New Teapots – part 2

When I was in London back in June, I came across one of the many touristy giftshops there. I had been considering getting a small teapot containing no more than two cups of tea for a while. I have done so as I have had a tendency make an entire pot of tea (the only pots I had here in Gellerup up until then both hold about a liter of tea), but for various reasons I haven’t been able to drink more than a cup or two before the rest of the tea went cold. This is especially a problem around Advent/December/Christmas, seeing that a huge part of my everyday that time of year is the Christmas tea.

As I write this, I start thinking that I might just as well use teabags or use one-cup filters for loose tea – but nevertheless, I found this teapot+cup in said tourist trap museum gift shop and thought I would kill two birds with one stone: get a souvenir from London and get the tiny teapot I had been thinking of getting for so long.

I can’t quite remember what I had with the inauguration of this one – probably a muffin – but with a quick cuppa I could just as easily have had freshly baked vanilla cookies (the dough freezes well – and if coming directly from the fridge, one can easily slice a few slices from the dough and bake them accordingly).

New Teapots – part 1

I was fortunate enough to inaugurate a new teapot back in the fall. It’s not that the old one wasn’t good – but it just didn’t work as well as I wanted it to. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t regret buying it – I just ended up realizing how unpractical it is.

The old teapot is a Bodum teapot – Bodum is the firm behind most quality French press coffee pots in Denmark if I’m not wrong – and this teapot is derived from the French press idea; pressing the loose tea down to the bottom of the filter when the tea is done steeping. Very convenient for black teas, there are no holes in the lower part of the filter, preventing the tea from going bitter from the tannin.
But with time, a couple of problems with this teapot occured; 1) it is impossible to get the stains off of the filter, and 2) it’s just awkward to brew tea with teabags (yes, you heard me – I use teabags) in it; you can’t use it without the filter since the opening is otherwise too wide to support the lid.

The Tea Pot - without the filter

Then one day, I saw this teapot and small matching mugs in a store in central Aarhus – and I fell in love.

Teapot and small mugs in store

The irony? The teapot and seven mugs (the number of my study group at the time) didn’t cost much more than half of what the Bodum teapot alone cost me. This teapot also has a filter for lose tea, but the design of it is so subtle that no matter what, the lid of the teapot fits the opening like a glove. This means that I can use it for both lose tea and for teabags. Yay! On top of that, the filter is very easy to clean. Double-Yay!

I celebrated the new teapot with muffins made from a new recipe (rather: new at the time of the inauguration) – they are so freakin' easy and are made from ingredients I usually have in the kitchen anyway, and the end result is an appropriate (as in: not overwhelming) number of muffins. So I almost need an excuse not to make them these days. You can find the recipe in the previous post on this very blog.

Yum.

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Gallery

The Entire Teapot – with filter and presslid

The Tea Pot – without the filter

The Filter – brown from the black tea

The teapot in store

Teapot and small mugs in store

The filter is the item on the right. 🙂

Yum.

Recipe: English Muffins

Source: This is based on another recipe – but as with any other recipe on this blog, I edited a bit. The original recipe can be found right here.

I found this one while looking for a simple muffin recipe, and one must admit that this must fulfill that demand – even to an extend that I didn’t expect. But since I don’t like raisins other ways than how they come in the package, that was a no-go, and since I had no lemon, so was that. But although the muffins are great without, a dash of lemon might dress it well.

Another perk is that these muffins freeze well.

Yield: 9 muffins.

Ingredients
150 g butter
150 g sugar
150 g flour
2 eggs
1 teaspoon baking powder

To-do
Let the butter soften – this makes it easier to work with.
Preheat the oven to 200º C (390º F).
Mix butter and sugar.
Mix in the eggs.
Mix flour and baking powder – and mix it in with the rest.
Divide between nine muffin tins/moulds.
Bake for 15 minutes or until golden and unwobbly.

Enjoy with your afternoon/evening tea/coffee – eg. a good Earl Grey.

Randomness Recharged

Hey all,

I was talking to a fellow student over the Facebook chat the other night. She needed more pictures for her own blog, and I wanted to update this one. But I think we both felt a bit out of blogging mojo – in spite of myself having a bunch of drafts lying around (some of them from when I started here on WordPress a couple of years ago).

One of the reasons why I started blogging more regularly often was that I wanted to get into a proper rythm and get a bit of practice – and most important: “speak” (write) my mind and communicate various things to the rest of the world. I wanted communication through writing to be part of my professional life as well as wanting a place to share aforementioned various things.

But then something went… wrong. Or maybe not wrong, but not how it should have gone. I came up with other blogs.

One blog was Eksilkøbenhavneren, where I wanted to share the process of moving from Copenhagen to Aarhus in order to study dramaturgy at Aarhus University. It still holds its validity as it is written for my Danish friends and family, and thus it’s written in Danish. But many of my personal reflections moved away from this present blog when creating Eksilkøbenhavneren.

Another blog is Stage Takeoff. Initially having a drive for travel that is about as dominating as the drive to do theater, it didn’t take much inspiration to start a blog that would be based on the combination of the two. But what happened was that I took everything theater up on that blog – although that wasn’t the initial plan with neither ye olde present blog nor Stage Takeoff.

Suddenly the themes that were important to me were outsourced to the aforementioned blogs (I even made a blog specific for travel updates, but it was barely updated, and in retrospect really vague and barely worth the time) – and it is as if focus was removed from here instead of using the blog as a centering unit.

The only thing happening to Eksilkøbenhavneren will probably be no more than just start blogging on it again. But both this, my personal blog, and Stage Takeoff will have a minor overhaul each. I will be taking a look at all of my blogs and collect evrything possible right here on my personal blog. Stage Takeoff will go back to be the combination of theater and travel (occasional stints will be rare and/or limited to the matching Twitteraccount).

As for the future – I don’t know where I will be going with writing, but as it is it doesn’t seem as if I have the basis to create something new to write about theater (or anything else for that matter) from a personal perspective on. If I have anything to say on theater, it will either have to be from here, from Stage Takeoff, or from the platform of those I write for (and in the case of the latter, I will to my best to either retreive permission to re-post it, digitally scrapbook it, or link it from here). The day I have the basis to start a professional blog on theater, I will. Until then I see no need not to “exploid” my own personal corner of the Interwebs for the cause.

Yours truly.

😉