Musik Monday - Law School Finals Edition

Have I mentioned yet that I'm in law school?  Only about a million times?  Oh, okay.

For my school, it's finals season and that means I am beyond stressed and busy.  My first in class final is Wednesday and I'm not prepared at all and I have a million other law school things to do and this commercial law outline just isn't making any sense and AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!
Don't expect too much from me for the next couple of weeks.  I did want to post the most relevant song/video I could think of for my life right now though for Musik Monday:

Just, just, just cram

Barbie's Dreambike

Studying for finals in law school is extremely draining.  Obviously, sometimes you just need a break.  Sometimes that break involves a little pranking mischief.
So, I went to a friend's house and she made dinner for us and both of our boyfriends.  After dinner, they were ready for bed and we all went to our respective homes.  But, my boyfriend and I took a little pitstop at the other guy's shop first.

See, at his shop, he has some vehicles stored, including his motorcycle.  The guys are away this weekend doing track days on their motorcycles, but the bikes were still in the garage of the shop for some last minute tune ups.

With the aide of hot pink spray paint and some painter's tape, we made a major tune up to our friend's motorcycle.

(More pictures after the break)

We were nice enough to leave some of it the original colors

National Pretzel Day!

April 26 is National Pretzel Day!  So, in honor of that, I decided the German thing to do would be to bake some Pretzels!  I used this recipe.  I had used another recipe from that website for my bienenstich cupcakes.
It was not the easiest recipe and my pretzels aren't exactly the prettiest things.  I'm proud of them though and I got them done just in time to celebrate the day!

Chef Spartacus was making sure I was doing it right

Bienenstich Cupcakes

I saw a recipe online for Bienenstich cake (Bee Sting Cake) and got way too excited about it.  This is one of my favorite desserts.  The dough varies some between recipes, but a few things are constant:  The honey glaze, the custardy filling, and the almond slices.  Without even knowing what it is, I'm sure it sounds delicious

The new big thing seems to be cupcakes.  Cupcake shops are popping up everywhere.  Cupcakes Wars is a huge tv show.  They've even started showing up in Germany! 

I decided that I wanted to try to make the cake recipe into a cupcake recipe - I used the same recipe, but a shorter bake time, a cupcake tray, and so improvisation with the filling.

The recipe can be found here:  http://www.germanfoods.org/consumer/recipes/beestingcake.cfm

Rolled the batter/dough into 12 little balls that filled about half of the cupcakes.  The right is the plain dough.  The left has honey drizzled on it.

Almonds go one top after the honey - The left is only honey, the right has almonds.  You can see I went overboard with the honey.  This caused problems later.

Musik Monday - Kids singing Rammstein

A friend posted this on my facebook wall (timeline?  I don't know, they forced the change on me and I have no idea what to call anything on facebook anymore) recently.  I get a lot of "This is German, you'll love this" kind of posts - and that's usually really accurate.


 


This video is amazing for so many reasons.

First of all, Rammstein is awesome.  I'll be honest - I used to hate them.  I thought they were overhyped and had nothing better than loud noise.  Then a few things happened.

Egg-cellent Easter Part 2

Easter egg trees are a tradition for many families.  I know that it's a tradition in Germany, Austria, and other German-speaking countries to blow the white and yolk out of eggs, paint the hollow eggs, and hang them on branches or trees.  My family has always done this tradition.  Though we don't paint eggs every year, this is just as important to us as a Christmas tree.

A lot of people in America (at least in my experience) don't go through the process of blowing out and painting eggs.  Instead they get the plastic eggs and hang them.  I've seen pictures friends have put up of this.  I also used to go to the local firehouse when I was a younger Girl Scout and we hung plastic eggs on one of the trees out front every year.

I love when traditions from other cultures are brought to America.  I'm glad I've experienced both the German way and the American adoption.

The family Egg Tree

Musik Monday - The Power of Music

This is a little different than my usual Musik Monday posts, but when I saw this video, I knew I had to share it with many, many people:




I grew up with music being an enormous part of my life.  It was always on in the car, and I knew the words to almost every oldies song before I started Kindergarten.  I played violin and piano since before elementary school and continued through college.  I even visit pep band for college basketball games and break out my electric violin.

Egg-cellent Easter Part 1

Like many families, we have a tradition of dying eggs for Easter.  I put much more work into it than most do.  We usually do a "hunt" on Easter morning even though I'm 23 and my brother's almost 28.  It's a big deal (since I always beat him by 1 or so).  This is the first year we didn't do the hunt, but I still made some awesome eggs!

The prep: Primary colors + green

Finished Product
Left to Right (top): green, red, orange, teal, rainbow, everything (aka dino egg)
Left to Right (bottom): blue, yellow, purple, mint green, drizzle rainbow, yellow w/ blue details (was going for plaid, got lazy)

Musik Monday - The Beatles, Sie liebt dich

When people think of The Beatles, they rightfully think of England.  However, the Beatles really owe a lot of their popularity and start to Germany, specifically Hamburg.  The group traveled to Hamburg in 1960 when they had 5 members: George Harrison, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Pete Best (the original drummer who the group found right before their trip to Germany), and Stuart Sutcliffe (who dropped out of the band in 1961 to finish his studies and sadly died shortly after he left the band).  They played at a handful of nightclubs and were gaining popularity until Harrison was deported for being underage and McCartney and Best were deported for attempted arson (I can't make this up).

Later, the group returned to Hamburg.  In 1961, they made their first professional recording there.  They continued visiting Hamburg and playing in nightclubs there through 1962.  It's said that this not only helped to build their fan base (Germany loved them), but they also got some of their signature style, namely their haircuts, there.

They returned to Germany after they hit it big and were worldwide stars.  The group made a number of recordings in German - of German songs and of their own songs translated into German.

Here's "Sie Liebt Dich":


Can you figure out what song that is in English?


It's "She Loves you (yeah, yeah, yeah)".  Some minor typos by whoever made the video and pronunciation isn't perfect, but it's quite good considering they didn't speak German!  There're some live videos too worth taking a look at.

How about that?  The Beatles are far from the only musicians in that era who recorded songs in German.  Many groups and singers did so in order to build their popularity in Europe.  There's many other weeks for all of those though!

Musik Monday - Wise Guys Deutsche Bahn

My mom sent me this video earlier today and it wasn't until after a long day of classes that I got to watch it.  She loves the Wise Guys and got to see them live as a foreign language teacher conference.  Awesome accapella, awesome humor as always from the Wise Guys.  They're at the top of my list for German music.  They're definitely inspired by Die Comedian Harmonists (I can say that with relative confidence because they have a song called "Die Comedian Harmonists").  This is another group you'll all likely see a lot of music from on here in the future.  I'm a big fan of this kind of clever talent.  It's almost got a Weird Al taste to it (there will be so much on Weird Al soon by the way).

Senk ju for träveling wis Deut-sche Bahn