After Toni described what we got in our package the other day, it is my (Thea’s) part to tell you a little bit about our childhood memories and the content of our boxes. When Toni heard the theme of this swap, she instantly turned to me and said: “We must do a cellar cake”. A cellar cake (in older times also named Lukullus after the great Latin gourmet and commander Lucullus) is a chocolate cake made of cacao, coconut fat and layers of shortbread cookies.

However, something that has shaped our whole life is a saying my mom used to tell us all the time: “Everything must change in order to stay good”. Living after this aphorism, our childhood was never full of traditions and the same meals, food or even Christmas Trees but rather experiments and new stuff. That’s why we decided to spice up the good old Lukullus and try it in different versions. In the end we made four different versions of the chocolaty treat:

• A White cellar cake with cranberries and whole wheat cookies
• A more traditional Lukullus in mini square format with a hint of amaretto
• Squared mini cellar cakes with a surprise of red jam inside
• Finally Mini Cellar Cakes in muffin shape with meringues and pieces of whole wheat cookies

Then (very much like in our childhood) Toni ceded me to do the packaging :). I’ve always been a buff for paper, boxes and everything around Packaging. Thus I rummaged through my “Structural Design” books (by Rabbit Press) and made up these square and rectangular boxes made out of sturdy cardboard paper in Yellow, Blue and White. Each recipe got another audiobook series, which we really loved in the past. Toni and I both collected ridiculous amounts of tapes –never CDs and we also do not believe in CDs for children today, because there is this certain atmosphere about cassettes! CDs take away the joy of arguing about who is responsible for pulling the magnetic band ;). Toni used to make homemade cassette covers for the ones we had copied *ehem* (back in the days we were not as indulged in copyright laws as we are now ;) and I knew my “Bibi Blocksbergs” so well, that they would stop the cassette after 5 seconds and I had to guess which episode it was.

Just on the morning of sending the package, I baked MY childhood memory cake: the simple sugar yeast cake made by mom and cut into little rectangles. Simply heaven, especially when still warm!

You will find our recipes later this week on the Foodboard, which our lovely organizers of “Post from my kitchen” have created.
We hope you like what we came up with. We definitely love all the ideas we saw around the web! Thanks so much, Silke, for being an awesome swap partner!

Yours, Toni & Thea

Everyone loves to meeting friends. However when your friends are spread around the world because you have met them digitally through blogging, Facebook or their wonderful Pinterest findings it is much harder to meet up.

This coming week we have another chance to catch up with some of our friends from the blogging world. We will go to Stockholm to attend and speak at “Meet The Blogger Stockholm 2013″. We are really excited about this bunch of lifestyle and living bloggers we already know and value

• Liselore, who is the organizer of the MeetTheBlogger events
• Chi from OneZeroSixKids, who was here last year for The Hive Berlin and is one of our valued proof readers for English
• Mary-Ellen from HOPinteriors, who we’ve shared a lovely coffee in London with and who is the official blogger of MeetTheBlogger and will again do the challenging task of live-blogging
• Lovely Jeanette from Byfryd, who we started loving at The Hive and who is one of the most talented lifestylists (= Thea’s neologism for people who just make their live beautiful)
• Frida Ramstedt from the popular blog and iPad magazine Trendenser, who did the last keynote in Amsterdam – a very inspiring woman
• Emma from Emma’s Design Blog – Thea had the pleasure of getting to know her during the Blog’nhagen tour in Copenhagen last year
• Judith from Joelix, who will be contributing to sisterMAG in the next issue and who is a dear friend we always love meeting (Hive, Hello Etsy Eindhoven …)
• Of course Elodie Love from Hamburg with one of the rare flower blogs out there (Madame Love) and who Thea had the most fabulous tour at Blogst conference
• More TheHive friends from Berlin: Caroline from Trend Daily and Toni from Skandivis
• Our good friends from Germany Ricarda (23qmstil) and Clara (Tastesheriff), as well as Kathrin from Happy Home Blog
• You might remember her project from our past issue: Steffi from I Love Eco – a really great Dutch blog about eco-friendly prodcucts
• Deborah from Kickcan and Conkers, who always has the best stuff she shares on Facebook :)
• vtwonen author Laura who has been incredibly nice and generous about our magazine

And as always there are some names you have seen around in the World Wide Web and you finally get to meet in person. We are especially looking forward to getting to know:

• Nina Holst from stylizimo
• Desiree from Vosges Paris, who I’ve had lovely email conversations with, but we have never really met and talked
• Of course Will from Bright Bazaar, we definitely are looking forward to hearing his speech and finally meeting him in person!!

We are also really honoured to be able to speak at the conference. Our topic will be “Our creative process”, which is a very exciting topic to talk about. However if you cannot attend, don’t be sad! You can follow all the activities and speeches through the Social Media channels of Meet The Blogger: their live blog over at meetthebloggerstockholm.com, their Twitter feed @meettheblogger or you can follow them on Facebook.

Now we only have to still put together our presentation!! But it wouldn’t be fun without the last-minute pressure, would it?

All pictures: Meet The Blogger Amsterdam 2012

Sometimes the best things happen when you don’t expect them. On a bus ride back from the rewardStyle Party (see post about that here) the lovely Andrea from Ginger Vintage and Jasmin from madametamtaam offered to give me their spare ticket to the Lena Hoschek Fashion Show on Tuesday.

Lena Hoschek is an Austrian designer from Graz. After school she graduated in Fashion Design in Vienna, afterwards worked as an intern for Vivienne Westwood which inspired her to open her own atelier in Graz. Today she has shops in Vienna and Berlin Mitte. She is one of the set designers of Berlin Fashion Week. Her collection could be described as “Punk and Folklore” with many Russian influences mixed with hardcore biker boots. Her dresses are known to be very retro, inspired by the fifties with wide skirts, small waistlines and you could also find these ingredients in the most recent collection. This time embroideries, puffy sleeves and Russian inspired hairstyles dominated the looks.

It definitely was an exciting atmosphere in the Mercedes Benz tent with such a big show to start. Many celebrities or wanna-bes gallivanting next to the runway.

Take as an inspiration:

• Large shoulder scarves with bold patterns
• Mix and match biker boots with dresses (not sure you will see me doing that but as you can see it is legitimate)
• Braided hair (definite yes)

All in all the collection reminded me a little bit of Ulyana Sergeenko with a rougher edge.

I also saw the next fashion show from Rebekka Ruétz, but I’ll tell you more about that tomorrow ;).

Yours, Thea