winter is here ....and baking some cookies

and finally it's here. winter hit us with a storm last week and everywhere covered with snow now. it was not that bad , I heard  somewhere in Ontario they had a 100+ cm snow !

I love snow , its whiteness ..but after a few days , of course it won't be white anymore :( and everywhere will be  a mess. behind our apartment there is a snow dumpster , where they put part of the snow cleaned from street there and it's already 1/4 full ! the  streets also get quite messy , the 3 lanes street become one lane, the first lane  where was for parking now is fulled with snow so the next lane is parked with car and there will be only one lane for driving ! but no more complain from me because we'll have a long way to the end of winter and I don't want to be one of those people who are not happy during the winter and complains all the time so I got myself ready mentally and emotionally  for winter :)
I came from a country that have 4 separate season but the lowest we go in the winter in our city was about -10 C.I could not imagine at that time what  -40C is or how you could live at those conditions. but now is different.I got used to it and life goes on normally in the those severe cold weather.now enough about the weather .
I baked something new yesterday (new for me of course). it's cookie filled with jam . one of my friend cooked the most delicious apple jam a few months ago and becuse it tasted so good I use it only for baking .
here is the reciept , it is not mine but I don't remember from where I wrote it down .

Jam filled cookie:

butter 300 gr
250 gr sugar
400-500 gr flour ( it depends I used a little more than 400gr , so start with 400 and add frequently till you feel the dough is ready)
2 eggs
1 Tsp vanilla
1 1/2 Tsp baking powder
1 Tsp of orange zest  or 1/2 Tsp of orange essence ( this part added by myself )
Jam for filling ( I used apple jam , you could use any kind you want ,like  raspberry ..)
melted and cooled chocolate if you want ( I did not used it this time because I was in hurry!)

Mix , butter, flour, eggs, sugar, vanilla, and baking powder, and work the dough for at least 5-8 minutes, to get it smooth and workable. Then you can divide into two; and add melted chocolate to one half, and mix  it well.
Roll out each dough to a 1/2 cm thickness, and cut out cookies with cookie mould (put some flour on the top of the board so the cookies separate easily when you want to transfer to the pan without any misshaping ) . Bake  for about 5-8 minutes at 350 F, just pay attention not to overcook them, they should still remain white.
after cooled down , put plenty of jam between and stick them together . be generous on the jam because it get absorbed by the cookie and dried after a while.
you could dip them in the melted chocolate too if you like ( or any other fun ideas you have) so they don't look boring like mine!
Enjoy..! 

If I had to live my life again...

"If I had to live my life again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner" by Tallulah Bankhead
I read this a few days ago, and since then I'm reviewing my past and thinking about my mistakes. some of them really seams stupid now but I'm sure back then they weren't. I'm not happy with my mistakes but I don't have any problem with them either because if they were not there at the time I'm not who I am now. nobody is perfect but I think a lot of things in my life happened when they suppose to happened. I don't feel behind schedule so I'm not sure I would make my mistakes sooner ! and I would not do some of them anymore ...

and here is the photo of the cake that I baked. it was "plum-peach-olive-oil-cake". the modification was :
1- I did not add plum at all , I did not had a good feeling about baked plum so I just skipped it

2- I add 1/2 cup walnuts and put it in food processor and add it with flour mixture to the cake.
3- next time I'll add a little more sugar because the cake does not taste sweet
4- I'll add more peach for the next time too.
in the recipe it was mentioned "light brown sugar", I only had one type of brown sugar ,I don't know if it's light or not , but the color of my cake is slightly darker compared to the picture on the website so I guess that not so light brown sugar combined with walnuts caused my cake to be darker.
and about the white sections around the peaches, it is because in the recipe it says mix the peaches with flour before putting it on top of the cake, so here is the baked flour plus peach juice around the them.
It is such a delicious cake and I loved it , I'll be baking more of those definitely.

movie talk "Julie and Julia" and ...

this weekend we saw Julie and Julia; it was a nice movie specially the Julia parts. I love Meryl Streep, she is such a great actress, and she can pull of any role.
In the movie there was part that I enjoyed very much , where Julie had a fight with her husband and he left him ,she was in a bar with her friend and she told her that yeah you’re a bitch..! . I liked that honesty and the fact that she did not get offended. I never had any friend that could tell me my mistakes or tell me how they really felt about me, I never had a courage to tell someone something that I was not nice. I always think that if you don't have something nice to say just say nothing. and that's bad because I know that some of my friends said bad stuff behind my back ( I don't care that they were lie or not, I preferred they told me in my face) and of course I never had a courage to confronted them about those lies. that's very bad, I really like to have a close girlfriend that I could talk to about girls stuff and be able to share my feelings with them sometimes but I don't.how they could be found !?
another point that I never got was why Julia said that Julie's work was disrespectful!? she wrote a book for other people to use it and Julie was using it , maybe she taught that Julie is judging here book and her work ( or herself) by cooking all the receipts or something like that. but through out the movie it showed how strong Julia was and cared about other people feeling , why she said that about Julie I did not understand.


yesterday I went to the gym and did cross trainer for an hour , 20 min of cycling and 1 hour of belly dancing which was fun. but in the middle of the night I woke up from a bad dream ( which I explain later ) combined with a feeling that my legs are disconnecting from my body . it was painful but not only in my legs, the pain was all over my body. I know I should have a program in the gym and stick with it (or not?!?!) but sometimes the machines are not free so I do whatever else is free and also after 30 min of cardio I still have energy so I continue. so the results of this much of cardio would show itself in the middle of the night.;)
I 'll talk about my bad dreams parts some other time. because now I'm leaving and tonight I'm going to bake ,hooora..(I'll take a picture and post it here tomorrow)

we change..

Monday ...I don't hate Mondays but rather dislike them. I should try to like them ;believe me I'm trying but no changes so far..
last night me and my husband went out for dinner some place called sacwich , which is basically a sandwich in a sac, but they taste very good . I think it's a sauce because it's a special sauce (they call it Italian sauce) with some herbs and it smells and tastes great ...
I did not bake last night but cooked our today lunch.
this morning I was reading something on the web when I came across this sentence "things don't change, we change " and I was thinking it's true. we all change but most of us try to explain these changes by looking around us not ourselves. I 'm looking at myself and could think of several examples which I said to myself that "things changed " but really I'm the one that changed. sometimes for the good and sometimes not that good actually. ..
I'm happy about the change that I'm starting to see in myself these day and I hope to get better every day ..
have a good week

new version of me and new cake

today I'm working. I don't like to work on weekend but sometimes we have to do something that we don't like. and something else that I 'm not very happy about is that I missed my Yoga class today which is a result of being little lazy. I came to school around 10:30 and my Yoga class was at 13:45 so I had to go to downtown ( by metro or car) and  then come back here to finish my work . so I decided to skip it instead.
I started this class about a month ago , 3 sessions a week and I'm so happy to say that I connected with it very fast and saw its results . in regular basis I'm a sensitive and nervous person . for sensitive part let me just say that people's behaviors towards me affect me very much . but now I feel more relaxed ..and refreshed
last night I baked a new cake which named " chai coffee cake" . I loved it and we took it to our friend's home where we were hanging out . because we don't have any cake at ours now I think I'm going to bake something else . I did not decide yet . tonight is also the cooking night . I hope I finish sooner so I could get to all that

It's really hard to keep up with blog. I'm realizing that now . sometimes I have something in my mind that I want to write about but then I'm not at my desk or I have to finish something else before. so by the time I finished working I'm so tired just want to close my eyes.
I just want to be able to go home earlier ,like people that work  here at university ,they leave at 4:30 and I leave at 6 (on good days of course) then I go to them gym and by the time I get home I'm so exhausted and still we did not eat yet and bla bla bla...
Sunday I was home ( except of my Yoga class and little shopping ) so I cooked two different foods which both is sandwich like , so till today I did not cooked  yet. but tomorrow I 'll cook maybe spaghetti or something ..
tonight we 're going to the old dog movie,I heard it's very funny so looking forward to that :))