Friday 22 September 2017

3 ingredients cookies

“Mm. Smells good. What's wrong? You only make those when you need to calm down.” Joan Watson in “Elementary” (Season 2, episode 16) when she enters the kitchen in the morning and Sherlock Holmes is just about to get the Yorkshire pudding out of the oven.

Sherlock Holmes is someone you wouldn't call normal. Naturally he's got some weird traits and characteristics. Cooking and baking is not my passion, although I can do some things that others actually like. So it's very strange for me that Sherlock Holmes in Elementary seemingly is baking to calm down and I now started to do the same, preferably using one recipe when I am frustrated, namely the following:

Ingredients:
1 cup Nutella (or other chocolate spread)
1 cup flour (or maybe a bit more)
1 egg

Directions:
Pre-heat oven to 330 ° F (160 ° C)

Put all the ingredients in a bowl, mix with a spoon or hand-held mixer. (Those of you who use a spoon, you can easily make the recipe in the middle of the night without disturbing your room-mates or neighbours at all.) Take a small piece of the mass, make a ball out of that. Squish it flat and put it on a baking sheet with baking sheet. Repeat until dough is all used. Should make about 16 bits.

The cookies will rise a bit, so really keep it rather small and flat with a bit of distance between each.

Baking in the oven for about 5 to 10 minutes, until the cookies aren't that much wet and shiny anymore as they will be the first minutes. A bit shiny is absolutely fine.

Afterwards let them cool a bit. When they're right out of the oven the cookies are not only hot, but also fall apart fairly easily. Cooled down a bit they're harder.

The original recipe is with Nutella spread, which is available everywhere here in Germany. I have made the recipe already with white spread (which needs considerably more dough). My favourite cookies are with a caramel sea salt spread I was lucky to find at Edeka. I also used dark brownie spread and peanut butter as well (with and without peanut bits). For that one however I probably have used too much flour, because the cookies were rather dry for my taste. I personally don't like the Nutella-cookies as much as I do the Nusspli-cookies, a different kind of chocolate spread, which is available here.

Try it out. Let the spreads that are available in the shops in your area inspire you. You're welcome to write in the comments which spreads you tried and how you liked the cookies.

Monday 18 September 2017

I am beautiful

It's been over a month since I watched “Suicide Squad. Didn't watch it when it came out in the cinemas. For one thing because there was talk about much violence. On the other hand I have only limited interest in comic adaptations and movies where people are put together when they are normally not appearing together interest me even less. My Batman details knowledge is very limited. I have seen the animated series as a kid. I barely know more than the „classic“ bad guys everybody knows.

Suicide Squad” is a story around a group of villains from the Batman/Gotham City universe. I didn't know most of them, but their individual stories are roughly outlined to introduce the individual characters. Then there's also a scene in an otherwise abandoned bar where the group is taking a short break and talking. Captain Boomerang says that another one from the group is amazing on the outside, but ugly inside. “We all are!”, agrees the almost constantly aggressive Harley Quinn. Except for him, she says and looks at the reptilian-like Killer Croc, he's ugly on the outside, too. He's calm when he takes the hoody off his head and tells her, “Not me, shorty. I am beautiful.”

Overall the movie is a matter of taste and there's no accounting for taste, as they say. I personally liked the bar scene best and I thought about it afterwards the most. Obviously at least two other people thought the same, because that scene is on YouTube in German, albeit in bad quality, under the title “Ich bin wunderschön | Suicide Squad | Beste Szenen“ here:


And also in English you can find it under the title “SuicideSquad(Killer Croc)-I'm beautiful_-*Best Scene*“ here:


Very fast I saw a connection to that one scene in “Sherlock” where John Watson asks Sherlock Holmes in the context of “Who am I?”, if he is pretty (see Am I pretty?). But Killer Croc didn't just say “pretty”, he said “beautiful”.