I don’t have an oven here, but I do have co-workers who are happy to oblige me by letting me use theirs. So I’ve made peanut butter cookies in three different ovens. Usually me coming over to bake also includes an invitation to dinner, so after all is said and dine… these often turn out to be midnight baking adventures.

Due to the (relative) success of my cookies, I decided to follow up with something vaguely more healthy: carrot cake. I made one last night for a friend who’s leaving at the end of this week, and brought it to work. It was worth it just to see all everyone going, “You put WHAT in this cake?” Even better when people didn’t believe it had carrots in it. “What do you mean, carrot cake? This is a gingerbread cake.”

For what it’s worth, it was a delicious carrot cake, and easy to make (Carrot Cake III on allrecipes.com). A few substitutions though:
Instead of 2 cups sugar, use one cup white sugar and one cup of cassonade (light brown sugar).
Add some nutmeg (probably less than a teaspoon).
Using 3 cups of icing sugar for the frosting is sufficient.

I had to make a few substitutions (cream cheese doesn’t really exist in France… and I was too cheap to buy vanilla extract, so I used vanillin sugar) but overall there was no problem with it at all! As good as any carrot cake I’ve had at home. And I think this is the first time I’ve made a cake that turned out!

Entering the final stretch of my time here! Everything since January has really flown by. I’ll be sorry to leave.

Just look at those things.

My lab mate had asked me, “Do you just want to eat them or are you interested in the prep too?” I said “prep,” naturally, so here I am at 10 am on a Sunday morning blotting dry little amphibian limbs.

Once thawed (you can buy these in the supermarket, they come individually wrapped) and blotted, you toss them in a bit of flour, then fry them in some butter. Once that’s done, you check them all in the oven with a butter/parsley/garlic sauce and bake for 20 minutes or so.

They come out looking like this:

Fresh out of the oven and ready to be disassembled.

There is (unsurprisingly) not a lot of meat on these things, but the sheer amount of butter that goes into them ensures that you won’t eat too many. And what do they taste like? Fish. The flesh isn’t quite firm enough to be compared to chicken, I found.

Still haven’t had escargot yet, though.

(Inspired by a conversation with my brother )

Strasbourg, like most other French cities, has a lovely and impressive cathedral. This one happens to be rather Gothic, and according to Wikipedia, was the tallest building in the world at one time!

Inside Notre-Dame de Strasbourg

Inside there’s a rather intricate astronomical clock.

Takes a ticking and keeps on ticking... wait, that's something else

Outside the cathedral is one of Strasbourg’s biggest Christmas markets. I found this little village at the foot of a giant Christmas tree in the center of the square. The Christmas market sells all the usual suspects (vin chaud, Christmas decorations, pain d’épices) along with some Alsatian specialties: bredle (the ones I bought were like cinnamonny gingerbread) and bretzel.

An adorable little village of light!

That basically wrapped up my séjour in Strasbourg, although I had to take a picture of this outside the train station before I left the following morning:

Typically Alsatian? Storks and Christmas markets

Storks are to Alsace as orcas are to BC. My roommate told me that they are known to build nests on chimneys… unfortunately, I only saw these plastic ones.

European Parliament

The title of this is either “Europe has heart” or “Europe at heart”; I can’t remember if there’s an accent over the “a” or not.

I take a lot of pictures of sculptures

What was a little annoying is that I discovered that it wasn’t actually possible to visit European Parliament when I was there. They take groups, it seems, but individual visitors are only allowed at certain times… as a result I walked around the edge of the building and ended up taking random photos instead.

Random ball thing in the pseudo-courtyeard

Same thing for the European Court of Human Rights. The architecture of this is supposed to evoke a boat pulling up to the riverbank, which isn’t obvious from this picture. There was a relatively high-profile case going on around this time; some Irish women were charging that Ireland’s law against abortion deprived them of certain rights.

Yeah, can't get in here either

The last building I visited here was the Council of Europe. By this time I figured it’d be a good idea to take a picture of myself somewhere… so I found a post and (after multiple attempts) managed to take this one. It came with a price though…. as I was picking up my camera from the lantern-thingy I’d put it on, I knocked it to the ground instead. RIP Nikon Coolpix.

I don't know if this photo was really worth it in the end

The rest of my day was spent trying to find a FNAC to replace it. Luckily (or not; I am really starting to hate this camera), they had the same model in stock.

Anyway, so my first real day in Strasbourg started off with a long bus ride to the Jardin des Deux Rives (“Two Shores Garden”). There’s a pedestrian/cyclist bridge here which leads over the Rhine and into Germany!

Two countries, one bridge

That was the easiest international crossing I’ve ever done.

Anyway, onto Germany:

No, seriously, I was in Germany

The French caption below the street sign reads:
“Nibelungen, dwarves of the Nibelungen legend, owners of treasure”
I can only assume something’s been lost in translation….

Kehl is pretty unremarkable; it’s a small town. I walked up and down the main shopping area, bought a few things, understood about 2% of what was said to me (“hallo”, “danke schön”, and “tschüss”), and somehow managed to buy an apple pastry. I have no idea how people travel in countries where they don’t speak the language at all.

Das Rathaus

I’ve always found the German word for “town hall” amusing, because my limited knowledge of German means I default to English, where this would clearly mean “rat house.” That might not be inaccurate for some councillors, I suppose….

That weekend, a cold snap hit France: it was snowing in Lyon, and the forecast for Strasbourg wasn’t much better: – 12C. Luckily, as soon as I got out of the station, I saw what I’d come to see:

Christmas markets!!

The Christmas markets in Strasbourg are supposed to be among the best in the country. What makes them absolutely lovely for a weary traveller is the copious amounts of mulled wine which can be had. No, seriously, it warms you up. At some point I also decided that I’d lived long enough in this country without eating snails and so took a tentative first step with a baguette au beurre d’escargot. It just kind of tasted like garlic bread. (Hey, wait, according to wordreference.com there are no snails in beurre d’escargot! (“garlic and parsley butter”?) I’ve been had!)

So pretty!

Strasbourg is pretty in the snow. Seeing half-timbered houses in winter just brought an inexplicable smile to my face. They’re adorable, okay?

"Christchild Market"

(So named in reaction to the Catholic tendency to attach saints to everything.)

I'm a pretty waterfall.

So I headed out on the second night with the intention of walking up to the basilica on Fourvière and snapping as many pictures as I could. Which I kind of did. Here are the best:

Basilica of Fourvière

On the left you can see the statue of the Virgin Mary which was basically the element déclencheur of the whole Fête des Lumières. At least, I think that’s what it is. It’s mounted quite high, actually, so you can’t see it that well…

A little bit closer

You could almost say... gong show. But not.

They were projecting lights on the facade of the basilica, accompanied by the bells, which was pretty neat, actually: I heard strains of Carmen as I walked up to the hill. The pictures don’t really do it justice… you had to be there, in other words.