Epic Shortbread Fail

If you’ve been reading my blog, you know that I’ve been struggling to express my half Scottishness through the making of shortbread.

It’s butter, sugar and flour: how can anyone screw that up?  And yet, I have managed to find way after way.

Yesterday I made one perfect batch.  So perfect that I got a little overconfident.  I thought that I had this shortbread thing figured out.  Now I know how to make shortbread, I can look back at my hilarious past mistakes and laugh.

So I set out to make another pan of shortbread today.

So maybe you were wondering what happens when you don’t measure the butter carefully enough and add too much of it to the shortbread dough.

THIS:

This was supposed to be shortbread, after I scraped it out of the pan

Apparently too much butter keeps everything from sticking together.

I wonder if my Croatian side is having a bit of revenge, after my arrogant claims of Scottishness permeating my being? Croatian me is saying, “Screw this baking shit. Go have a burek.”

Update:  I have discovered that mixing Epic Shortbread Fail into cherry yogurt results in something that tastes a lot like cherry pie.   Yum.

 

100 Minutes of Misogyny: A review of a preview

So I’m watching a preview for a Croatian movie called Sto minuta Slave, or 100 Minutes of Glory, about the life of painter Slava Raškaj.  (Her last name’s pronounced something like Rash-key.  Her first name also means “glory”, so the title of the film is a pun.)

Slava Raškaj, self-portrait

Raškaj is known as the greatest watercolorist in Croatian art.  Deaf since birth, she studied art in Vienna (Croatia was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire at the time) and painted her most famous watercolors in the Botanical Gardens in Zagreb.  There are a couple of them in the Modern Art Gallery in Zagreb.  Other than this, there is damn little material available about her or her life.

My art lovers’ guide to Zagreb, Croatia – finally done

Ples ("Dance") by Ivan Generalic

At last, I have finished my massive guide-writing project for Unanchor.

It’s a three-day itinerary that shows visitors the best places in Zagreb to see art.

And I finished it only two months over deadline.

Unanchor guides are meant to be more intensive than a normal guidebook.  They don’t just list places to go, they take you by the hand and lead you there.  I like this approach, because I have often been lost or confused by incomplete directions in guidebooks.    And I know Zagreb pretty well by now, so I thought it would be a breeze to write.

WRONG.