happy 2016 and a quick review of gaumenperlen 2015

First of all: I wish you a very happy, sunny, joyful, healthy, exciting and tasty news year 2016!
Let´s start with a quick review of the year 2015 : It was really a very wild one – for gaumenperlen as well as for mobile minds and me:-)
Reviewing all the pictures a lot of scenes came back vividly to my mind and I smiled as well as being glad, that some thigs are really over.

The year started with a fantastic trip to Genova, where all the orange tress were already carrying fruits! It was like a direct jump form winter into summer. I remember a very nice party and my walks at the seaside, the water drops of the spray in my face. These short days were one of the most beautiful eperiences of the year 2015.
Afterwards in March I had a wonderful birthdayparty at www.briefmarkenweine.de – big thanks again to Alessandro and Nicola for hosting this event with so much care, attention and love!
Briefmarkenweine is still the best winebar in town and my absolute favourite. There are always new and rare wines to discover, and the two are the greatest hosts!!!!:-), have a wonderful team, and marvellous anti-pasti. I hope they will be here forever!
Then there were a lot of professional u-turns in early summer, not easy to handle but in the end everything worked out, and I am really greatful for that. That was why the gaumenperlen summer production did not really happen, except for a few private gems: One new chutney out of grapes, barberries and dill, and in autumn a fantastic chocolate plum cream - best to eat with homemade vanilla icecream.
Vanilla icecream ist the keyword for the next chapter: I still remember the superhot weeks in summer, when it was nearly impossible to move, the city was completely overheated. People acted slowly and sometimes a bit crazy:-). I still remember a great garden dinner evening in the coolness of the lounge at rummelsburg at a friends´house. I discovered two new favourites during that hot period:One at the cafe aroma in Schöneberg - they call it maumau. It is a light cocktail, very simple and it tastes so refreshing and bracing. And one at a street cafe in Prenlauer Berg, it is called "affogato al caffe".

How to prepare Maumau

Cut a pealed fresh ginger peace in very tiny slices. Put them in a glas with a few fresh menta leaves and round about 2cl homemade Limoncello. Then pound it slightly. Put ice cubes on it and fill it up with an extra brut Prosecco or Champagne. Marvellous summer stuff!
Since I did not like the Limoncellos I tried – they all taste so artificial and remind me more of american chewing gums than of fres lemon – I satrted to make Limoncello on my own. The result of thsi period were two extraordinary Fruit Liquors: A Limoncello and an Orancello – some technique, but made out of Oranges. Unfortuneately the whole production has already left my kitchen: one part for presents and the other part for all the dinner drinks @ palais gaumenperlen during the summer dinners.

Let´s move on to my second favourite summer rediscovery: affogato al caffe. A fine italian Espresso with a little bowl of vanilla ice cream. This little sweet thing will stay on my alltime favourites list forever. Super simple and very fine taste. But be careful: The espresso really has to be of high quality and really hot and the vanilla ice cream should also be not too sweet – best way: homemade:-)

At the end of the hot summer I started my trip over Munich to Switzerland for a fantastic holiday with my very dear friends. Back to Berlin I already planned the second trip to Switzerland for their wonderful wedding party at the Albula Garden Ressort - I was so happy for them that they got amrried after 15 years:-) Unbelievable nice event, so many nice people, top food and wine and sunshine the whole day as well as one of the last hot summer nights. Will never forget that party.
Autum started softly and turned into a wild final period of the year. Had a lot of very nice and dear visitors here in Berlin, went to the RAW wine fair with my favourite private Sommelier:-) and met a lot of interesting new people. There were so many marvellous moments in the last two month, a lot of them to private to talk about, but they were so sweet and turned this wild year into a soft and sweet one in the end.
All the best for 2016 for you!! Thank´s for being my friends, guests and partners!

dolce vita ahoi! 
monika ebert • mobile minds

Munich + Switzerland + bella Italia

Last week I traveled to Munich, Switzerland and bella Italia. In Switzerland I visited my dearest friends - now just married :-) On my first stop in Munich with family and friends I took part in a fantastic winewalk from Andreas Röhrich, Chief Sommelier @ Munich´s top Restaurant http://www.broeding.de . This winewalk took place at the "Genussfestival" and he dedicateded his walk to the grape Silvaner. Andi is one of those fantastic sommeliers who have a whole world of wine knowledge as well as the rare talent to find the right words, tell fantastic wine stories and encourage everybody to trust and enrich the own tasting experiences.

We discovered one of the most impressing natural white wines I ever tasted, made with the oldest Georgian wine amphoras out of Silvaner grapes. Unbelievable taste and a very nice, gifted and experienced wine maker, Manfred Rothe - http://weingut-rothe.de/.

Travelling further to Switzerland we had a fantastic week of excursions over the alps alternating with relaxed garden days on the fantastic terrasse of my friends right next to the river Albula. Because the heat was enormous - sometimes I layed down indoor on the marvellous appartment floor to cool down my backside - the fllor is made out of black natural slate. And I had a glass of spritzer near by.-)  

A few days I took care of all the garden Oleanders in the evening, my favourite southern trees, and I was very happy that they overcame the extreme heat with my "water treatment" :-) very well.
 
Our terrasse wine evenings were focused either on Italien or French top wines. We had a fantastic Tignanello and a Château Lagune Grand Cru, both excellent and very different red wines. After drinking wines of that range for a whole week it is always hard to downgrade to one of those nice but normal daily wines. 
With the wines we had superbe salmon or lamb filet from the grill accompanied by fresh garden vegetables like string beans or a fine summer salad.  

One of our trips over the Julier Alpine Pass and the Silvaplana led us to Chiavenna, a small, very nice little Village in the region Bergell. We had a marvelous, classical, simple Italian lunch at the river terrace and afterwards drove on to an impressing little castle called Castelmur. Not only the building and the antique interior were impressing also the modern art installations of a current exhibition of video installations added a fantastic new level of inspiration to our stay.
To sum it up in a few words: the quietness, the deep breath of raw nature and our excursions and evening talks as well as our silent moments of indulgence, our walks and dinners were so inspiring that it is hard for big beloved Berlin to fascinate me at the moment. I am very glad that I am back there to the Albula again at the End of August.

dolce vita ahoi!
monika ebert • mobile minds

Caramel cheesecake with almonds

I love cheesecake. We have a few very nice Cafés in Berlin specialised in cheesecake. They have excellent cakes – but homemade is homemade:-). The perfume in the kitchen when you bake a cheescake is as magic as the different textures and tastes of the cheesecake – changing hour by hour and day by day: lukewarm fresh out of the oven – an unbelievable pleasure. Then after one day the cake starts to mature, like real cheese. And if the friends you invited for coffee left a piece (which is a very rare situation:-) even the second and thrid day taste and consistancy of the cake changes.
After I red a whole bunch of cheescake recipies obver the last decade I combined my favourite two recipies with two recently found ones and made a cake half with peanuts and half with almonds. I decided that the almonds work perfectly so here is the result: Top of all cheesecakes 2015 with almonds and caramel.

What you need

I normally work with a smaller baking pan which has a caliber of 22 cm. 

The ingredients

100 grammes of butter cookies

80 grammes of butter (60 for the cakebase | 20 for the caramel)

100 grammes of planed almonds (40 for the base | 60 for the topping)

4 eggs

110 grammes of sugar  (80 for the topping | 30 for the caramel)

80 grammes of crème fraîche

600 grammes of fat cream cheese

1 soup spoon of fresh orange juice 

How to 
For the cake base crumble the butter cookies and work almonds and the melted lukewarm butter in. Cover the cake pan with a baking paper and press the cakebase on the bottom and form a border of 3 cm. 
For the topping mix the cream cheese, the eggs and the sugar forand stir the ingredients for two or three minutes. In the end put the almonds in. Spread the topping plain over the whole cake base. 
For the caramel melt the rest of the butter and the est of the sugar until the two ingredients beging to become light brown. Be careful!!!! when adding the orange juice!!!! Very hot steam is rising!!! Put the pot beside and if the steam is over stir until the juice is mixed completely with the caramel. Then add the caramel sauce spoon by spoon over the cheesecake topping and stir it slightly in with a little fork.
Bake the cheesecake for round about 50 minutes – electric oven, 180 degree. Cover it with sugar powder after it has cooled down.

Bon appétit!

dolce vita ahoi!
monika ebert • mobile minds

 

Short trip to Liguria Genoa – with pasta genovese :-)

Last weekend I was invited to a big birthday party in Luguria. The venue was near Genoa in a samll village called Nervi. The unbelievabe coast impressions, the wonderful little bars at the seaside and the wild sea of January combined with sunshine and round about 12 degree temperature outside were so heart movong that I felt like being in a dream – travelling there out of the snow covered Berlin. 

I have been to that wonderful coast in my twens so it was a very special trip for me to be there again and to remember those wonderful italy trips of that decade fo my life. There were trees full of oranges and the air was so mild and smooth like on a vrigin spring day. Everything I ate there tasted differently because of that salty, mild, warm air. The woman who celebrated her birthday was so wonderful and impressing, that I was totally enchanted of her, ehr freinds and her party - "a typical italien party" as she said after midnight:-) Mille grazie Chiara! We spent a wonderful evening there at a bar called "Bomfin" at the seaside of Nervi and besides that we drank a lot of nice spumante we ate a few very nice genoese delicacies. Genoa has to offer a lot of them.

Pasta Genovese

The most famous and most known of these genoese delicacies was the pasta geovese, a fresh pasta with the classical, well known paesto genovese. I fell for it when it is fresh and handmade. It is very simple to cook: you stir a bunch of fresh aromatic basil with fine raped "parmeggiano" (parmesan cheese), pine nuts, salt, if you want a bit of black pepper and a fine strong olive oil. You stir until you got a purree. Some peronple add one cooke potatoe to make it more viscid. This paesto genovese you put over hot handmade pasta. That´s it. If all the ingredients are of high organic quality it is one of the most tasty and most simple things I have ever eaten in my life. Never make paseto genovese with basil out of the supermarket or with low quality parmeggiano!

Back in Berlin, sitting at my work desk today, grey outside, everything feels a bit strange after that weekend full of sun, nice people, unforgettable moments and italien delicacies.

I want to travel very, very soon again through the whole country. 

dolce vita ahoi!
monika ebert • mobile minds