Necessary Chocolate

When you drop the roll of pinwheel cookies

If you drop your roll of pinwheel cookies on the way to the refrigerator, and the filling is still warm, and the dough is still soft, you will get a mound of dough and filling. Then you can look at it, mush it together, wrap it in plastic, and stick it in the refrigerator until you're desperate enough to need it. Yesterday was that desperate day, and I decided to use it up for a Christmas party last night. And look how pretty those slices are:

They baked up well, too. I've made these pinwheels for years, but now I'm thinking that mushing may result in the more aesthetically pleasing choice.

Some skills you just don't inherit

My mom's embroidery floss.

My bag of floss.

Thanksgiving

A few pictures to commemorate a great long weekend:

Thursday evening in Delaware - Longwood again! This time, I didn't have to go alone. My cousin and my dad came, too. You, too, can make your dining room look like this for Christmas dinner.

Friday morning in Delaware: I've been waiting to take this photo since last Thanksgiving. The ice machine, with ice made according to a Secret Family Recipe. I'm not sure if that makes the ice better, or a little scary.

All weekend: eating leftovers, including the remnants of a chocolate brownie cake with caramel peanut topping, from Dorie Greenspan's Baking book.

Saturday in Virginia: Friends came and helped begin decorating my parents' tree. The dolls are up. Only about 500 balls to go.

I'm grateful for so much, but on this blog I'm especially happy to have "met" all of you. Thank you for checking in, and for your comments and ideas! 

Delegating gingerbread

Measuring out twenty sets of wet ingredients - molasses, maple syrup, and corn syrup - for gingerbread can get a little messy. The butter was a snap.

But that task is done - twenty sets of pans, wet ingredients, and bags of pre-measured flour and ginger were handed out yesterday to many kind women so that they can be mixed, baked and delivered back to me to store in my freezer until Dec 9th. Yeah!

I'm very proud of myself. I did not make cute little labels to put on any of these containers.

Random facts about me

Long ago - well, weeks ago, the tres gentil Laura was kind enough to tag me to list seven weird/random things about myself. I kept coming up with a list, but it seemed to consistently devolve into a list of things that I didn't like about myself, and that's just silly. So, after much too much thought, I reveal the following:

1. I don't care for fruit. I will happily eat any vegetable, and I will eat some fruit, such as watermelon, but in general I haven't liked fruit since I can remember. Now that I'm an adult I can eat apple pie, etc. and look like I'm enjoying it. But I'm not. While the rest of the world picked apples at the apple orchards, I went to the orchard and bought the cider donut ice cream shown above.

2. I first found "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" in a bookstore in Basel, Switzerland. I read the book and thought it was okay, but I'd read so many better versions of the story. I then felt unbearably smug when it hit America.

3. My name is not an abbreviation. I have creative parents.

4. My middle name is Margaret. In my mom's family, the oldest daughter of the oldest child is named Margaret: my mother, my great-aunt, my great-grandmother, and so on are all named Margaret. I like the name, and it was quite the bonus to be named after my great-grandmother, who did not pass away until I was in graduate school. She paid particular attention to her namesake (or claimed to, anyway)! I try not to remember that this naming tradition may stop with me.

5. Thanks to the Arizona crew, I've been in the delivery room for four births. That's more than most single women not in the medical field can say. Oh, and before the first birth I took the Bradley method birthing class with Janet and her husband. I made her promise that, if I did that, I would have earned the right to give her future children anything I wanted as long as it didn't ruin them morally. Seven kids later, I still hold her to that promise. As an added bonus, I know how to breathe during labor and I've seen a placenta; the teacher kept one in her freezer - I do not lie. After that session, we all agreed that Janet had learned enough.

6. In the fifth grade, I led a picket on the principal's office. It was 1970 and we'd moved from the California Bay Area to Westchester County in NY. During recess all of the sports equipment went to the boys, and I decided that we needed sports equipment too. I should point out that I'm terrible at sports, and I don't touch sports equipment if I can help it. But there was a cause to be won. My social studies teacher gave us time to put together the signs. One afternoon, the kind principal called mom: "Do you know what your daughter is doing right now? She's picketing my office." I think that we did get equipment. I wouldn't know - I wouldn't have touched the stuff.

7. I appreciate the natural world in all of its glory, but somehow I am, at my very depths, a city girl. I feel utter joy in a big city. My family still isn't sure how that happened.

I'm not sure who I will, in turn, tag. Maybe I'll just add another tag for Marilyn!

Testing gingerbread

I've been so loyal to my old gingerbread recipe from my Sunday Suppers cookbook. But in an effort to find a gingerbread recipe that would easily feed 400 people, I found Nigella Lawson's. Wow.

I used pureed candied ginger instead of fresh ginger, and cooked it in a 13x9 pan instead of a 12x8 pan.  I tried a little bite, and couldn't help but eat one entire end before it made it into work. It's moist, in an almost fudgy way, and just as fresh as the title promises.

Now I have to build up the confidence that this is, indeed, a worthy dessert for the Christmas concert. Picture it with a piped whipped cream star and a little gingerbread cookie on top. That sounds good, doesn't it? I hope so. For some reason I'm fragile beyond normal, and any comment of "oh, well, if we're just having gingerbread" is enough to send me spiraling into self-doubt. (Yes, the comment has been made.)

Regardless, I'm making 20 gingerbread kits this weekend to hand out to anyone who's willing to cook for me. If you have any ideas for a good drink that would be easy to serve (hot cider, for instance, is out), speak up!

1:00 AM at my house

Spray-mounting the posters for my church's upcoming Christmas concert.

This is only interesting because I told EVERYONE that I had finished printing out the publicity materials on Monday. And I did. Unheard of for me. They were designed by Saturday and printed by Monday - and they weren't due until THURSDAY.

But then I thought it would be nice to have more. And then I thought that it would be nice if the posters were mounted to gold paper. But then they didn't look as good as they would if they had a black border. And then I realized at 10:00 last night that I had left my spray-mount at the last church function, and that I'd have to go to the nearest 24-hour WalMart. But other than that, I was done on Monday.

They were worth it - it's not every day I get to play with gold paper.

If you're in the area on December 9th, come on by. I'll be serving gingerbread to 400 people. More on that tomorrow.

(For the sake of the fonts division of this blog: The Hallelujah is Adobe Bickham Script - one of my favorites. There's rarely an excuse to use it at work, and I'm so glad that we're doing the Hallelujah chorus!)

It's beginning to look a lot like

I have a new red scale - that takes AA batteries! (The old beige scale took weird batteries.)

So that now the chocolate is chopped and measured in 5 ounce units

and  I can start the Christmas cookie dough NOW. Four batches of World Peace cookie dough done! Pinwheel cookies begin tonight!

Seriously, I already have the last four weekends of December completely filled, between church and family. Remember that list last year? I can't believe how much of the list I completed! It was all too much - and so much fun - and I'm starting earlier this year. Here goes.

October fun: Tie One On - Local Pride

Yes, I know that it's November, but there are few things still to report! Since Amy gave us a full four months to make aprons reflecting our Local Pride, I chose to start sewing on October 30 and finish on Halloween night. In my defense, I chose the picture and fabric at least a month ago. Really.

The image is a 19th-century panoramic map of downtown Troy, from a great online collection at The Library of Congress (did you doubt it?). The map just happened to match an old pair of linen pants that I'd been hoping to reuse. I printed the map onto colorfast inkjet fabric, and then fused it to batiste so  it wouldn't feel quite so papery. The apron is beige denim, and the pants became bias tape.

When I first moved to this area, I chose to live in downtown Troy. The city is a great stage-set; while the city struggles economically, the historic building stock is of such quality that the city always looks like it's doing better than it really is. It doesn't hurt that it has, in fact, been a stage set (Age of Innocence was filmed there), many times. Lots of small businesses and homeowners who love the city have been working hard the last few years to help it once again be the city it was.

In the nineteenth century Troy was the Silicon Valley of its time. Its location at the head of the Hudson River near the start of the Erie Canal, combined with pro-active, successful city families led to the early establishment of colleges, industries, and museums. In its heyday, all roads led to Troy.

The Hudson River, the museums, the parks, the Music Hall, RPI, Emma Willard School, and Russell Sage College are all still there, and that's why I wanted to live in Troy. My two-room apartment had hardwood floors, 14' ceilings, a bay window, beaded wood trim, and, unfortunately, electric heating. I only turned on the heat on Sundays and when company came. I lived frugally, if coldly. I was within a block of the Music Hall, the library, colleges and grocery stores. It was the perfect transition from NYC and college. When the city shot fireworks over the river, my windows would shake and I'd run down the street to the river to watch.

I live on the other side of the river now, in trees and suburbia with adequate parking, but I'm in Troy weekly to visit the great farmer's market and for the community choir practices.  Fair warning - any new visitors are strong-armed into the whirlwind tour of Troy. Be prepared.

I was going to back off from the next tie-one-on theme, but it's polka dots. So be looking for me to sew up something January 30th.