holly, jolly, awesome!

so its nearing that time again when we gather together and hope for snow while exchanging gifts that we may or may not want. since being in the northwest snow doesn't just happen anymore its sought out.

this weekend i had the opportunity to travel to lake tahoe and celebrate my friend anne's birthday in a cabin about a block from the shore. we ate, drank, and were merry. the highlight was ice skating above the mountains, but watching chefs compete on tv with eggnog and ice while drinking manhattans came in a close second.

the weekend prior i went to a holiday gathering and partook in a white elephant, to which i brought a ceramic peanut and received edible underwear. fruit rollups it was not, but unlike my luck at selecting gifts my ability to provide sweet delights was a success. that night i brought in toe a carmel apple almond cream tart. pictures of this delight are below.

more cheer and celebrations are ahead. i wish everyone high spirits and warm hearts as they head toward the new year.

get with this or get with that?

i sketched out this idea a few years ago. originally i drew it as a short boy standing on his tippy toes to receive a kiss, flipping the traditional role of the girls performance in this act. then i showed it to a few people who remarked that vertically challenged men might not find it humorous. its hard to create things that won't offend someone or thing, but i listened to the suggestion and decided to make the situation ridiculous to limit its offense. if monsters where real and varied in stature, which i'm sure they would, there may be one or two made self conscious by this illustration. i can't say i would feel bad, cause they're monsters. is that racist?

After completing the image last night i couldn't decide if it was completely obvious what was taking place, so i added a little word box with a heart. this cute addition felt a little too fluffy, so i went on to produced a second version with a darker punch. now i'm not sure which one i like better. i guess they could be left as a duo, cause who doesn't love a satisfying chomp!

is that all there is?

if thats all there is my friend then lets keep baking. lets brake out the booze and have a ball. i apologize for that, got this song in my noggin. anyway, i woke up this morning hoping to bake some muffins with the leftover buttermilk i had sitting around.

its actually kind of silly, but i'll find one ingredient thats about to go bad, like buttermilk, which maybe cost me around two dollars and decide i need to use five dollars worth of ingredients so not to waste the fifty cents thats left in the the milk carton. well what is life, but a bunch of lose reasoning.

unfortunately i left out to much baking soda, so these muffins were nearing ballistic test material in density, but they still came out looking pretty.

busy, busy, busy! or am i slow?

well, its been busy for me as i've been drusin around this last half of nov. drusin is a term coined by my friends anne and alan for when someone is moving quite slow. a prime example of this is me, hence the play on words.

anyway, its been a while and i've done a lot of baking recently, so i thought i would go ahead and post a bunch of photos of things i've worked on.

these first few photos are of two german chocolate cakes i made for my friend martin's 40th birthday. i used a recipe i took from david lebovitz's blog which you can find here. as you may have guessed he like to bike, so i spruced up the top of one of the cakes with a few chocolate cycles. 

 

 

after making these two monsters you think i would have stopped for a bit, but i kept chugging along right through thanksgiving. unfortunately i have to wrangle up some shots of the pies i made for the holidays, but there is plenty of other items to display.

as i posted before i'd been on an effort to perfect my skills of baking french macarons, those tricky french sandwich cookies made from no more then egg whites, almond meal and sugar. i found a pretty good formula on an aussies blog syrup and tang. it tells you how much of each ingredient to use based off the amount of egg whites you have; a baker percentage for macarons.

well, they've been getting better each bake off and i think i hit my stride on thanksgiving, so lets see if i can keep it up. along with macarons i've been exploring another sandwich cookie with a more humble background, the whoopie pie. my first attempt was actually using a recipe i found from a british newspaper. i guess the craze has jumped the pond and landed in london town. europeans scale there ingredients by weight, making things more exact, which is why i clung to this recipe.

finally i'll leave you with these last two photos, one being a slice of a caramel chocolate tart from the book the sweet life by kate zuckerman and a loaf of bread produced in the fashion of chad robertson of tartine bakery fame. I have to thank my friend anne for jotting down the  bread formula the same day i was demanded to make the chocolate tart in order to cure a group of ladies from sweet depletion.

come back in the following weeks to see even more treats as i'm sure the holidays will spark a flurry of baking, maybe even a few drawings and other surprises too.