Fall vibes & cooking in my French farmhouse

We had a couple of friends come visit this early October and we fully enjoyed the last really warm and sunny days and it is now finally true fall weather. I absolutely love it and I'm enjoying cooking and I'm so looking forward to the coziness of the coming months. Before we jump into the video, I wanted to quickly remind you of the offer I shared in earlier video by the sponsor of this video which is Babbel. Babbel is one of the top language learning apps in the world. Whether you want to learn for travel or maybe because you've got plans to move to another country or just because you like learning new things, Babbel is scientifically proven to help you start speaking a new language in three weeks. Being a French teacher myself, I have of course checked all the details of this app and what I love is that it uses very practical conversations. I particularly liked the part where you learn about moving to the countryside, of course. And at this moment, you get 60% off on your subscription with Babbel. I have put all the details in the description. I had some sweet potatoes lying around in the kitchen and I usually don't really know what to cook with them. So I found this recipe online for a sweet potato and sage bread. So I peeled the potatoes and baked them in the oven for about 20 minutes so I can turn them into a mash because it only said mashed sweet potatoes in the recipe. And I'm mixing that with flour, salt and the sage. In goes the active dry yeast and water and then you just mix it all well and leave it to sit for around 8 to 12 hours until it's doubled in size. So I just put it in the living room somewhere and forgot about it and I will continue with this tomorrow. And since I have so many baked sweet potatoes left, we already ate some for lunch but they were just still sitting there. So I found this coffee cake recipe. So again, this is a recipe I found online and it's probably from the US because everything is in cups and I'm just not used to working with cups as measurements. I think it's quite easy or I'm guessing it must be really easy when you're used to this but when you're used to just measuring in grams and just having your scale out, that just feels so much easier. But I'm doing the best I can and I'm really excited to try this out. It's something I've never done before. I have made brownies using mashed sweet potatoes but this is a, it's called a coffee cake. And of course I had to adjust the recipe because I always have to find my own twist and I put in spices. It's a blend of spices from the Netherlands and it's used to make speculaas or speculoos is what they call it in French. And I think it's very close to gingerbread spice but a little different. So yeah, let's cross our fingers this turns out good. The next day I continued with the sweet potato bread. It was actually very easy to make this so I will include a link to the recipe online if you want to try this yourself as well. Now I hope you like cooking or watching other people cook because when I was going through all my footage for this video I realized it was a lot of footage of me cooking and photographing the last recipes for the cookbook. The good news though is that I have ordered the proof copy but it's going to take about two weeks for it to come in so I was a little, I don't know, a little surprised by that. I knew it was going to be long but I'll just have to be patient and let's all cross our fingers that there are no big issues that we need to change and that the proof copy is good so then I hopefully should be able to make the book available on Amazon early November. But I will keep you posted of course. The coffee and lunch place at my co-working space in Beaune has recently changed. It is now only a coffee shop and I absolutely love it. They have so many specialty coffees and I think it is the only place in all of Beaune where you can get plant milk in your coffee. I have also talked to Marie, the owner today, and suggested and asked if I could maybe do my book launch party. Yes, my book launch party. I have decided to celebrate just getting this book out into the world. I usually tend to be very enthusiastic about a project, put my heart and soul into it, bring it into the world and move on to the next thing without really celebrating what I've achieved. So Olaf said why don't you just throw a party and I've decided to do it here. There's a whole story to why I wanted to do it here but that will probably be either for the book launch party itself or in another video. I am also planning to make this party open to anybody who wants to come to Beaune and celebrate with me. So as soon as I have more details I will definitely share them with you. Just look at how beautiful my flower bed is now. I don't know if you remember but all of those cosmos did not show up, grow, whatever you call that. Like they normally do in the summer and then at the end of summer, I think, maybe even end of August, a small bunch was growing here and I decided to take out all of the weeds from the bed and sow some more and not everything has been successful but look, I have all these marigolds and I don't know if you remember that I tried to plant dahlias and there you go. I didn't think that was going to be successful honestly when I planted those and here are the zinnias my American aunt brought me because my American grandmother has them in her garden and I don't know, is it normal for things to be so late? It is mid-October now. I'm just so impressed. Look, gosh, so I'm not really sure how to do this next year. I don't know why it is so late but it is looking gorgeous and I'm just now allowing some of them to really dry completely so I can harvest the seeds and use them next year. I have been away for a couple of days so they haven't been dead-headed. Maybe I'll just leave them so I can, like I said, harvest the seeds. I'm going to pick some flowers for our guests. So as you can see, my days have been all about cooking, photographing and finishing the book and like I said, I have uploaded everything to Amazon and ordered the proof copy. I will definitely keep you posted on that and I'll be back next week and I'm going back to the Brocante shop in Autun that maybe you've seen that earlier video. I talked to Honey and we both really felt like doing another video so that is coming up in the next one. Thank you so much for watching and I will see you next time.