Chocolate Chip Shortbread Cookies

Chocolate Chip Shortbread
Years ago, when I started the job that brought me out here to Seattle, my new coworkers and I had a cookie exchange for the holidays. The cookies I had that day, like these Chocolate Chip Shortbread Cookies, are still some of my favorites, I still make several of them. READ MORE

Possibly Nailed

beaded snowflakes
It’s a familiar story, one you may have heard before…
Blog writer (me) has a busy week and doesn’t update blog.
Mom of blog writer mentions on the phone, in a rather accusing tone, that she’s noticed that said blog writer hasn’t updated her blog.
Suddenly, blog writer feels 12 all over again, runs to the computer, quickly pulling up typepad and frantically searching her brain for what she’s meant to write about all week but hasn’t.READ MORE

Woodland Centerpieces for Thanksgiving

Woodland Centerpieces

I won’t be spending Thanksgiving with my friend C and her family this year, and I will miss her and well, truth be told, I’ll also miss her flowers. I have shown you her amazing floral arrangements before. Always gorgeous and modern. So, as I’m prepping for Thanksgiving here at our house with friends this year, I’m remember a few little tricks that C has taught me (and that I’ve just kind of picked up along the way). I thought it would be fun to share.

 

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Vintage Book, The Cookie Book


Vintage book

 
Vintage book
Found my very faded, dog-eared copy of one of my all time favorite childhood books, The Cookie Book. I guess you could call it a vintage book now. It contains 12 recipes, a cookie for every month of the year. I ordered it from the Scholastic brochures that come home from school (and I smile at the idea of how little the whole Scholastic thing has changed over ht years). I loved the hand drawn illustrations. And I love that I marked my favorite cookies.
Ian has asked to make Mississippi Mud Pie from this book for Thanksgiving. It made me think of this little one, which is still in with my cookbooks.

Emma's Birthday Cake


(Thanks for all the kind words about Ian’s quilt!)
The birthday cake that was requested for Emma’s party, Angel Food. My first time making it. Whenever I make a classic, something like this, for the very first time, I almost always go to The Best Recipe. That cookbook is one every budding cook should have in my opinion. Its not as sexy as most of the cookbooks coming out these days (although they recently reissued this cookbook with a bit more sex appeal, but mine is the original version, with no photographs, lots of pencil drawings, very much like its magazine origin, Cooks Illustrated). But this book will make a cook out of you. If you have a piece of meat, a squash, want to make the perfect chocolate chip cookie, anything, this cookbook will tell you the basic science behind what the ingredients do (for example, I never really knew why they used ingredients like lard in biscuits when I was growing up, I just figured it was what the cook had around, or maybe just tradition).
Anyway, a dozen egg whites and a lot of whipping later, the cake came out beautifully crusty on the outside (the recipe told me I was going for an almost macaroon-like texture on the surface and I watched it like a hawk during the last bit of baking time), and light as a feather on the inside. Whew! This photo was taken just before the strawberry halves were added.
Which brings me to my next question. Its time for me to take the bazillion hundred photos currently on my computer off before I tempt fate more than I feel I already have. How do you guys catalog your photos when you take them off the computer? In the past, I move them onto disks, and store them in a box, but this feel inefficient to me. I’m hoping there’s a better way to preserve them. And quicker. Last time I did this little exercise it took me the better part of a day. So please, what’s the secret? Is there a secret? Can we create a secret? Help!

The Finished Quilt for Ian

 
The Modern Quilt Workshop
To explain why, in spite of all the scurry that fills our days right now, I would stop to obsessively finish this quilt off, is to just call me a little bit of crazy. The half excitement and half crazy parts of sewing can make me really productive, and I wanted to see this finished real bad. I brought it home from The Quilting Loft last week.
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