Swiss (non)Chocolate

Basler Laekerli -- Have you tried these? Not very easy to find in the USA... in fact, one usually needs a Swiss friend who goes home to Basel from time to time, waits in the shop queue (preferably at Laekerli Huus, the mecca of laekerli emporia) with 1000 other people vying for souvenir sweets, and sneaks a box of these delicious little cookies home through Customs.

They look quite simple, just a thin, not-too-sweet gingerbread sort of cake-like cookie (does that make sense?) with a mottled white sugar glaze, and when you first open a new box they are actually not at their peak. Patience is rewarded if you can bear to wait a few days, with your laekerli box tucked into a larger tin (plastic outer wrap removed), because the cookies will acclimate and -- absolutely! -- become softer and more aromatic. When you bite into one and can taste the citron peel along with the mild spiciness, THEN you have yourself a box of supreme Swiss excellence. And hey, it isn't even chocolate (you can get chocolate-covered laekerli but that's just gilding the lily).

Of course the intrepid can learn to make them by hand... here again it helps to either BE Swiss or to KNOW someone from The Old Country who can guide you through the process -- luckily we fall into the latter group (can't help not being in the first group, alas). Handling the dough is the hardest part of the prep because it is very, very sticky; but once you get the hang of that it's all smooth sailing and delicious eating from here on out.

I'm going to ask my friend if it's OK to post her recipe for homemade laekerli, and, when I get her to say yes, will post it here, with how-to pictures, and we can explore this beautiful non-chocolate member of the Swiss confectionery pantheon together. Did I mention how perfectly they go with tea? You knew that.

xo, Trix

It's good to have friends who can bake

Isn't it just? Yum yum... we feel very lucky today {burp}. Made this morning by *****, and here accompanied by some cold-infused tea (in regulation jam jar!), this wholly wonderful thin-crust fruit tart gives us wonderful energy for weblog posting and other important pursuits. No mystery to this confection, really -- it's peach+blueberry tart! The mystery is how our friend made it soooooo good, because we think it has magic in it. Maybe the fruit came from her garden... that would do it. As we try to solve the puzzle, we keep taking bite after bite, and soon the tart has disappeared into...?

Jolly good. I wish every one of you the same degree of excellence today,
cheers, Trixie

Wacky film, yummy-looking wagashi

Warm Water Under a Red Bridge (Akai hashi no shita no nurui mizu)
directed by Shohei Imamura, 2001; available on DVD in the USA

Warm Water Under a Red Bridge is a film for grownups, dealing as it does with what is known in the parlance as mature subject matter (sex, ooh!). That hurdle passed, let me tell you about the wagashi (traditional Japanese tea sweets) in this film: the female protagonist Saeko (played by Misa Shimizu) has taken over wagashi-making duties in her aging grandmother's shop, and during the course of the film we have occasion to see a little bit of what goes on in a small-town wagashi-ya, including glimpses of some cool tools of the trade -- hand-carved wooden molds or kashigata (pictured above), bean paste and other ingredients, and traditional packaging. I suppose one might need some background in Japanese confectionery to catch the nice details woven into the main story (and the film, while certainly not for everyone, is unusual, delightful, beautifully made, and also stars the ever-watchable Koji Yakusho), but even without prior knowledge you know there is something traditional happening before your eyes, and it's compellingly esoteric.

I wish I had some wagashi with me when I watched this movie... it's like Tampopo: don't watch the movie when you're hungry (side note: Koji Yakusho is in Tampopo, too, wow).

{kashigata image courtesy of the Etsy seller Products From Japan With Love, whom we thank for letting us borrow it}

More sweetness very soon,
Trixie

Who is Alynn Ross?

Over the next several posts we will introduce you to some of our favorite people, and those folks, in turn, will occasionally drop in to post special messages to you. Peachy!

It wouldn't be a very mysterious weblog if we didn't toss in a mystery now and again, would it? Here's one: Who is Alynn Ross? Can you guess? Stay tuned for clues.

Golly! Another mystery weblog launches into the cosy blogosphere!

How could we possibly resist? It's a natural progression from our other weblog and website, after all... resistance being futile (and not being the resisting sort), here we are.

WELCOME to our rest stop (or final resting place?) for meanderings about mystery novels that have a confectionery connection -- by main story, or by character predilections or back-story, or by the simple fact of having some sort of confection tossed into them -- also for discussion of literature in general, films, music, photography, design, printing and publishing, tea, travel, jeepers ANYthing that could in any way be tangentially or directly associated with mysteries or confections.
Thank you for coming over!

For starters, please allow me to introduce myself and my best friend and 'blogging companion: I am Trixie (so named by one totally-famous writer James Norwood Pratt of San Francisco and the universe), and my pal is Dustin, and we love few things in life more than a good read, good tea, and a really good piece of something sweet to chew on.

In the coming posts we shall regale you with such tales as the ongoing real-life mystery of the Glico-Morinaga Kidnapping (Tokyo 1984, still unsolved), a character study of the granddaughter-confectioner in Shohei Imamura's film Warm Water Under a Red Bridge, Dustin's gleeful review of Katharine Weber's 2010 masterpiece True Confections, compare-&-contrasts of mystery novel how-to guides, and, without a doubt, confectionery musings of the highest order.

As we pull out our press passes to attend chocolate tastings, tea conferences, mystery festivals, and more, we look forward to your presence and participation back here in blogland. Onward!
~ Sweets to the sweet, Trix

p.s. The image above is of a Chocolate Mikasa, a simple, elegant, playful chocolate-inside-and-out version of the classic Japanese tea sweet called a dorayaki made by Minamoto Kitchoan -- about which you can read more here... it's a confection, it goes with tea, and we eat them while reading and writing mysteries... need I say more?