King of Cakes

This is a slice of Baumkuchen from our local bakers. I'd never heard of it before today, but it's delicious so I think it'll be making more appearances on the B mid-morning snack table.

It's made by cooking thin layers of batter on a spit, piling them one on top of the other to get this tree trunk effect. The outside is painted with some wonderfully sticky jammy kind of glaze. Perfect food for a cold day. Apparently you only get to be a Konditormeister (Master of Sugar) if you can make one of these. What a title to aspire to: Master of Sugar!

So, stepping aside from the wonderful world of pastries today, we had some rather sad news (not really):

<ring ring>
Hello
Hello is Mr B there?
No, this is Mrs B can I help?
Yes, it's [nice garage man] from the garage here. It's about the car. I'm afraid it's not good news. I think it might be time to let go.

Gulp. Yep, it turns out that my car's suspension has broken in an unfixable way. I only learned to drive 9 years ago, and I've never had another car but this one. Mr B can't understand why I feel sad about it. I do love, though, the way our nice garage man breaks news like this to us - he did the same with Mr B's car a few years ago.

Nice garage man says it was corroded, but was probably finished off by a big pothole or something. But I'm not going to point out that Mr B was the last one to drive it before it broke...