around the corner

I don’t get out enough, a realization that always hits me whenever I do go somewhere and immediately feel refreshed and inspired by new sights and sounds and smells.
The good kind of inspiration, not the Pinterest kind of inspiration that has you in awe and whispers ‘you could never make anything this awesome’.




Last Sunday afternoon I needed a walk, a breath of fresh air and a change of scenery. It had been raining all day and I had been working away in front of my computer. Late afternoon, the rain stopped and it started looking friendlier.
J and I drove out to a nearby village and went exploring, walking in the woods, admiring the old streets and generally soaking it all up.



Sleepy German villages can be utterly charming and I fell in love with the place immediately. The streets and gardens were lovingly decorated with flowers and there was beauty around every corner.




Remind me to get out more.

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recipe: quark pie

Last Saturday we had this delicious pie at my friend’s mom’s house and she kindly gave me the recipe. It was so yummy that I had to share it.

A note on quark: Quark is a german specialty dairy product (it also translates as curd cheese). It is like cream cheese, just fluffier and tastes a bit sour. If you can’t buy it where you live you could use any other cream cheese, though the pie’s texture might be a little stiffer then and I would recommend using less sugar. It is also pretty easy to make at home I’ve read.

Lu’s Quark Cherry Pie
1kg Quark
400g sugar
200g butter
6 eggs
1 Packet (ca. 50g) Instant Pudding Mix (or Custard Powder)
1 tsp baking powder
3 tblsp cream of wheat
juice of one lemon
canned cherries

Stir together the eggs, sugar and butter and add the custard powder and baking powder. Then stir in the cream of wheat, lemon juice and quark.
Pour off the juice from the cherries and place cherries in a casserole dish. Spoon the quark mix on top and bake at 170°C for about 70 min. (until golden brown on top).

The pie will be very soft and has to be spooned out of the dish. Enjoy!

Back to the 1970s

While my dad’s in hospital I do some business appointments for him, along with the italian boss of the company we’re selling shoes for. I picked him up at the airport yesterday morning and after paying a little hospital visit we set out to drive to the client. Thankfully he has no problem driving my dad’s big Audi…if I had to do that in german traffic I’d die…or cry. German people are mean when they’re driving and they have no patience for someone trying to figure out a vehicle three times as big as the one they’re used to and so crammed with shoe cases that you can’t see a thing behind you. And automatic…I’ve never even driven automatic before.
We got to the client’s office and it was a big villa. Once we stepped inside we were literally taken back to the 70’s. Dark wood paneled walls, brown plush armchairs, brown stained glass coffee tables and on the walls pictures from the client’s shops as they were in the late 70s/early 80s. It was all in good condition but I could totally picture my dad starting out business as a young guy in these very rooms 30 years earlier. It was quite fascinating.

Heck, even the coffee cups and milk trays were totally still stuck in the 70s!

It’s actually a bunch of really important clients who do this appointment together and there were about 10 of them. I’d previously thought they would just cram around the shoes on the shelves and poke them and discuss them.
But no, they filed into the room quietly, made a big circle around the first group of shelves, looked at me expectantly and said “You may start”. Gulp. I’ve presented a collection before, but usually that is a one-on-one interaction with one client. Also this collection is brand new and I am not really familiar with it yet. Still, I dove in and made an impromptu presentation of the whole collection and I think it went pretty well. Phew.
To leave you with another picture, this was our way back at dusk in awful weather and bad traffic…so glad I wasn’t driving 🙂