The Celebration Girl

Good morning dear friends!

Today Nicosia has blue skies again after a few weeks of clouds and rain and I feel invigorated! I don’t mind cold weather (I love it actually), and I like rain too, but I need the light of the sun and blue skies to be truly happy. Maybe that’s because skies in Cordoba, my home city, are always deep blue and, looking at blue skies makes me feel  a sense of connection with my own home.

These past weeks have been really hectic. As I mentioned before, my children, Luka and Zoe, started nursery school one month ago…and as it very often occurs, two weeks into their new schooling experience, they got a ear infection! There seems to be a really strong bug going around, because all children and even the teachers got it. The first round of antibiotics didn’t do the trick, so we had to  try with a second one, and it took them 10 days to be ready to go back to school. What was even worse was that my husband and I also got a really bad cold (we are guessing the same bug), so there was a concert of coughs going on in our house all night long. But now we are all recovered and very appreciative of our good health! We are also giving the children vitamins and probiotics to reinforce their immune system, and we are keeping our fingers crossed  that they won’t get anything new (in the short run, at least).

But today’s post is not about me, or my immediate family. It is about a very special little girl, whom I love very, very much and whom I consider my “niece of the heart”. Olivia Valentina (Oli, as we call her), is the daugther of one of my oldest and dearest friends, Mariana. No, scratch that, Mariana is not really my friend, she is more like the sister I never had, a “sister of the soul”. Mariana is the person I shared dreams and hopes with since we were 16 years old, the one person that was as passionate about books and history and literature as I was, the one with whom I buried a time capsule in the backyard of our country-side home when we were 17 , the one with whom I wrote a little book that maybe one day our children will read, the person that had a penpal and liked studying, just like me. Mariana is  the magical being that showed me the meaning of true friendship and someone I have missed deeply during these 7 years that I have lived abroad. The thing with being an expat is that we are bound to miss those we love, and we carry the burden of knowing that, many times, we are not present during our loved ones special and important moments. Argentinian author Hernan Casciari uses a metaphor from football (soccer) to explain it and says that ” pain and party, tragedy, triumph are the same when you’re away. Not being able to cry with your loved ones when something horrible happens, not being able to celebrate with your people when something wonderful happens puts you immediately in offside“. He is right.

Fortunately, last year it was different. Last year, our trip to Argentina coincided with Mariana’s pregnancy and that made us both so very happy.  I could not stay until Oli was born and I have only seen her cute, adorable face through pictures, but  having had the chance to hug my friend during such a life-changing time, and to talk to Oli through the belly is something that I am deeply thankful for.

The original idea was to take advantage of this trip to organize Oli’s baby shower, so I started planning it pretty much as soon as the pregnancy was announced. But once we arrived in Argentina, we learnt that Mariana’s pregnancy was experiencing some complications and, during our second week in the country she was put on full bed rest. The baby shower no longer being a possibility, I decided to prepare Oli and her mummies a special present to celebrate her life: a “party in a box” which they could use either for a “sip and see” after Oli’s birth, or maybe even for Oli’s 1st birthday.

The “party in a box” used the same theme as the baby shower I had  originally planned: The tree of life. Mariana and I always liked ancient mythology and literature, and  used to write listening to  Loreena McKennit’s  CD The Mask and the Mirror, which contains a song called The Two Trees, based on the homonimous poem by WB Yeats, which reads as follows:

Beloved, gaze in thine own heart,

The holy tree is growing there;

From joy the holy branches start,

And all the trembling flowers they bear.

The changing colours of its fruit

Have dowered the stars with merry light;

The surety of its hidden root

Has planted quiet in the night;

The shaking of its leafy head

Has given the waves their melody,

And made my lips and music wed,

Murmuring a wizard song for thee.

There the Loves a circle go,

The flaming circle of our days,

Gyring, spiring to and fro

In those great ignorant leafy ways;

Remembering all that shaken hair

And how the wingèd sandals dart,

Thine eyes grow full of tender care:

Beloved, gaze in thine own heart.”

When I listened to this song, I also remembered the myth of Yggdrasil, and how the idea of a Tree of life is shared by different mythologies and the baby shower’s theme was born. I contacted my dear Laura ( from Delicious Tea) and commissioned her to design the party printables, and she did the most beautiful work I could have imagined. Laura designed a lovely, blooming tree, with leaves in different colours to represent the diverse ways in which Oli is loved, and this tree was included  in all items. She also designed a banner with the baby’s name, which instead of the traditional triangular shape uses leaves in the same colour palette as Oli’s tree of life.

The tree above was made from a branch of a tree from my mother’s garden, so that it would grow together with Oli, accompanying her. The little tag cards are for guests to leave  good wishes for Oli’s life and to hang them on Oli’s wishing tree, so that she would be able to know, when growing up, that she is, and has always been, deeply loved.

The box also included some decorations, such as two little wooden trees and a rose paper pompom, as well as some of the items necessary for a dessert table, with food labels that played with the party’s theme.

The sweets and sugar decorations included “Flowers of Joy” (sugar flowers to decorate cupcakes with), with their corresponding cupcake cases…

…”Enchanted dew” (little meringue cookies)…

…”Prosperity leaves” (bamboo skewers, to insert chopped fruits in)

… “Love seeds” (chocolate coated almonds)…

“Branches of Life” (Branch chocolate)

…as well as all of my favourite recipes in a little hand-written notebook, that could serve as Oli’s first.

It also included drink tags for different kinds of Lemonade, with coordinating twine,  as well as personalized paper cups with matching paper straws, paper plates and bamboo spoons…

The box also had the tags for souvenirs, but not the souvenirs themselves  (mixed flower seeds, to celebrate life by giving back life to the Earth)  because I didn’t know when the party was going to take place.

I also  punched lots and lots of  flowers in different shades of green and pink , which could be used to craft garlands, piñatas or other decorations.

As a special present, we created a series of postcards for guests to write love notes for Oli. These postcards, when put together, formed a A3 sized poster (which could be hanged in the baby’s bedroom) with the inscription: ” Your existence makes us very happy”.

Finally, I added three bibs, just because one can never have enough of them with a young baby!

I placed all items in a box, and travelled with it, the tree and the pompom to my friend’s house, to deliver the party and have a quiet afternoon of mate and long talks, like in the old times.

 Queridas Mariana, Pao y Oli: las quiero con el alma! Que esta nueva vida juntas, que recien empieza, las llene de felicidad hoy y todos los días de su vida.

Have a lovely weekend, dear friends!

Good afternoon dear friends! How are you today?

These past weeks I have been absent from the blog, and I apologize for that. As I mentioned in my previous post, I had been preparing two surprises for you. The first one, was the dessert table for Chinese New Year, and here is the second one: A tutorial for making the chocolate cookie heart wreath pictured above, which I designed for Catch my Party!

When my Christmas breakfast table was featured as Catch my Party’s Party of the Day, Jillian mentioned that she was going to pin the holly wreath to make it next year and I offered to prepare a tutorial for her. She loved the idea and suggested, instead, a cookie wreath for Valentine’s day! So  I set myself to work!

If you would like to know how to do this, including how to decorate each type of cookie, hop over to Catch my Party!

I will show you how to decorate tons of cookies…

…how to put together a wreath like this one:

or like this other one…

…how to draw hearts with royal icing…

…how to outline with sprinkles…

…and how to outline with sanding sugar.

And if you have remaining cookies after assembling the wreath, you can enjoy them with milk…

Or even prepare cute Valentine’s day presents for your loved ones!

I have also included templates of the cookies I used, so go to Catch my Party now and happy baking!

Good morning dear friends, and Happy New Year!!!

How are today? How were your celebrations? I hope you all had a really great time and that you started 2012 in the happiest of ways.

Today, as first post of the new year, I wanted to show you the Christmas table I prepared for our children. Since they are still very young, we do not do big celebrations on Christmas’ eve, but rather, we celebrate on the 25th, together with the opening of presents.

This year, I had an “Amy Atlas moment”  and decided to prepare a few special treats to surprise Luka and Zoe for breakfast, together with a decorated table, with backdrop and all. It was really fun to do it! I baked and decorated everything at night for a week, and hid all treats in our study room for the kids not to suspect anything. On the 24th, we set up all decorations and we left the table ready for Luka and Zoe to find it when they woke up. They were so happy!

The inspiration for the table came from a set of window stickers that we brought from Argentina, which featured Santa Claus and its reindeers, and with which the kids had been playing since we had arrived back to Cyprus ( they didn’t survive, so I have no photos of them!). Around the time when I was preparing the treats, I also saw a BEAUTIFUL set of Free party printables from Bird’s Party, offered at Catch My Party, featuring a super cute Rudolph reindeer, so I decided to use them, and to adjust the colours of the reindeers to match them. I also used the printables for the backdrop:  I made several red and green paper fans in different sizes, glued the party circles to them, and attached them to a frame that I already had.

The desserts themselves aimed at reflecting us, as a multicultural family, and at incorporating flavours from our different traditions. There was Pandoro, which is common in Argentina and Italy  (store-bought), gingerbread cookies (in the shape of Santa Claus and Rudolph’s faces), gingerbread houses (the flavour of which reminds my husband of his own childhood in Kosovo), kourambiedes and melomakarona (from Greek Cyprus, where we live), as well as chocolate cookies in the shape of holly and of a Christmas wreath, “Rudolph” cake pops and vanilla bean macarons with chocolate hazelnut cream.  For drinks, we served hot chocolate, and coffee for the adults.

 I made all cookies (including the cookie wreath) using the gingerbread cookies and chocolate rolled cookies recipes from Glory, of Glorious Treats, and 2 sets of Wilton cookie cutters. For the macarons, I used the recipe and the method I shared in this previous post, and I made the mini-gingerbread houses according to the templates and instructions shared on the blog Not Martha. For glueing the gingerbread houses , I used Sweetopia’s recipe for Royal Icing, which I then thinned to decorate the cookies. I LOVE that recipe, it worked really beautifully.

Here are a few more pictures of the details:

And here is how the dessert table looked next to our Christmas Tree, in our living room:

I hope you like it!

Have a wonderful week!

Good morning friends! How are you? Are you ready to say goodbye to 2011? I know I am.

It is funny how the simple act of changing one tiny little number can make us feel like the days ahead are full of possibilities, that new beginnings are possible and that wonderful things await us. I embrace that feeling every year, even if it may be just an illusion for some. I like making time for pausing and reflecting and planning and hoping.

We also have a small tradition for New Year’s eve: we try a new recipe each year. We search old cookbooks, trusted blogs and the internet in look for yumminess and we prepare that. Alas, we still haven’t decided what to prepare this year! Mole Poblano is a strong contender…I’ll let you know next year whether we made it or not! And iIf you would like to give it a try, check Amanda’s blog.

When we started looking for recipes for New Year’s eve, I also started thinking about new recipes to share with you. And I remembered that this recipe, which appeared in Whole Kitchen Magazine back in September, could not be read by those of you who do not speak Spanish and that I had received several requests to share it in English. The problem was that the recipes were exclusively for Whole Kitchen, so I couldn’t publish them here without authorization (and, being a lawyer, everything related to authorizations, copyright, etc, etc is pretty much sacred to me!).

I contacted Silvia, one of the lovely editors of Whole Kitchen, and asked her whether I could publish it or if they would be interested in publishing the recipe in English in their blog. And she, very kindly, made an exception to the general rule due to the fact that my blog is  not in Spanish, and authorized its publication here.  So, my friends, here is the recipe for Chocolate and pear mousse pie that I submitted to Whole Kitchen Magazine (and remember that if you want it in Spanish, you can read it here)

Ingredients

For the crust:

100 grs de butter

100 grs icing sugar

180 grs self-raising flour

60 grs cocoa

1 egg yolk

1 egg

For the filling:

4 medium-sized pears

100 grs  sugar

50 grs melted butter

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

1 tablespoon natural lemon juice

1 envelope of unflavoured gelatin, diluted in 1/2  cup warm water and 1/4 cup cold water

2 egg whites, beaten until stiff

200 cm3 whipped cream

For the chocolate ganache:

200 grs dark chocolate (if you don’t like the bitterness of dark chocolate, you can use half dark chocolate, half semi-sweet chocolate)

200 cm3 cream

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

Preparación.

1)      Prepare the crust:   In a bowl, mix flour, cocoa and sugar. Make a whole in the middle and add butter, incorporating everything with your fingers  until it reaches an sand-like consistency. Add the egg and the egg yolk and integrate until you have a dough that you can form into a ball. Cover the dough with cling film and let it rest in the fridge for 15 minutes.

Grease and flour a 30 cms pie pan and preheat the oven to 150C/300F.   Remove the dough from the fridge, roll it and cover the pan with it. Bake it in the oven for about 10 minutes or until the dough separates from the borders of the pan. Remove from the oven and let it cool down while you prepare the filling.

2) Prepare the filling: Peal the pears and cut them into medium-sized squares. Place them in a saucepan together with butter, sugar and lemon juice. Cook on low heat for about 15 minutes or until the pears become soft.

Once the pears are soft, remove from the heat an let them cool down for about 10 minutes. Place the preparation in a food processor or blender and pulse until having a purée. Add the vanilla and let it cool completely (you may place the purée in the fridge to accelerate the process if you so desire).

Dissolve the unflavored gelatin and add it to the pear purée. Let it rest for 5 minutes so that the gelatin starts to add consistency to the purée.

Whip the cream until firm, being careful not to over do it (we don’t want to make butter!), and add it to the purée once it is ready.

Whip the egg whites until stiff and add them to the purée. Your pear mousse is now ready!

3) Add the pear mousse to the chocolate  crust and place the pie in the fridge until the filling is solid (about 4 hours)

4)      Prepare the ganache. Chop the chocolate into small pieces and place it in a heat-resistant bowl. Put the cream in a saucepan and put it on the stove, on low heat. Once the cream starts to boil, remove it from the heat and pour it on top of the chocolate. Once the chocolate starts to melt, start beating until it reaches a creamy consistency and until firm enough to cover the pie with it.

5)      Pour the ganache over the pie, making swirls with the back of a spoon. You may also put the ganache on a piping bag and decorate the pie with it.

6) Let the pie rest until the ganache is firm and serve.

If you don’t want your pie to be too chocolatey, you can omit the ganache and serve it uncovered (just crust and filling). It is delicious either way.

Also, if you want to start the New Year with a traditional Cypriot flavour, you can make Vassilopita, a traditional cake  with a coin inside, to be eaten on the 1st of January, the day of Saint Basil.

I hope you like the pie and, most of all,  I hope you have a wonderful New Year’s Eve celebration and a fantastic start of 2012. May all your dreams come true next year, and may you always have illusions to create new dreams!

See you in 2012!

 Good morning dear friends!

I hope you had a very happy holiday celebration! We had a quiet, relaxing long weekend at home, which was great.

I prepared a small dessert table for the occasion but I didn’t finish editing the pictures yet, so I thought that, in the meantime, I could show you a few pictures of how Nicosia (my city) was decorated for the holidays. Earlier this year, in November, I took a Christmas photography course with Montréal-based photographer Jackie Rueda  and it inspired me to register some of the beauty of the holiday season with my camera- or, at least, to try!

Here are some of  the pictures I took.

I will be back before the end of the year with a yummy chocolatey recipe. Have a wonderful week!

Hello my dear friends!

It is almost evening time here in Nicosia and we are getting ready to start cooking our Christmas dinner. Since we are expats, with no nearby family, this is generally a very quiet moment for us, far from the running, shopping and cooking craze that December generally brings.  Family is always missed, but there is comfort and joy in knowing that we are together is our hearts.

One of the advantages that I see in this way of living, is that we get to choose the traditions we love and we want to incorporate into our own celebrations as a little family, and to change them and adopt new ones as it pleases us. So, when it came to choosing how to spend our Christmases, we opted for a quiet dinner at home on the eve, and a bigger, yet intimate, celebration on the actual day of the holiday. Our kids are still rather small, and they haven’t started school yet, so they don’t have many expectations about these dates…so they are doubly surprised and overjoyed when they discovered their presents and special treats on the 25th!

One of the treats that I make since we live in Cyprus are some special Greek cookies called Kourambiedes. They were the first sweet I had when I arrived in Nicosia and I loved them immediately.  They are eaten on Christmas day, and at other celebrations, such as weddings. They have cinnamon, almonds and rose water, and they melt in your mouth!

So, if you feel like baking something different these days, do try them! They are very easy, and fun for baking with kids!

Here is the recipe:

Ingredients: 

{for the filling}

30grs almonds

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon sugar

{for the dough}

1 egg

1 teaspoon brandy/cognac

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

100grs butter, at room temperature

1/4 cup sugar

1 cups all purpose flour

{for dusting}

rose water (1/4 cup, approximately)

icing sugar  (approximately 3 tablespoons)

1)Preheat the oven at 150C/300F

2) Process the almonds, sugar and cinnamon until the almonds are coarsely ground (do not over do it, you don’t want them to turn into powder)

3) Beat slightly the egg, vanilla and brandy. Cream butter and sugar with a wooden spoon and add it to the egg mixture. Once they are integrated, start adding flour 1 tablespoon at a time, until you have a workable dough (see picture 2)

4) Shape a piece of dough into an oval. Make a hole in the middle, put 1/4 teaspoon of the almond and cinnamon mixture in it and close it, as shown in  picture 3

4)Place the cookies on a baking sheet and bake for about 45 minutes or until barely golden (Keyword: barely! Do not let them brown!)

5) Put the rose water on a glass and get a brush ready. As soon as you remove the cookies from the oven, paint them with rose water. (The difference in temperature will allow the rose water to be absorbed by the cookies, so do not let them cool down).

6)Let the cookies rest for about 3 to 4 hours. After they are dry, dust  icing sugar over them and they are ready!

They taste delicious with a cup of tea and they last for a couple of weeks if you keep them in an airtight container.

May you have a wonderful Christmas, full of love, peace and joy.

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Este post está dedicado a mi amiga invisible, y compañera de andanzas fotográficas, María. Feliz navidad!!!!!!

Good afternoon dear friends!

I apologize for my silence over the past few weeks. I had originally intended to write a few posts before but, as it turns out, coming back home after a 7 week trip with twin toddlers required to readjust them to the old routine, to Nicosia’s  weather and time zone (there is a 5 hours difference between Argentina and Cyprus)  and to our normal life, in general.  So these days we have been juggling regular work and study schedules with middle-of-the-night wake-up episodes, piles and piles of clothes for washing, folding, ironing and putting away, and  a sort of  ”pre-spring”clean (always due after such long trips).

In spite of all these adjustments, it is wonderful to be back home, and coming back in the middle of the Holiday Season makes it extra special. We arrived to a beautifully-decorated Nicosia, with the streets full of lights and Christmas markets, and people singing carols in the streets of downtown. And this, for a Christmas Elf such as myself, is enough reason to be happy.

On Christmas’ eve it will actually be 4 years since I arrived to Cyprus (my husband had been here for 6 months already), so this time of the year is always one of memories of years past, a time to reflect on how much our life has changed since that day.  Back in 2007 there was just the two of us, and an almost-empty apartment with a bed, a sofa, an outdoor table with 4 chairs for the balcony, and a Christmas Tree that my husband had arranged for me, to make me feel at home. In the year that followed we furnished our house, we had twins, we  met new people, we adapted, and Cyprus started becoming our home.

Making a place one’s home involves incorporating new habits and letting go of some others. We change, sometimes imperceptibly, with every new country we live in and those mutations are only perceived when contrasted with people and places that we have met before. As Nelson Mandela said in “A long walk to Freedom”: There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered”.

One of the ways in which we have changed is in the food we eat, particularly during holidays and other celebrations. We approach new places also through their food and, in the process of adapting, we incorporate new flavours, we make them our own, and they travel with us wherever we go. This is the case with the cookies I will share with you today, which have come to  mean Christmas to me, as much as  Panettone or Turrones (which are some of Argentina’s traditional holiday sweets ).

Melomakarona are, in fact, the cookies of advent. Greek Cypriots fast during this period (they adopt a vegan diet, eliminating all animal products) and, during that fast, they snack on these cookies, which are highly caloric. Everything in their flavour speaks of this season:  they take cinnamon, clove, orange,  honey and walnuts, and they are dipped in syrup for extra sweetness. If you are looking for a different cookie to bake these days, I highly recommend these ones. They will fill your home with true holiday cheer!

Here is the recipe I use, as was given to me by my neighbour (and adapted by her  from the book “Cyprus cooking for friends“, by Sandra Lysandrou)

Ingredients

1 cup sugar

1 cup orange juice

3 cups vegetable oil (canola)

1/2 cup brandy

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1 teaspoon ground cloves

1 teaspoon salt

8 1/2 cups self raising flour

5 teaspoons baking powder

{For the syrup}

1 1/2 cups sugar

1 cup honey

1 1/2 cup water

{For topping}

1 cup finely ground walnuts mixed with 1 tablespoon of cinnamon (I like to mix walnuts and almonds)

Preparation: 

a-Preheat the oven at 140 C/ 284F

b- In a large bowl, mix sugar, oil, juice, brandy, spices, 7 cups of flour, baking powder and salt. Work the dough, adding the extra flour as needed, until it becomes fluffy. The dough must be oily, not dry, so stop adding flour when it becomes just workable.

b- Form the melomakaronas by taking small pieces of dough and shaping them into ovals with your hands.  Note that this is a dough made with self-raising flour and a fair amount of baking powder as well, so the cookies will expand in the oven. It is consequently better to make them rather small, and to place them in an ungreased baking tray  separated from each other, to give them place for growth. Bake them until  the bottom is golden brown (approximately 30 minutes).

c- Allow the cookies to cool down completely and prepare the syrup by mixing sugar, water and honey and bringing them to the boil. Once the syrup boils, remove it from the heat and dip the cookies in it, soaking them for a few seconds.  Note that it is very important that the cookies are completely cool when you do this, otherwise they will not absorb the syrup! For the same reason, you will need to reheat the syrup if it cools down before you are finished dipping the cookies.

d- Place the cookies on a wire rack to drain the excess syrup and sprinkle the crushed nuts mixture over them.

I hope you will like them !

Good morning dear friends! How are you today? Did you set up all your Christmas decorations already or is it customary to do it  only on  Christmas’ eve  in your country? I haven’t set up our Christmas tree yet, nor any of the decorations…but Santa has already passed by our home and has left me a wonderful, most desired present!!

I know, I know, Santa doesn’t exist… but my present is very, very real and it makes me very, very happy! Would you like to know what it is? Let me tell you a little story first and you will soon find out!

Okay, as you know, I have always liked cooking, especially baking. When I began doing it, I didn’t have any appliances because they were out of my budget, so I used to do everything by hand, while  dreaming of getting a hand mixer and a food processor. Around that time (early 90′s)  Argentina started to be more open to imported goods, foreign magazines became more affordable, and my mother got a subscription to Good Housekeeping Magazine. It was in those pages that I saw the first picture of a KitchenAid stand mixer and fell in love with its design. I did not really know how they differed from a regular food processor, but I loved how they looked. They were not sold in Argentina (or perhaps they were, in specialized stores, but I never saw one) and I am sure I wouldn’t have been able to afford one anyway, but I always remembered those pictures.

Fast forward to 2008. Little after we moved to Cyprus, I went to a shop near our apartment to look at food processors. We were already expecting our twins, and I thought we would put one to good use after the babies were born. And when I entered the shop, I immediately saw a shelf of KitchenAid Artisan Stand Mixers in many different colours. I remembered all those magazines I used to spend hours looking at and asked how much they costed…and that was the end of the dream. They were too expensive for us, especially with two babies coming soon. We bought a Moulinex Food Processor that served us well and -to be honest- once the babies arrived I hardly had the time to even remember the precious KitchenAid!

Last year I decided to do a little makeover to our apartment and my main target was the Kitchen. When we had moved, the Kitchen looked like this and I had always found it too dark and gloomy:

So I bought a few cans of paint, and in one week I painted the walls in a lighter colour,  all kitchen cabinets white, and an accent wall in a shade of turquoise, my favourite colour. When I was done with it, it looked like this:

 The main result of the change? I loved my kitchen,  I wanted to spend more time in it and, as a consequence, I started cooking more. I started trying things I had never done before, such as decorating sugar cookies  or covering cakes with fondant, and I started trying new recipes. And here I discovered that my dear food processor had its limitations. It just couldn’t beat for 20 minutes like some recipes required (the burnt smell was noticeable after 5 minutes), there was no “medium speed”, only two speeds, and the beater attachment…well, it didn’t really cream butter and sugar as thoroughly as instructed by some recipe directions.

So the KitchenAid came back to my mind. I browsed online, just for fun, and saw this one, the KitchenAid Artisan in Martha Stewart Blue:

That colour! It was PERFECT! (well, perfect for me, at least). Alas, it was not sold outside of  the US because it had been a limited edition, currently out of stock. A friend offered to ship it but, once taken out of the country, the warranty was void and it didn’t come in European voltage  (From what I read, it appears that the higher speeds do not perform as well with an adaptor).

There was, however, a similar shade that was sold here, the KA Artisan in Ice Blue. But the price was still very high. So I did what I always do when I want something that looks impossible: I put a picture of it in the New Years Picture collage, trusting that, if it is meant to be, the Universe will lead me to it (it sound crazy and funny, I know, but it works!).

I didn’t do anything else for about 6 months and then, one day, I remembered a story from an old school book from 2nd grade that was called “My savings”. This story was about a man who had named his house “My savings” because he had bought it with the money he had saved on cigarettes after he stopped smoking, as a way to remind himself about the importance of those expenses that look apparently small but end up having a huge impact on our budget.  So I started thinking how I could rearrange my budget to save for my beloved KitchenAid…and I found a way.

First, I found out exactly how much the KitchenAid’s current cost was, and then I divided that amount by 12, to make it more seizable, and to have a clear idea of how much I needed to save per month if I planned to buy it within a year. If I managed to save more, great, but I didn’t want to put a strain on my budget because of it (it is, after all, a luxury item, not a need!). The monthly amount was surprisingly low but I still had to find places where the budget could be cut: what were we buying on a monthly basis, automatically, but which was something we could live without?

The answer was simple: diapers. I had started potty training my children and my daughter was out of diapers already, so instead of putting the money for diapers and wipes back into the general budget, we kept it aside. We had lived without that money for 3 years and we could continue to live without it without problems because it was sufficiently small not to be missed, yet sufficiently big to represent a change by accumulation. I also started putting all small coins in a jar and changing them to notes by the end of the month, and adding that amount to the KA savings as well.

By the beginning of December, I had 2/3 of the amount required to buy the KitchenAid Artisan Stand Mixer, with no effort.

Last Friday, my husband added the remaining 1/3 as a Christmas present to myself, and we went to buy it. It was pouring rain, parking was an absolute mess, and we had to go to a second shop of the same chain to get it in Ice Blue…but it was worth it because we bought it! And here it is, on my kitchen counter!

I look at it over and over and I still cannot believe that it is MINE!!!

I haven’t used it yet because I want to read the manual first, to be sure that I am operating it properly (yes, I am intimidated by it). But I will use it soon, for all the holiday baking…and lots more after that. We will be great friends, I am sure.

And when I do use it, I will share everything I will learn with you, here.

Now if you will excuse me,  I’ll go take another look at it

I’ll be back later this week with more posts about our trip to Argentina and our Christmas preparations.

Have a beautiful Sunday and a wonderful start of the week, tomorrow!