Where I’m from, as is true of many other regions, eating pork and sauerkraut on New Year’s Day is considered to be good luck. It’s really the potato dumplings infused with sauerkraut that I crave, as do all the women in my family it seems. Maybe it’s the cold weather that makes us crave the carbs to raise our seratonin levels, I don’t know. The solstice is past, though, and like my friend Kraehe, I’m grousing that Sol seems to be taking her sweet time with all of these gray days we’ve been having lately.

I need one of those clear, bright days, when the sunlight reflects off the snow and the temperature makes your heart beat more quickly. And I need to go play in the snow!

To beat the winter blues, I thought it might be fun to make a Twelfth Night cake, sometimes called a King Cake. Americans are most familiar with this cake as it’s associated with New Orleans Mardi Gras, but it has it’s origins in Christmas celebrations, specifically the Epiphany.

This was never part of my family tradition, but since moving back to the general area where I grew I up, I keep hearing people chanting “pork, sauerkraut…pretzel.” So I looked up this pretzel thing and, wouldn’t you know it, it’s a Twelfth Night cake. Yummy!

Good thing we’ve already eaten all of the vanilla kipfel. I can exercise tomorrow.