Baked Apple Dumplings

[J.] While travelling around New Zealand, we were staying with a very lovely family in Wanaka, South Island. They hosted us for two nights and we had a blast preparing dinner with them: they were fun to be around, had interesting stories to share and were seriously digging into food. They shared their whole kitchen with us and well, husband made a lot of use of it. Preparing dinner or a meal together is something that I found to be one of the most rewarding activities when staying with local people and something over which it is easy to connect with people. Okay, I must admit that generally my cooking part reduces to chatting with everyone, sipping on one or more glasses of wine and maybe cutting some ingredients while everyone else actually is preparing the food. I am so not into cooking, but well... I love eating and especially, the social atmosphere when everyone is assembled in the kitchen, chatting about the world and its little stories. That also the reason why I love having a couch in the kitchen!
The second evening, our host prepared the dessert for dinner and they introduced us to what appears to be the most traditional cooking book in New Zealand: Edmonds' Cookery Book. We were told that this cooking book is THE cooking book one will find in every household of New Zealand:

A few days later, we were walking past a book store and I thought, well... let's check if our hosts were right when they said one will actually find this cooking book everywhere. And indeed! Saw the book, and tataah! - Bought it.
Now, there were two questions coming with this purchase:
A) What on earth do I want with a cooking book when I do not cook?
B) Why would I want to carry a book around for the next six months when quite likely I am not going to use it?
These were exactly the questions husband asked. I looked at him and said 'Well, you are right, but a) I simply wanna have it, and b) it will remind us of our trip around New Zealand forever!' So, the deal was that we take the book with us and I am going to bake sweet dishes on a regular basis. Sold!

Now, baking without any basic tools can be a bit of a challenge. But, there are still more then enough basic recipes in this book that do not require any electric tool (besides an oven and some basic oven-proof materials). This evening, I started off with baked apple dumplings (recipe as per Edmonds Cookery Book):

Ingredients for Baked Apple Dumplings (serving 4):
2.5 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 teaspoons baking powder
50g butter
1 cup milk
4 medium Granny Smith apples, peeled and cored
1 cup sugar
1 cup water

Sift flour, salt and baking powder into a bowl. Cut in butter until it resembles fine breadcrumbs. Add milk, mixing to a soft dough.
Divide dough into four portions. On a lightly floured board roll out each portion of dough to a 20cm square.
Place an apple onto each dough square. Dampen edges with water. Sprinkle each apple with 1 teaspoon of the measured sugar. Carefully wrap the dough around each apple. Place apples in a greased ovenproof dish.
Put water and remaining sugar into a saucepan. Heat gently, stirring constantly until sugar has dissolved. Pour this over apples.
Bake at 190 C for 45 minutes or until pastry is golden and apples are cooked.

And that's how the dumplings looked liked:

Two apple dumplings fresh out of the oven :)

What I really liked about this recipe is that without having used any precise measurements the dumplings turned out to be totally yummy. They are like sweet bread with a sweet but fresh filling, something that I would call the perfect dessert for a cold day. Combine it with vanilla ice cream and you are in heaven.

Few notes:
1) It does not matter how the dough is wrapped around the apples, just wrap it.
2) Put the dumplings into a rather smaller but deeper dish.
3) I would say that one dumpling is easily filling one person for a meal, but then I might have used more flour and butter compared to what the recipe was indicating...

A photo that just does not make sense to me...

[J.] As recently mentioned in another post, I joined an online photo course to get my photography skills kick-started a little bit. Part of the homework I am currently working on are photographies taken during the night, in particular long exposure pictures of stars. I started taking some of these pictures when we were still in New Zealand in the more rural areas of the Southern Island. I knew we were going to leave for Buenos Aires shortly and because the city light in urban areas can compete with the starlight in the night sky, I was not sure if I would be able to see such a clear sky during a night in Buenos Aires.
One night, the sky above Wanaka, New Zealand, was beautifully clear and I grabbed my camera, a warm jacket and a glass of red wine to take my first star photographs outside. I adjusted the camera, a Canon EOS 60D, to a tripod and attached a remote control via an USB cable to it. I wanted to capture as much of the sky as I could, so mounted a wide-angle lens onto the camera body, the Tokina AT-X 11-16mm lens and set it to 11mm (or 17mm on a 35mm equivalent). The exposure time for these photos were set to 30 seconds with an aperture of 2.8, ISO of 1600 and manual focus.
With this set-up, I would have expected a photo showing no or almost no star movement caused by the earth rotation. And when I looked onto the screen at the back of my camera, I saw this:

Star trails above Wanaka, New Zealand

My first thought was that I made a mistake with the settings or that maybe the camera has not been properly mounted onto the tripod. This photo does not only show the moving stars, it also shows movement of the tree leaves in the lower left corner. Such star trails would normally be expected when using an exposure time of around 15 minutes, but not with an exposure time of 30 seconds. However, the tree leaves should not show any movement at all because the distance between the camera and the tree is fixed and hence, no earth rotation could cause such an effect as this picture is showing!
I took more photos with the same camera settings to make sure that it is not the camera itself causing this effect due to being too loosely adjusted to the tripod and starting to move by itself during the exposure time. But all other pictures were showing a somewhat similar effect. And even if the camera would have moved on the tripod during the exposure time, the star trails in that picture seem to be really smooth and steady, something that I would not expect if the camera gets loose on the tripod and starts rotating.
I just cannot make any sense out of this! Haha... maybe my camera is developing some artificial intelligence and trying to mess with my mind! Anyone out there who can make sense out of this? Maybe some other camera settings I am not aware of could have caused this?

However, when I moved the camera facing the opposite cardinal direction, I got a picture that I more expected in terms of no star trails and even more important, no house or tree of fence movement:

Milky Way over Wanaka, New Zealand

In the meantime:
1) Our first day at the Spanish school is over and our heads are spinning with all sorts of Spanish vocabulary and new impressions, but it is a lot of fun. We went home from school in the early afternoon, had a quick light lunch and fell asleep almost immediately thereafter and slept like a log.
2) Walking along the streets of Buenos Aires this morning for the first time during daylight left me with the feeling of excitement for being in this city. It just feels so good and I cannot wait to further explore the streets and shops and cultural places and everything else around here. It just feels so, so good to be here...