The Return

J. and W. came back today.

Boyfriend was feeling a bit meh.

I thought I'd celebrate the first and remedy the latter by baking muffins. Sadly, my feet are covered in mosquito bites that have reached full allergic potential. Putting on shoes hurts. So I sent Mr. Grumpipants on his way to buy things like flour, sugar, eggs, bananas, butter, muffin paper thingies and cocoa powder.

Because we're an international couple, there was some discussion as to what exactly was meant by 'cocoa powder'. It wasn't Nesquik, was it? Really? Then what did I mean?

Boyfriend is still amazed by my demands of cooking stuff from scratch. Mixes are so... easy! I don't see the point of paying three euros for maybe one euro's worth of flour, baking powder and sugar, mixed in a bag, even if buying the ingredients seems more expensive at the time. The fact that my man can actually cook and bake like a master once he has a recipe did not help his cause on 'but you only need to mix in oil and eggs'. We have the technology, we have the skills and buying mixes saves about five minutes off a ten to twelve minute process. No one is in that much of a rush.

If I got paid a euro and a half or more for every five minutes' work I did, I'd be making eighteen euros an hour. Times seven hours a day, times about twenty-one days a month... That's a pay of 2650 euros a month. For measuring out dry ingredients and pressing a button on a paddle mixer. Even if I subtract taxes and health insurance from that, I could be living quite comfortably off of my highly specialised abilities of pouring and reading. And knowing better than to smoke around large quantities of dry, flammable, aerosolised materials, I suppose, but I'm pretty sure such crimes against common sense and Darwinistic theory get punished by death quite quickly. For those wondering what I'm talking about, go to youtube, look up 'flour explosion'. Go on. You know you want to.

So Boyfriend set off, certain he'd get something horrendously wrong and we'd end up with baked bads rather than baked goods. I was pretty sure the only thing he might need to ask about was the cocoa powder, but once you stress that you're not making chocolate milk, most women people who work in supermarkets should know what he was on about.

Ten minutes later, my cell phone went off.

Did I mean wheat flour? Yes. This type? Any type. Germany has a very foreigner and beginner-unfriendly system of sorting flour into affordable flour, but with a cryptic, angricultural type name which states the type of grain and a number or named flour with a big hint as to what they can be used for and charging double for spelling it out for you. I'm pretty sure that anything that comes in one kilo packaging and states 'wheat' as its source can be used for baking. I could've used my dark meal that I bought to make dog biscuits with, but fibre doesn't belong together with vanilla sugar and butter in my book.

Next came the predictable, the cocoa. He'd actually found a box labeled 'cocoa powder for baking purposes', which is the German helpfulness equivalent of being spoon-fed by the staff in a restaurant. He was pretty sure it was right, but was the amount okay? Yes, the amount was fine.

He came back with everything, so we set to baking.

First came the low-fat, low-egg muffins with raspberries. I was going to throw in some vanilla sugar, but forgot. I also forgot to melt the butter. Powerful spoon action from Boyfriend - Super Cook solved the last problem and reduced the frozen berries to manageable little pieces.

We put those in the oven and tried again with high-everything chocolate muffins with banana pieces. We did try and melt the butter this time, but I forgot that butter, once overheated, explodes. Yeah, we still need to clean our microwave.

By the time we needed the oven again, the raspberry muffins were done. So we put in the chocolate ones, left the dishes in the sink 'to soak' (read: to not get put in the dishwasher due to infantile laziness) and arranged the raspberry ones on a plate with a note saying 'Welcome back from Boyfriend, Sis and Wolk'.

The chocolate ones are delicious. I know, because I checked. Four times. They're definitely delicious.

By the time J. and W. got home, there was a raspberry one missing, too. I guess someone was checking if ninjas poisoned them while we weren't looking. They hadn't: Boyfriend is fine.

The welcome back get-togeter was relatively quiet. There were awesome T-shirts, hello's and yum-tasty-muffins. A few thank yous were thrown in for taking care of the cats (Boyfriend and Sis did this).

I tried a piece of muffin, but it was definitely missing some vanilla sugar to give it a bit of oomph.

Iggy tried to liven things up. He found a dog blanket that smelled of dog, saw it wasn't his bed and decided it must therefore be his litter box. Luckily, J. could understand this. Iggy spent the rest of the time playing with Leon, who spent half of the time playing back and the other half being a massive canine pervert, trying to mount the puppy. They must have played for over half an hour. Our little ball of fur and happiness even went so far as to accept treats being given to him, because it were long treats, keeping the evil, evil human hands far away from him. Iggy's little doggy face was licked clean (making it all wet and spiky-haired) by the time J. told us we were being thrown out because she was tired after the long car ride.

 J. also had bought too much treats for her dogs, so we went home carrying an empty muffin plate and an armful of treats. Iggy went up by himself, then went up even further. I was once again the evil one who said 'No, bad dog!' to this behavior. He almost didn't do it when he noticed I was displeased, but then decided he was going to anyway. It might seem like a small thing, but I keep having this horror image of someone leaving the door open, Iggy being frightened and fleeing (he can only go up stairs, going down is a bit too much for his tiny body to manage) and then excreting his fear where our neighbours keep their shoes. I don't even know if the people upstairs like dogs.

So now we're home, washing stuff because the new shirts smell like cigarettes and I finally have enough coloreds to warrant a load. And I suppose I should go put the dishes in the dishwasher and clean the microwave before we get vermin.