Poppy seed cake

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I just love poppy seeds and this recipe combines them with my other favourite, lime! Those lovely little blue dots and green bits in the cake make it cute. To make it more festive, you could glaze it with cream cheese-icing sugar-citrus juice or try substituting cheese with Greek yoghurt.

200 g butter
2 dl sugar
3 eggs
2 tsp baking powder
3 dl flour
2 tbs poppy seeds
1 tbs vanilla extract
grated lime/lemon/orange zest and 2 tbs juice

Beat the butter and sugar, add eggs one at a time. Then add baking powder mixed with flour and poppy seeds, vanilla and citrus.

Bake in a greased and floured cake tin at 175 for about 50 minutes.

Moleskine recipe journal

I have just received my last Christmas gift from Amazon, a new recipe journal by Moleskine. I´ve used Moleskine notebooks for years and think they are the best. Just before Christmas I noticed that they had these new types of journals for recipe, wine, music etc. Others must have noticed those too, as they ran out of them. But now I am the lucky owner of two recipe journals!

Having collected recipes in various folders, notebooks, boxes for years, the first thing I noticed in this one was the index. All the pages are numbered and at the end there is an index you can fill. So this time, you can actually find the recipies fast rather that search for them from various locations like I´ve done for years. First part of the journal has a template you can fill, the rest are empty pages. There are also some funny stickers you can attach to your recipies. Compared to many other recipe journals, this one gives you a lot of flexibility with the stickers and empty pages to create and arrange something that looks like yours. I can´t wait to start filling mine!

Lunch at Vapiano

Vapiano has a fresh concept of made-to-order pizza, pasta and salad. To me it somehow reminds of New York with all the space and fresh ingredients. It was a nice break on a snowy gray Tuesday.

I had a tasty orange-chili, pak choi and turkey campanelle pasta with a nice Primitivo red. For dessert a lovely mascarpone, coconut and lime cake, some Darjeeling imperial second flush tea and to top it all, my favourite digestive, Sambuca caffe. To a tea enthusiastic they have a very impressive tea selection.

Delicious and not expensive at all! Someone had commented that this might be the best fast food chain and I would have to agree.