Wood burning stove

Hello friends.  Those of you who have been to our apartment, especially in the winter, know that we have a wood burning stove as our primary heating source.  We also have inefficient electric wall heaters, but they dry out the air, smell bad, and burn money.   So, we never really use them.

Our wood burning stove is very cute and romantic and lovely, but boy, it is a lot of work.  Gudrun does most of the fire starting and tending, but still...

Picture of the wood burning in the stove.  Gudrun took this picture with a long shutter speed to capture good detail in the wood and flames that have a "flowing" characteristic look. 
Photo unedited.

A couple months ago, Gudrun wanted to try experimenting with cooking in the stove.  Our friend Jeff successfully made boyscout orange cakes (hollowing out an orange and filling it with cake mix, wrapping it in aluminium foil and tossing it in the fire).  So anyway, she started researching other ways to cook in a fire...  our stove is rather small, so things like putting a cooking stand for a stew pot inside would be impossible.  We had almost given up hope when Gudrun decided to open the stove from the top.  I had assumed that this was just an easy access point to clean the stove from the top (shows how much I clean it!).  But, it turns out that the door on the top is actually a baking compartment!!   It is about 6 inches deep, and big enough to hold a tray of cookies or a casserole dish.

This is double good news - it satisfies Gudrun's boy-scout desire to cook on the fire, and it opened up our baking possibilities!   We don't actually have an oven in the house (they aren't common in apartments in Belgium), we only have a stove range and a microwave with a very basic baking function (basically only good for cooking frozen pizza).

For that reason, you will only see me making oven dishes in the winter months.  So if you want to send me baking recipes, do it before March :)   Also, baking in the wood burning stove is a little adventurous... there is no temperature control, and thus no way to know what cooking times will be.  The adventure appeals to me.  I think I like baking more since it is literally a "black box" process, than I would if I were baking in a conventional stove.

Anyway, for that reason, when I post baking recipes on here, I can not give you exact temperatures or times... so you will have to get as adventurous as me to recreate them :)

Note: regarding Gudrun's photo above, as mentioned, it is unedited.  This, mainly because we don't have any editing software yet.  We are looking at buying either Lightroom 3 or Photoshop CS5 (both Adobe products).  If anyone out there has any experience with these or other editing software, Gudrun would be more than happy to get your feedback/suggestions.  Since I'm a student, we can get the software on incredible student prices... so that is an opportunity that we shouldn't miss out on.