Losing never tasted so sweet!

I couldn't resist making a celebratory post about Germany taking First place and USA taking 2nd place in Group G!

Also, the Google Doodle is too good to pass up sharing.  This is one of my favorite ones yet!

Hope everyone enjoyed the game, whether in Germany or America.  And thanks to Portugal for winning their game!  Let's be real, G was by far the most exciting group to watch.
Our boss was generous and let us watch the game on one of the televisions in the office.

Did anyone take off of work to watch?  I know there were some office parties out there and plenty of conference rooms full of snacks and game watching.  I brought in surprise soccer cupcakes; half were Red, White & Blue inside and the other half were Gold, Red & Black inside.

Now lets just keep the soccer frenzy alive USA!!

(source: Business Insider)

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.

Pi Day 2012!

It's Pi Day!  Almost the ides of March, but even better.


Some not-so-nerdy people may not get it.  March 14 is also 3/14 or 3.14, which equals Pi (π).  So, some of us geekier people find it important and necessary to celebrate the day.  Tonight, I'm "baking" a pie for Pi Day!  I'd have done it earlier, but I was too lazy to get ingredients and then was at a basketball game until tonight.


I ended up making a pie out of my Costco cookbook called "Chocolate Peanut Butter Mouse Pie" by Eagle Brand/Jif.  It uses a premade graham cracker crust, which made my life easier since I have no pie pan.  There's a layer of sweetened condensed milk/melted semisweet chocolate chip mixture over the bottom of the pie crust.  On top of that is a layer of: