Finding Spring

Today's 100 Happy Days photo

We had some heavy rain recently - much needed, and it turned our brown land into a green one. The gardens exploded - everywhere is color now, so much eye candy wherever you look.

Today I walked through the neighborhood with my camera - and everything I saw made me so happy!

Baby Blue Eyes in my garden

California Poppy - such a happy flower!

White and pink blossoms shout "It's spring"!!

The fountains whispered their lovely splish-splash...

and the mockingbird sang his little heart out. 

One of my most favorite spring bloomers are dogwoods, either white and pink ones, whereas I give a slight preference for the pink one over the white one. I also love the peachy-pink one, but I couldn't find one here.

What I found the most, though - and therefore beginning and end of this post - are wisterias. The fragrance of these stunning climbers is absolutely heavenly.

Oh Happy Days

When I visited denthe's blog this morning I saw that she has joined the 100 Happy Days challenge. I hadn't heard about it before, so I was quite curious. After following her link and reading all about it, I decided to join as well. Surely, it can't be that difficult to find at least one thing a day that makes me happy? Take a picture of it and post it to my Facebook page?

I take this as a reminder that there always is something that puts a smile on my face. This challenge will be especially important on days I feel gloomy.

So I will post one photo each day to my Facebook page and Google+ and every now and then I plan to write about it here on my blog.

Today is the first day - and my happiness started early, with baking these Brötchen (German rolls). In Germany it is quite common to eat fresh rolls for breakfast every morning. You can get them in every bakery and they taste best the day they were made.

Since the three of us have breakfast together only on the weekends, I decided to bake some Brötchen for today's breakfast. I made the sponge yesterday afternoon and let it sit on the counter until this morning. I got up at 6:30 and started to make the dough, which again had to sit for a couple hours.

Shaping the dough into Brötchen was more challenging than I thought - out of 25 I managed just one almost perfectly shaped Brötchen:

I definitely need more practice! But who cares about the shape when these heavenly smells wind their way from the kitchen through the entire house and you're really hungry when you finally could sit down for a very late breakfast?

The Brötchen were delicious, although I can think of some way to further improve them. Of course we didn't eat 25 of them - I just threw the remaining Brötchen in the freezer for some weekend breakfast in the very near future.

You can find the recipe for the Brötchen here.