Lazy Saturday afternoons...

Do you know these days when it is raining throughout the whole day without stopping for even a minute? And do you know these days when there is hardly any sunlight? So even though it is not later than three o’clock you have to turn on the light because otherwise you would not be able to resist the strong desire to just lay down on the sofa, turn on the TV or sleep for about an hour.
 

Yesterday was such a day and trying to keep my eyes open and concentrate on all the things I should do was my biggest challenge. What happened was that a big battle took place in my head. On the one hand I knew that I really had to work and study for university but on the other hand it hardly made any sense. I had been sitting in front of my laptop and had been staring at some Russian exercises for too long without anything happening. So I decided or better realized that it was hopeless to keep trying when all I really wanted was to sleep or read or whatever.
 

Exactly. WHATEVER. You have to know that I have got my own strategies for situations like that one. Watching TV or sleeping would somehow make me feel guilty, especially when I know that I really have to learn.  So what I have figured out over the last years is that baking first and foremost doesn’t cause any feelings of guilt and beside that I absolutely love baking. It makes me forget all the things happening around me (or work waiting for me) and all I do is to concentrate on the different steps of baking a cake or whatever.
 

So the first thing I did after having decided to stop to learn (or at least trying to learn) was to look for a recipe. At the beginning I had absolutely no idea what I was looking for, but suddenly I remembered a recipe that I had tried out about a year ago. It is a yeast pastry, similar to cinnamon rolls but instead of the cinnamon use walnuts (and because there were no walnuts at home I had to improvise and used hazelnuts instead – there’s only a subtle difference in taste). It’s actually a simple recipe but it takes some time because you have to wait for the yeast dough to rise. So it was getting dark outside while I was baking and rolling and so on.

In the end, when I perceived the wonderful smell of my yeast pastry, I knew that spending my whole afternoon with baking instead of learning had been worth it! And the taste of the end result was convincing as well :-)