I had a few close friends over for a casual birthday shindig. As far as I’m concerned, the entire point of turning 30 is to have an excuse to eat cake. I decided on a chocolate-almond-espresso cake, which I got from the Upper Crust Bakery.
It went really well with homemade French vanilla ice cream.
I also made quiche for the party:
I’ve made quiche many times before, but this was …
Originally, I was going to post about this piece of lemon cake:
The cake was tasty. But now I have news, so I will post about that instead!!!
Scott Andrews at Beneath Ceaseless Skies has accepted my story “The Land of Empty Shells.” I’m really excited about this sale — Beneath Ceaseless Skies is a great market (go check it out if you haven’t yet, they’ve got some awesome stories!).
The Interstitial Arts Foundation is doing a search for cover art for their Interfictions II anthology. Interested artists can post their work directly to a flickr pool for consideration. I’ve submitted two photoshop projects of mine that I thought might be a good fit for the anthology.
Petal Fire:
Pencils Magnified:
Last Thanksgiving, Maureen asked me if there was a side dish I’d like to bring, and, feeling rather adventurous, I volunteered to bring quinoa (pronounced keen-wah). I had never had quinoa, but I’d seen it described as having a nutty flavor. In my mind, quinoa would be about the same size as barley, and would have a flavor halfway between an oat and a pecan. Therefore it seemed like a good base for a Thanksgiving side dish.
Turns out, quinoa is nothing like that. It is …
Jessica (jess_ka) made several beautifully-decorated miniature rooms, and she let me stop by the other day and photograph them. Each room is built inside a box, and they have an astounding amount of detail for how small they are (it’s hard to tell in the photos, but I’d say the boxes are between 10 and 20 inches tall). I had a lot of fun playing around with the lighting and the post-processing.
Jessica did a lovely …
I’m in Olympia this week, visiting family, and tinaconnolly came to visit me. We made shortbread cookies:
The cookies have rosemary and thyme in them. We got the recipe from a post on Maureen’s blog. The recipe says to press the cookies into flat rounds on a baking sheet, but ours were kind of crumbly so we pressed them into a square pan instead. After making the recipe version, we tried a couple variations:
I know at least one person who doesn’t like the end-o-year statistics posts, so I’ve hidden mine behind this cut (also, the post ended up being rather long):
I’ve snagged an invitation to have Christmas dinner with Maureen, and am using it as an excuse to make my first ever attempt at homemade candy. (After all, I’ve only eaten dozens and dozens of cookies…obviously what I need is more sugar!) Candy is tricky, but I think it went pretty well.
I made the candied orange peel yesterday:
It came …
Sugar cookies are a holiday tradition in my family. I’ve frosted them many times, but I have never made them start to finish before. But I got the recipe from my mom, and decided to give it a go. I made a batch of dough and let it chill for a couple hours in the fridge.
These were nice easy drop cookies. I like the combination of the craisins and the white chocolate, and the oatmeal makes for a nice chewy cookie.
I tasted a couple of these this morning when they came out of the oven, just to make sure there wasn’t anything wrong with them (can’t bring defective cookies to the cookie swap!). Because the cookies contain both oatmeal and fruit, they are part of a healthy breakfast…right?
