Daring Baker's Stollen Wreath

Merry Christmas, dear friends! I am on my way to the Northern part of Thailand with T and 11 of my family members. They are all excited about this trip as much as we are. Planned out the whole itinerary and hope that everything will proceed as what we desire. See you guys in New Year 2011. Happy Holiday and Happy New Year!




The 2010 December Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Penny of Sweet Sadie’s Baking. She chose to challenge Daring Bakers’ to make Stollen. She adapted a friend’s family recipe and combined it with information from friends, techniques from Peter Reinhart’s book.........and Martha Stewart’s demonstration.

Plagiarism

In the midst of properly planning for the upcoming trip of my visiting family, I had tonnes of things to do. While things in regards to itinerary were fully in control, I spent the entire weekend cleaning up the house, and making sure that it would be presentable to my special guests. Apparently this is the least that I can do to welcome my family members, especially those few who are visiting Thailand for the very first time.



The good news is I managed to juggle with a couple of baking chores, including the December’s Daring Bakers Challenge. Lucky me, I had finised baking the challenge item yesterday and photographing it this morning. So I guess I am good to go for the trip which will start the end of this week. My family will be visiting this Friday, big big deal!

Meanwhile, I was visiting bloggers’ sites and came across plagiarism. I was once being warned about plagiarism when stumbled into Fitri of Rumah Manis’s post. She was furious about the fact that some of her photos were stolen. It happened a couple of times and it was her friends who happened to see her photos elsewhere and quickly informed her about this disrespect and irresponsible act.



Of course ever since Fitri has taken a tough measure such as displaying a warning “don’t steal the images” at the end of her posts. That was just the right thing to do. However, the irresponsible party who are decisive about utilizing her images without her consent, most probably might still be stealing. But she has done her best in protecting her blog photos (of course including the photo watermark). And if plagiarism still persists, whoever that steals has consciously claimed himself or herself a THIEF!



This morning, plagiarism again came knocking. This time it happened to Aparna of My Diverse Kitchen. The same, a friend accidentally saw it in a publication and decided to let her know. She was of course mad about it and put herself into full confrontation. The media was contacted, the editor was spoken to, and the conclusion was that this supposingly property-right-aware entity admitted (believe it or not) that they took the photo and used it because it just came out on Google search engine. How ridiculous could that be!



Lucky for Aparna, after her persistent fight, she got what she fought for: the publication printed the retraction on the following issue and paid all the damages (inspite initially claimed they didn’t have any budget for it)! Bravo to Aparna and everyone of us, food bloggers who have taken the stand to fight for what is right. Cheers! Read all about it here!

Uncertainty

We are stuck in the middle of the Kasert flyover bridge. A few cars in front of our van have decided to turn back instead of waiting for the traffic jam to loosen up. It is just depressing since we don’t really know what is going on up front, is there an accident? Apparently there is this big uncertainty before us. Are we supposed to wait in patience or turn back and find another better way? We don’t know!



In life it is pretty much like that. Sometimes we are stuck and don’t know what to do. This traffic episode was preceded earlier by a confusion over unresolved ending of the movie “A Serious Man”, a movie about Larry Gopnik, a physics professor who was caught in problematic life tornedo, didn’t know how to get out of it and decided to get advice from his rabbies only to find disappointment of what he expected to know. He just couldn't manage to make sense of all that were happening.



Life in his case was all about problems and uncertainties and no matter how hard he was trying to deny facing some of them, they always come back to haunt him. The movie was ended with another disaster episode of the professor’s life when his doctor called requesting an immediate meeting to talk about his overlooked chest x-ray results, meanwhile his son and the entire group of classmates most probably will be hit by the approaching massive tornado.



And just like that, the screen was filled with the rolling credits suggesting the movie has ended, again it is like telling the audience to grab another idea of life uncertainty, go figure!





Meanwhile I like to thank Renata of Testado Provado e Aprovado for the One Lovely Blog Award and Nale of Coolinarija for the Me Encanta Tu Blog Award!