Baking and Mistaking

Hey guys!:)

First of all I have to say, that I love cooking. Before TKK I attended a school, where we had cooking as a subject once a week and in the end we had to pass a final exam, so I learned a lot there especially to maintain my passion for cooking and baking. 
So, our homework task, to find a food blog on the internet was funny for me and I spent my afternoon navigating through several food blogs. Suddenly I came across that one, which caught my attention: www.bakingandmistaking.com/
It seems perfect to me, because I am very interested in desserts especially cookies and cakes. There are recipes of brownie cookies, trio cookies, mini apple pies and even Oreo cheesecakes - what else could you ask for?!

As I have seen some blogs also concentrating on baking before, there was something missing: pictures. They can change a lot within a few seconds. I recognized that the last hour because if a food blog doesn't consist of any pictures, it is completely boring and looks too serious. Pictures make texts look more inviting and cheerful. Also the other visual aspects like for example background, font and colours are not inconsiderable, they decide whether your post will be read or not.

To be up to my own expectations of a good structured food blog, I added a picture and a recipe of 

Chocolate dinosaur brownie cookies:

Recipe: From the Smitten Kitchen Cookbook
1 cup (2 sticks/220g) butter or margarine, softened
1 1/2 cups sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
3 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder 
2/3 cup unsweetened cocoa, sifted

Beat together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy, three to five minutes. Add in the eggs and vanilla and beat until smooth and uniform.
Add in the four, salt, baking powder and cocoa and mix until incorporated and smooth, with no remaining flour streaks. 
Wrap the dough in plastic and chill for at least an hour.
Roll the dough out to 1/4" for thicker cookies or 1/8" for thinner ones. Cut shapes, transfer to a parchment paper lined baking sheet and bake on 350 F for about 10 minutes.
Transfer to a wire rack to cool. 

learning vocabs - a never-ending story!

Back to school: monday morning, vocabulary test in the second lesson: "which words should we have learned?" - that was one of the daily-routine-sentences in our class. Reading through them in the first lesson was enough to get a quite good grade. But I think now that system will not work anymore.As we have heard at the tutorium, there are differend types of "vocab learners": the ones, who have to walk around in the room, these who use internet platforms and those, who have to write down a list with all the vocabs, they have to keep in mind.
I think, I am one of the last group, because I need to see the word and then I can go on.

In one of the last lessons someone spoke about flashcards. I researched a little bit about them and found out, that would be a good idea additionally to the lists, because there are always words where I know, "that word will be tricky to remember". Those words I should give more attention, so my personal resolution for the future are flashcards.

I create a traditional vocabulary flashcard on white paper. Then I write the word in very large writing on one side of the flashcard and on the other side, I write down a definition gained from a dictionary. A good thing would also be to write a definition in own words. Then I sometimes split the word into roots and define them. Antonyms (opposite words) and synonyms (similar words) are also on the backside of the card. I split the verbs from the nouns by using different colours.Everywhere at home I pin them up. In the kitchen on the fridge, in the living room next to the television, in the lavatory and in my room above my bed, so it's the first thing I see in the morning and the last in the evening. :)

Maybe my method seems that logical to you, to use a few details of my post.
I hope so :)

Have a nice friday evening :)

Pogonophobia - the fear of beards?!

Sometimes there are days, were I really can't find my motivation anywhere. If you know what I mean, you also might know how hard is is, especially in those times, to force oneself to learn something for example an upcoming, let's say, english examination.

If you are really completely unmotivated but willing to do something for english, except from grammar, vocab learning and writing, I have something for you.
It is called "unnecessary knowledge", but of course it is not unnecessary: knowledge never is unnecessary! ;)

There are 10 little pieces of wisdom for you:

Leonardo Da Vinci invented the scissors.

98% of houses in the United States have at least one television set.

A horse can look forward with one eye and back with the other.

The youngest parents were 8 and 9 and from China.

The original name for butterfly was flutterby.

It was the left shoe that Aschenputtel (Cinderella) lost at the stairway, when the prince tried to follow her. 

Pogonophobia is the fear of beards and pagaphobia the fear of Popes.

The Hawaiian alphabet has only 12 letters.

It has been estimated that humans use only 10% of their brain.

A group of owls is called a parliament.

See you at the english cours!:)

How to create "To-Do-Lists"?

There are those days, where we have to do a thousand things in one day and we don't know how we are going to get them all done. Anyway they may be difficult to keep in mind for a long time because the average person's short-term memory can only keep 7 pieces of information for about 30 seconds. If you have more than 7 tasks that you need to remember, you are already setup for failure.
To avoid this, people began to use To-Do-Lists and I am going to tell you, how to create one:

✓ First of all, you need to write down anything you can think of, that needs to be done in the next time, irrespective of whether its a work task, family task, home task etc…

✓ The next step is to group items together (like for example: home related, friends related)

✓ Then put them into the right priorization order, the most important things in the beginning and the less important ones in the end.

✓ Consider to take just things, which will get you towards what you want and to get rid of unimportant tasks, because they are only stealing time.

✓ What also has to be mentioned in a To-Do-List is the time you will probably need for each "work", so note it next to them, to have an approximate idea how long it will take you to finish.

✓ If you have finished something, go on and tick it or cross it off your list because so you will get a feeling of progress.

✓ The List has to be kept in a central place, where you see it all the time, so you can't be tempted to ignore it.

✓ Keep the To-Do-List updated and add tasks everytime you have new ones.

If you try it like that you will make progress for sure.

Have a nice evening!:)

fəˈnetɪk ˈsɪmbəlz

Hey :)
if you understood my title, I think, you must have seen the 3rd page of our vocabulary in use at least once, because it means: phonetic symbols.
I chose this topic, because it is of our first progress check. I haven't spend a lot of time on styding the phonetic signs yet but I don't want to underestimate that part.
So I made researches on the internet and found some exercises for you. Test yourself how competent you are in understanding the phonetic symbols. Further down there are the solutions. Have fun! :)

1. əˈdɪktɪd
2. ˈleɪzɪ
3. mi:n
 4. ʧes
5. ˈfænsɪ
6. fæt
7. əˈtræktɪv
 8. ru:d
9. ˈtɔ:kətɪv
10. stænd

solutions:
1. addicted; 2. lazy; 3. mean; 4. chess; 5. fancy; 6. fat; 7. attractive; 8. rude; 9. talkative; 10. stand

I hope you could solve a few words of them and that my blog was useful to you.
[gʊd ˈi:vnɪŋ] ! :)