Happy Birthday to Julia

For one's birthday in Germany one is expected to make cake for other people, like the people at work and friends. Different. Well Julia transformed the pumpkin from the last post into two pumpkin pies for her colleagues. I was nice enough not to make her bake me a cake also and instead made her a Middle-Eastern feast for supper.

Here we have (from top to bottom) baked Hummus, flat bread with Zaatar as appetizer, tamarind onions, Tabbouleh, beef stew with apricots and there is also pitta bread somewhere.

Here is Julia with the rain-poncho my parent got her and the multitude of gifts Calin and Susanne brought.
Julia also received a few things in the mail that morning from her parents and Baba, the most interesting of which was the way this bouquet of flowers was packaged. It came braced in its own box and the stems were plunged in gel chunks. The other box was full of Belgian goodies, chocolates in a Tintin tin, cheese balls, high end pasta and sauce, and a chocolate fondue kit.


That night Susanne tried to imprison the Cat in her experimental mutant cat lab, being the evil scientist that she is...



But the cat ran away and hid in the flower box.


I didn't have time that night to make a cake for Julia. But I did make her favorite German cake later that week, sour cherry cake with streusel topping. (Here it's all mashed into little pieces to help it cool, because she wanted to eat a piece as soon as it came out of the oven.)