Hello everyone it’s Liz here with another “episode” (or perhaps “webisode”?) of Food In Motion where Jewels and I show a quick video each month on decor8 showing what we made recently along with the recipe so you can try it yourself. We alternate months, so I take a month and Jewels takes the next… This month it’s my turn to have fun in the kitchen! Since summer finally arrived here in Germany and you can get berries everywhere, I really wanted to use them in my kitchen and share with you what I came up with along with the help of my little daughter…
Berries taste wonderful on their own, but don’t they taste even better when there is cake around them??? Oh yes! Right now I’m working on my fourth cookbook and my three-year-old daughter sees me in the kitchen a lot when we’re home. She loves helping me, especially when I tell her I’m baking a cake! So it didn’t take any persuasion at all to get her to place the berries on top of the batter! I always give her little tasks when I’m cooking and she loves to help. Do your children like to cook with you? She rushes to put on her apron and gets out her own little mixing bowl and wooden spoons, standing on her stool to reach the countertop. I find it really important to involve children right from the start in the cooking process: it shows them what we eat and how the dishes we eat are made. When my daughter saw the powdered sugar later on the little cakes she cried: “Mommy! It’s snowing, although it’s summer!” — Let’s hope that didn’t inspire the weather gods to send us more November days in June!
Berry Cake – You will need:
2 eggs
150 g sugar (3/4 cup)
1 teaspoon vanilla sugar
150 g flour (1 1/4 cups)
1 teaspoon baking powder
pinch of salt
50 ml milk (1/4 cup)
75 g butter, melted (1/3 cup)
125 g red currants (1 cup)
125 g blueberries (1 cup)
Preheat the oven to 180 degrees celcius. In a bowl mix eggs and sugar on high until thick and pale. Combine flour, baking powder and a pinch of salt and add it to the eggs and sugar. Mix in the milk and the melted butter until it’s a nice and thick batter. Wash the berries and pat them dry on a towel. Pour the batter in a round silicone baking pan, smooth the top with a spatula and place the berries on top. Bake for 35-40 minutes until top becomes golden brown.
I hope that you like the video and recipe – thank you so much for supporting Food In Motion through your pins, tweets and other online shares – we really appreciate it – we put a lot of work into this column as you can imagine so it’s always so rewarding when you comment and share what we’re doing here – again, thank you! – Liz
(Film & Photo: Lisa Nieschlag from Liz&Jewels, Music: Thorsten Becker, Cake stands: 3punktF)
I really love to shop online. I still adore shopping in person still, I’m not one of those people who only shop online now because I do love a good browse and to be inspired by a lovely shop. Plus, I find interacting with products in person so beneficial. Yet, I find equal value in online shopping and find myself doing it more and more lately as it’s also quite an efficient thing to do when your schedule is full enough as my always seems to be. Are you a fan of online shopping or in-person? I guess what I’m wondering is do you prefer one over the other? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this! I was recently contacted by Rigby & Mac in England and fell in love with thier sweet online shop. They have lots of very sweet gifts and fun things I’d not seen elsewhere before, which is rare because sometimes I believe I’ve seen it all with being online so much pinning and blogging and reviewing products. It’s always such a lovely moment when you stumble upon totally fresh finds, isn’t it?
1/ lace baskets 2/ music box for baby 3/ pretty bird paper lightshade 4/ polka polka cushion
5/ silver leather rag rug 6/ laburnum teal cushion 7/ louise wilkinson cups & saucers 8/ ceramic fluted white jug
9/ large white ceramic pitcher 10/ blue print vase 11/ owl storage jars 12/ Annie Sloan chalk paints in many gorgeous colors, which I love!
See any favorite gifts from my selections above?
(images: rigby & mac)
I’m a regular reader of Danish magazines now, thanks to my neighbor who is in Denmark at least once a week and generously brings them home for me to drool over. One that I really like is called BoligLiv. They recently shared a fun DIY that I simply must show you because these two ideas for round paper lights are both so easy and creative – two of my favorite words when it comes to DIY!
Lamp with paper strips: Get a rice paper orb from IKEA, copy paper, glue stick, spray paint in the color you love and scissors. Now you spray the bottom edge of each sheet of paper and let them dry. Once they are dry, stack multiple layers of the papers together and cut them into 2 and 2.5 cm wide strips. Stack the strips according to length, you will have two piles. Glue the strips individually onto the paper orb keeping some space between each one. Use the longest strips first, starting from the bottom, using your glue stick. Use row after row of strips altnerating between the 2 cm strips and the 2.5 cm strips. Note: Hang the longest strips at the bottom. Full instructions here in Danish.
Lamp with fabric triangles: You will need 1 rice paper (Ikea) orb, scrap fabric, glue and scissors. Now you should cut a pair of triangles in two sizes in the fabric. Fold the fabric along a few times, and cut several triangles in two sizes through the layers with the first triangles as templates. Keep the big and the small triangles separated. Glue the triangles from the bottom up. Allow approx. 1 cm between each triangle and about. 2 cm distance between rows so you can still see the lamp between the triangles. Full instructions here in Danish.
What do you think, will you try these DIY projects??? I may because they look fun and I’d love to try using some of my spare Liberty fabrics for a project like this!
(images: boligliv)
When you live only a few hours away from the border of Denmark, and your upstairs neighbors who are also very good friends are Danes, you can’t help but love all things Danish. As you know, I’ve been writing about and traveling to Denmark for several years now – in fact, Denmark was were we began shooting years back for my first book. I’ve made many good friends “up north” in the past years and most recently, a wonderful stylist and author from Copenhagen contacted me to offer me a great rate on her summer house next month since she read on my Facebook wall in March that I was looking for a beach house on the Danish coast to rent in July. I really wanted to celebrate our wedding anniversary on the coast this year so I’m excited to say that thanks to Facebook (!) we’ll be taking a few weeks off in July to drive up to Copenhagen and then further north, to stay in a gorgeous little cottage owned by one of Denmark’s best stylists. I can’t wait! Really!
I’ll take some photos and tell you more about my trip upon my return but I’m very excited about my upcoming trip as I’ve not had a proper vacation in a very long time. That last time I took a real vacation was in 2010 when my husband and I went with our dear friend Esra to Istanbul for 4 days. But that was 3 years ago and since, I’ve been traveling so much for work that it will be nice for once to travel for pleasure. After taking over 20 flights in 2011 and another 10 or so in 2012, my version of a vacation was to stay home. This year, now that we just bought our first car since moving to Europe in 2009, we decided to skip planes and just enjoy road travel again. It’s been so long since we hopped in the car to go anywhere – normally it’s the train for us – but with a car you can meander off here and there and explore (something I love) and in the summer months, isn’t that the best thing to do? Oh, there’s a roadside stand selling strawberries. Stop. Oh! there is a pretty little antiques shop. Stop. Oh honey, can you stop at that cute cafe so I can get a coffee? Stop. There’s a pretty field with flowers, can you stop so I can Instagram that? Stop. Thank goodness my husband is a good sport. When I think about it, I must drive him sorta crazy. But this is typical with blogger’s who are also wives, right?
Our trip to Denmark will be one welcome break and if the weather cooperates, I plan to spend most of my time directly ON the beach. Even if I cannot sunbath, because Danish summers are not tropical by any means, I will be just as content to throw on a sweater, grab a chair, and just read on the beach, snap photos and collect little treasures on the shore. To have a coastal vacation is a dream of mine for several years since I left America – I live inland now and don’t get to the coast nearly as much as my little heart yearns for, so this trip will be a big highlight of the year for me. To smell the salty air, eat some smoked fish and relax in a sweet little cottage in Nordsjælland (she is even leaving me her bicycle to use!) is something I anticipate highly. It’s all I’m thinking about at the moment! After spending time in the sea cottage, we’ll then rent a space in the center of Copenhagen and spend 4 nights exploring the city. I’ve been there a few times but my husband hasn’t, so we’ll need extra time for him to see the sights and for me to do a little shopping and cafe crawling. :) I’m really looking forward to going to BLACK, the new store there that just opened by one of my favorite ceramicists Anne Black and Kirstine Meier Carlsen.
I wish I could see Astrid Svangren’s current installation there called BLOOM done with flowers, illustrations and still life vignettes. She is a Swedish artist who does some amazing contemporary work that I find fascinating.
I also want to check out the newish restaurant called Höst. Has anyone visited this place yet?
We also plan to spend a day in Malmö, Sweden since it’s a close train ride over from Copenhagen and my husband has never been to Sweden. I think he’d really love and with a name like Thorsten, I suppose he really should go there – I’m sure he’d find one of those souvenir shops with his name on a mug for sure, right? He never could when we lived in Boston, ha ha! Have you ever been to Malmö? Any MUST SEE book stores, cafes, shops, antique stores?
July is a good time to vacation because I’m in the midst of my next book and to have a break ‘in between’ shooting and writing will be just perfect. Then I can come back refreshed and energetic - ready to take on the rest of the project so we can turn everything in at the end of the summer.
Where will you go on vacation this summer? Tell me all about YOUR plans! Also, if you’ve been to Copenhagen within the last year, what did you LOVE and what do you recommend I check out? I’m particularly interested in beautiful shops, restaurants and cafes and the most photogenic neighborhoods…
(images: RUM, Black and Host)
Welcome to another new week on decor8! I have so much to share with you, including a video and a new recipe that will appear tomorrow, but first I want to talk about locations. Locations? Why yes. Locations are a big thing in the UK yet still not that popular in Germany though I hope that will change because I believe locations-to-hire is great business that could do exceptionally well in Germany given the number of magazines and stylists here looking for fresh spaces to shot in for their stories and books.
I personally love surfing location websites – there seems to be a high concentration of them in England and the spaces give me lots of interior inspiration. However, being in the world of interiors, I don’t just peruse them for fun – I also look at them for potential locations that I could potentially hire for a job. I recent shot and styled a job for Canon Europe and wanted to hire a location in Germany to do it, but unable to find any here I decided to just use my home. It worked out beautifully, but often I want to shoot and style spaces other than my personal home. For my next book, we are shooting and styling stuff here in my home which is fine but now I’m thinking I may want to grab a few homes to shoot in to add diversity to the book. Staying fresh is really needed these days. You have to show your audience something new, always. It’s a fun challenge, but a challenge still! You cannot rehash stuff people have seen before and try to pass that off as your best work, can you? My challenge has been to do new things to my home so that when you see it again in my next book, it will look fresh to you and be interesting to look at. It’s also fun to compare spaces as they were to how they are today.
Currently, I’m scouting in Germany, Denmark and England. Possibly Belgium and the Netherlands, too. Ideally, England because it’s super easy for me to get up there and I have plenty of friends to see and enjoy there while shooting. Problem is, I have nearly no money left in our tiny budget, money is always the problem when you are doing a book. Most people don’t think about that when they are looking at magazines and books – the sheer productions costs – but it can be enormous just to put together a single story in a magazine, even if you are leasing the props! I just need one or two beautiful homes to work in for a day to set up a few things. So my search begins… Here are some homes I found and loved over at Light Locations.
When I look at these properties from Light Locations, I imagine how I’d style each room. Where I’d place that chair, this vase, that table. Where I would add things to the walls, or take away… What I would put on the mantle, what I would place on the countertops, what I would remove. It’s fun to consider the options and play a little. I would love to work in any of these homes for a day… Wouldn’t you? Stunners!
(images: light locations)
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