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Showing posts from December, 2008

Holiday Baking

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I haven't done a lick of writing since the beginning of December, being consumed by the usual holiday busy-ness plus an ambitious succession of crafts and baking projects.   At the beginning of the month, I used the leftover fabric from my baby-carrier making to make bags for my mother, mother-in-law, and sister-in-law, plus a few small ones to wrap cookies in because the only tins I could find cost about 8 euro a pop.   For Mike's relatives over in Ireland I made the following: Aunt Big's Gingersnaps,  an old stand-by of mine, and two recipes that were new to me, Rugelach and Chocolate Candy Cane Cookies .  The rugelach I will definitely make again, despite the fact that it was a two-day process with a bit of fiddling.  The candy cane cookies were very yummy, but it is next to impossible to find striped peppermint candies in Ireland, even three weeks before Christmas, and I found the peppermint filling a bit much. The chocolate cookie part, however, was delicious. Then I

Nova's First Birthday

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Nova's birthday was this Saturday, and despite the chaos of roommates moving out and in, and the kitchen being in complete disarray, I was determined to make Nova a cake.   It is an orange chiffon (sponge) cake with chocolate ganache between the layers and huge amounts of ridiculously sweet white chocolate buttercream icing all over.  We took it to Mike's mother's house for a small birthday party that night, and a good time was had by all.   At one year old, Nova is never still except when she's asleep.  She walks at breakneck speed, honing in on anything sharp, dangerous, or electronic.  Her favorite teethers are mobile phones.  She enjoys exploring the far reaches of her range.  In the library, she will stay and play in the children's section for a while, but then she'll get restless and wander over to the computers in the reference room.  She can make my computer do things I didn't know it was capable of.  She's a very sociable baby, but with all the

NaNoWriMo

It's over, and I came in a winner, pulling past 50,000 words yesterday afternoon.  I didn't really think I'd make it for a while there, but I had signed up for the regional word war, and that gave me the motivational boost to stick with it and recover my losses.   In the end, I'd say it wasn't actually that hard to write 50,000 words in a month, but they were 50,000 reckless, adverb-heavy words of a fluffy romance novel which will need lots of further work before it's fit to read.   In the final eight days of the month, I put together a grant application, made Thanksgiving dinner,  baked a cake for Nova's first birthday, and wrote over 16,000 words while our now-ex-flatmates moved out, leaving us with no salt, coffee table, or wireless router, among other things.  It was kind of crazy, but I won.