spring Break" I am not in as great of a wide eyed panic to get my reading and writing done I have been taking the time to knit, cook real dinners and actually think about my dissertation topic (Channeling Craig Ferguson: I know!). However, I will save the waxing lyrical about representation of communism in Berlin's neighborhood architectural changes since 1990 for another day. And what a fun day that will be.

Speaking of things German and my domestic endeavors, I made spaghetti carbonara for dinner. Yes, you are currently going 'but that's not german, that's italian!' I'm aware, I'm aware. However, the first time I ever had Spaghetti Carbonara it was made by a German, in a freezing little flat somewhere in Edinburgh. It was absolutely delightful, and when I returned to Berlin I found those little Knor packets that let you make complex dishes without actually having culinary talents. So for many a meal while in Berlin, I made spaghetti Carbonara.

I have since then been lazy and just keep making the packets when I want it, mainly due to a significant fear of tempering eggs. Tempering eggs allows you to cook the eggs and include them in a sauce without the egg scrambling (think hollandaise). I figured I would just fail at this miserably and end up either either with salmonella or with scrambled eggs. Today, however, I conquered egg tempering.

(Recipe taken from The Food Network. I only had three eggs, so I added some cream to make them go further. I also used 1.5 cups cheese, well, because I love cheese)

Pictures after the cut...

Snow=baking

So, for those of you not on the east coast, particularly those not in the DC/Philly area, it snowed. Twice. With many inches each time. Now, I should be taking these no class, not going anywhere, no errands to run days to complete the six books I have to read before wednesday (and I'm not even behind!), but instead I have made a tiny snow man, shoveled twice read a book and of course, baked.

Saturday (the first snow storm) my baking endeavors were quite dull, simply a box of brownies with vanilla buttercream. I'm not sure why I will bake from scratch almost everything...but brownies.  They aren't hard or complicated. I just can't seem to get them to taste like Betty Crocker.
When it snows my neighbors get bored and thus throw parties, so they got enjoyed by my neighborhood.

Believe it or not I put marshmallows in those. Probably about a cup of mini marshmallows went into the batter. When they were done and I cut them up, the marshmallows were gone. I'm assuming chemistry got the better of me, but still, where did all the marshmallows go?

Today I was slightly more adventurous. When they forcasted another close to two feet of snow,  I went searching for a recipe worthy of a snowy day stuck inside and Caramel Banana Bundt Cake came up.
I like bananas, I like caramel. Bryn Mawr made (or bought, I was never really sure) a really tasty caramel banana cake that came around once in the six week menu rotation. Even if I wasn't planning on going to dinner or if I had work that night and wasn't going to get dining hall food, I made sure to go and get that cake. So, I figured this would be a close homemade substitute.

So, after consulting The Crepes of Wrath, I went to town on making said cake.

The cake part went well. I'm good at cakes. Not too pretty oven shot:

Then came the caramel part. The last time I made caramel I was probably about 13 years old and at the shore house of a friend. I decided I was going to make caramel apple tarts. After three failed attempts at caramel making, the friend's husband Dave had to make it for me. I have not since tried to make caramel. But I'm older, wiser and better with a stove, so it was time to try again.

This time was slightly more successful. The caramel was fine, quite tasty, but I reduced it to be fairly thick. The recipe calls for poking holes in the bottom of the cake and pouring the caramel so that it seeps into the cake (kind of like a tres leches cake). Not being amazingly good at the cause and effect part of life, the caramel kind of sat on the top, and not so much seeping into the cake.

Whoops:

In the end, it came out looking kind of odd (the glaze was kind of runny and well...left much to the imagination) but it tasted wonderful. The bottom with the caramel tasted very nutty and rich while the top with the thin yogurt banana glaze was very light and fruity

Recipe at The Crepes of Wrath. She did a lot of things I didn't. I used vanilla yogurt, no butterscotch chips and I used the remaining vanilla yogurt, half a banana and some powdered sugar to make a little glaze.

I suppose now I should get some  more reading done. Celia Applegate and her A Nation of Provincials is up next. 

Mr. Snowman says hi. He got buried under the extra eight inches of snow we  got between his creation and the second go at shoveling. He is unburied and back to greeting you at the front steps.

Switching things around

So, since our public history class has ended, I've decided to change things up a smidgen to better fit my current blogging needs.

I'm a procrasti-baker. When I don't want to do my school work or more often when I have finished a whole bunch of reading or a long paper, I bake. Recently this has expanded and I've been cooking more. In college the lack of an accessible oven really did me in as far as culinary exploration as tied to not doing school work, however, since grad school=kitchen, I have been cooking a lot more lately and documenting it. Facebook just isn't cutting it for my food posting needs, so this blog has become a place to talk about my research or historical musings...and the baking/cooking I do when I want to avoiding said research. 

Oddly enough, I rarely actually eat what I make. Maybe one cookie, a piece of cake, a sample of dinner, but I am not the main consumer of these edibles. Possibly a self induced desire not to weigh 400 pounds, and possibly a desire to not see another pork chop.

So, to begin this fun times, we're going back to Thanksgiving. Pumpkin Cookies with Cream Cheese Frosting. I was on a big pumpkin kick for a while, which included an amazing spicy pumpkin soup.

Not necessarily the best looking cookies, but tasty nonetheless. These turned out surprisingly well since I was cooking in a friends  kitchen in which she didn't have measuring spoons, baking powder (this was remedied), or any form of mixer/whisk. It turned out fine however.

The recipe  is here. I did not add raisins or walnuts, and made a simple cream cheese frosting instead of the icing they state. With a mixer and proper ingredients, these are a pretty speedy dish.

I suppose that is all for now, just introducing the new direction for the blog.

And we're back!

So, after a bit of a hiatus from deep thought (my brain somewhat fizzled after finals, but it's all good now), I figured this blog is a useful thing to continue with.

My winter breaks tend to mean a few things: I ever so briefly join the cult of domesticity (baking, cooking, knitting, cleaning, organizing-generally being a richtig gut Hausfrau), I do all the cultural things I have missed out on (museum visits), and I hear from my lovely vermieterin in Berlin.

I spent August through December of 2007 living and studying in Berlin. While there I stayed with this absolutely fascinating woman, Helga, who was my vermieterin. While coldly defined at 'landlord', I use it as a particularly warm term. She tolerated my initially pitifully slow and poorly pronounced German and is more responsible for my current fluency than anything else. In exchange I beat her one temperature of burning oven into submission to make thanksgiving dinner (thanks KaDeWe for imported American food, including cranberry sauce in a can!), and introduced her to my version of homemade mac and cheese. She spoke little to no English, but wanted to learn some. I mainly enjoyed trying to get her to say 'squirrel'. It was not a rousing success.

Helga has lived in east/East Berlin all her life. She has worked for the government in its various forms over the years and now works as an adviser for Die Linke and the Berlin Parliament. Our apartment was in a unique neighborhood in Berlin, Prenzlauerberg. Originally the section of the city for the laboring population, in the 1980s it was a focal point of action against the GDR's policies. Now it's a strange mix of hippies, yuppies that used to be hippies, their young children...and Helga. This is where we lived:



44 Oderberger Straße. WWII bullet holes and all. I lived on the 5th floor. Excellent exercise, but annoying with a weeks worth of groceries. The cafe sold waffles and ice cream and the whole building smelled of it all day long (believe it or not, I never did get a waffle, something to do when I get back!). It was one of two on the street that had not been renovated. I often had to get through city bike/walking tours to get inside. These tours would narrate the horrors of living in the GDR and the typical lives of their citizens, as though my poor little apartment building embodied all that was evil/downtrodden/totalitarian/oppressive in the East German regime. I normally rolled my eyes and trudged up the stairs to an apartment that would make Erich Honecker wrinkle his nose.

In this year's Christmas greetings, Helga informed me that the apartment building was being modernized. I am deeply saddened by this news. Buildings tell a lot of history, and the buildings a city chooses to keep or destroy mirrors the history that they choose to keep or destroy. Berlin is constantly revising its history based on the buildings it choses to keep, alter, renovate or destroy. In the case of 44 Oderberger, there are a lot of stories getting lost with a modernization.

Histories found in a building scarred by Berlin's traumatic 20th century. This 1989 photo shows a building that witnessed the grassroots beginnings to the civilian upheaval which brought down the wall. Even if the bike tours made it exemplify the more difficult parts of life in the GDR, it still told a history, specifically that of the GDR, a history with which Berlin has a particularly tenuous relationship.
I fear in many ways Berlin is trying to compartmentalize its traumatic past. There is the Topography of Terror, a fenced outdoor museum about the horrors of Nazi aggression. You have Hoheschönhausen, another fenced museum about the terrors of the Stasi. You have Bernauer Strasse, a once again fenced off reminder of the Wall. These boxed reminders tell of a traumatic collective experience while the rest of the city's history and memory becomes a gentrified revision of 1871. These fenced areas of remembrance push lots of stories and lots of history into one space, a place where people can go 'yes, this happened, it was traumatic, we should remember and learn' while history, events that happened to these people on these streets in these buildlings, dissappears from everywhere else. It's clean, it's distant, it's divorced. Should history be something we can walk away from? Bits and pieces chosen, boxed and revisited when we feel like it?

Berlin understands using space and place to tell history. I am just afraid of which spaces are being used and which history is being told, or more worryingly, being silenced.

Website Review: The Lower Merion Historical Society

The Lower Merion Historical Society. https://www.lowermerionhistory.org, The Lower Merion Historical Society. November 2009.

The Lower Merion Historical Society aims to promote community involvement in the preservation of local cultural resources. Their website states this is accomplished “by stewardship of local history, education of the community, preservation of historic resources and outreach to promote awareness of the cultural heritage of the Township of Lower Merion.” The Society's website is divided into two sections, one focusing on the society itself, the other on the collections and archives of the Society. As can be noted from the mission of the Society and the content of the site, the main audience is not the scholar or academic, rather the historically interested citizens of Lower Merion.
The site has a significant quantity of useful and relevant resources, particularly for those interested in family and area history. This includes artifact collections, collections of individuals, burial records, atlases, maps, historic photographs and significant Quaker collections. The photographs are digitized, but the rest of the collections are not, so searches of these collections provide identifying information such as call numbers and abstracts, but one must still go to the collections. For being directed at the amateur historian, the navigation of the site and research tools leave much to be desired. Despite sections entitled “How to Research” and “Search Tips”, the search interface is difficult to navigate even for a seasoned researcher, and the explanations are too long and too text driven. More concise and visually friendly directions (something other than blocks of black text on white backgrounds) would aid the user. The site could improve navigation to ensure a user's ability to return to the main page without having to retype the URL. The navigation is also not coherent. The site currently tells no distinct narrative nor promotes any particular interpretation of the area's past. A coherent narrative could introduce a user to the wide array of resources available and encourage involvement and preservation through increase historical engagement.
Despite these issues, the site provides access to intriguing and useful information. This is particularly true of the digitized photographs of mansions and architecture. A signficiant part of the society's site is dedicated to these themes (mansions are a significant part of Lower Merion's history) and its website is useful to research these structures and architects. It allows for quick access to photos and relevant information without having to pay the Society's librarian or make an appointment to pull the folio. This is particularly useful for the user with some interest in one particular place, but not necessarily a hobbyist invested in historical research of old homes.
While the site attempts to engage current issues through their online newsletter, the site lacks current historical civic engagement. There is no mention of big news items such as the recent destruction of an architecturally significant mansion in the area. The fight for this building and its destruction garnered significant press due to the society's involvement and the actions of Lower Merion preservationists, but is not included anywhere on the site. The Society could utilize these current events to bolster their mission of increased awareness of the township's resources. The Society has significant resources and their photography and map collections are impressive. These current events and photographs could be utilized in the design to create a cohesive narrative and entice casual users to do further research and engage history.

Readings, November 23

I think this would have been a superb week to read Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, particularly in relation to Rosenzweig and Cohen's thoughts on Exhibits and Film as made available through digital media (mainly the internet). Yes, access is truly a wonderful thing, but is viewing a online version of a museum exhibition about say, Gilbert Stuart’s 1796 portrait of George Washington (Portrait included) the same experience and does it garner the same 'take away' as going to actually stand in front of the portrait and the supporting artifacts and exhibit? Benjamin would naturally argue no. Rosenzweig and Cohen also agree that the internet is not a replacement for the real thing, but weigh the negatives of that against the positives of increased access. But can a person truly engage the exhibit in the way intended by viewing it online? Can you breech comfort and provoke through the controlled view of a computer screen? Will museum directors and museum design staff become moot players eventually as exhibits cease to be physical and just go online? Will people eventually give up on a museum and just go to their computer to experience an exhibit?

For the most part I appreciated Cohen and Rosenzweig's thoughts and analysis. However, for some sections (particularly those on creating, maintaining and backing up a site) I started to have flash backs to taking the GRE when they explained to you how to use a mouse and the up and down arrows. This, I suppose, does function as an example of how issues of digitization and digital media become out of date by the time you publish them.

Skipping back a paragraph, returning to the future of museums, I found the piece "Museums and Society 2034" fascinating and aggravating all at the same time. The point that struck me the most, possibly because I did all of the digital media reading first, was their discussion of media in the museum. They apparently do not believe museums will fall off the face of the earth, which is good, but they do believe they will become more media/digitally driven. This will be good for a society that is increasingly 'tech-y'. However, they miss the ever popular 'generation gap'. Despite feeling myself to be fairly technically savvy, it is entirely possible that when I am 60, I will be completely inept at using whatever the latest mechanical doohickey (technical, I know) the kids are writing their school work on. How will this translate to museums? If they are increasingly media and digitally driven, what generation's technical knowledge will they be catering to? Will parts of museums become inaccessible to a particular generation or group due to the technical constraints of the exhibit? (Throughout this entire article I waited for the phrase 'flying car' to get thrown around. Alas, it did not happen.)

And to make this completely lacking in any form of segue, a wee discussion of the two smaller articles, that about Haunted Mice and that about Internet as Civic Engagement. I liked both of these pieces, and think that they provide case studies about how the internet can be a really useful tool, for those both supernaturally inclined and community driven.