Red velvet cupcake with Bailey's cream cheese frosting: Happy Valentine's Day from Zurich!

I caved in and decided to do Valentine's baking after a boring day of doing admin work for my thesis. I was initially going to do macarons but that failed miserably so ended up with a red velvet cupcake instead. For a first try I thought it was ok, nothing like Magnolia Bakery's version of course  (I don't have enough butter in the fridge to do that).... As for the Bailey's, well any excuse for booze on Valentine's right? 

Yankee crab cakes with tartare sauce: a week of loving New York, New York (part 1)

(Clockwise from top left): Ballet at the Lincoln Centre; Waiting for the show; Runners at Central Park (very Juno); Manhattan skyline from Brooklyn

NYC came calling the week after my Paris winter school, which came as a nice break. M’s brother and his beautiful family (which includes the most beautiful blonde baby boy in the world) have recently relocated to New York for a couple of years. As this was the first time we were finally in the same hemisphere for a while, of course we couldn’t pass an opportunity to visit!

This was our second NYC trip this year and I thought our autumn visit was much nicer. The only hordes of tourists that we saw were the runners who were in town for the NYC marathon. It’s a mega-sell out event and people come from all over the world… to run 42km across NYC. Clearly, I have yet to discover the joys of long distance running... Anyway, all NYC marathon finishers get this really big medal and it was quite cute to see people still wearing them even in the days after the race.

Galettes: cheap eats in Paris!

Montmartre at dusk.
Sacre Coeur (L), throngs of tourist trying to take arty photos of that pointy tower at sunset (M), an artist hard at work (R)

The past couple of months have been full of hectic travelling for both work and fun, going from super-hot to super-freezing weather! But this also meant lots of feasting in between, which has unfortunately resulted in coming home to Switzerland with an extra 3 kilos of food baby… (detox starts next week).