I'm a 21 year old student from Germany, and I got married to an American army soldier in November 2006. We don't live together yet, so I'm usually cooking for myself. I LOVE inviting people over for dinner though. The thing I love doing most in the kitchen is baking and decorating. I can spend hours making gingerbread houses or coming up with ideas how to decorate snacks and such. BBQing with my dad in the summer, making christmas cookies with my mom and my sister in the winter, while singing along with Christmas songs. And cake-baking marathons with mom and gradma before every family birthday. I always have all kinds of foods left from cooking (single household...), so I'm a master at using up ingredients that are opened or just have to go =) Another thing that people really admired was a 3D cake of R2D2 from Star Wars. It was 1.5ft high and took an entire day to make and decorate. I regularly burn stuff in the oven, because I don't have a kitchen timer. The reason is that I want to find a particularly cute one, but I haven't seen one yet =) Another failure was me trying to make marshmallows. I don't know what I did wrong, but I melted a spatula in the process, the mixture smelled very odd, and its consistency was that of chewed bubble gum.. not fluffy and light like marshmallows should be. I tossed it out and then had one heck of a time trying to clean all the sticky kitchen tools.