Americans are smart like upholstered furniture

My diminutive blond dorm mate hasn't been baking this semester until yesterday. Her ingenious method of ensuring a good rise for her bread makes me feel soft in the head. I and my fellow American here in the dorm have been trying to warm our dough in proximity to the electric radiator in the room, which has resulted in some dense loaves. However, there isn't a range directly above our oven, but a cabinet. Where did the Norwegian place her dough?

Unfortunately, to warm the cabinet one has to leave the oven on through the entire rising and re-rising process, so it is a little wasteful of energy. But the barley-whole wheat bread that I made today is deilig!*

Also, more pictures of food! I was shopping at the Asian grocery yesterday and found various amazing products. Like ordinary brown sugar. Norwegian brown sugar doesn't quite seem to be the same thing as you can get in America. This hasn't been an issue to me, but some of the other girls are missing it when they try to make chocolate chip cookies. I also found this adorably packaged cream cheese: Puck. It's very soft and kind of shiny, but the dairy monopoly makes the same cream cheese product. I suppose it is available state-side as well, but I haven't ever seen it before. Tastes the same, but the texture is sort of different. It seems like it might be good to use in baking...

The background to the picture is my dorm mate's cookbook from high school home ec. We've been using it a lot for it's metric measures. And it helps with the language practice. See? Multi-tasking in action.

*Yes, I did just make bread a couple days ago. No, this loaf wasn't just about trying out the new method for raising the dough. Dude and I actually needed a new loaf.