The Ink-Pot and the Palette

I was up past midnight last night, lovingly frosting and decorating cookies for the office holiday pot luck.

( Bears and Snowflakes )

( Food and eating )

In other pleasant holiday-themed news, dine and I met for pulled pork and top-notch fandom conversation last night at Russell Street Barbecue, where she presented me with a Christmas card, depicting an extremely fine naked male torso and the admonition that he knows when I've been good or bad, so be bad, for goodness' sake. It's adorable.

There is such a difference between talking to regular people and talking to fellow fans about fannish stuff. Nearly two hours flew by, and I biked on home afterwards feeling good about myself and satisfied with my evening, instead of wondering if I seemed odd, you know?

I just finished re-recording chapter 4 (of 12) of my Podbang entry. I lost almost three weeks of podfic-recording time to the flu! I felt fine after one week, but my voice didn't come all the way back till yesterday. It will be a dash to get the remaining eight chapters recorded and edited by deadline. I'm gonna need another bottle of Scotch.

Along with making podfic, I managed to generate 3000 new words this weekend on the long Regency AU fic. Some of those words are good, and a few are even good in the order they're currently in. It's a great feeling to jumpstart a stalled novel. I love that thing.

In the department of consuming written material, I listened to another couple of hours of The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America, and I have to tell you, the book is almost unbearably thrilling as the author follows the paths of several individuals involved in fighting the massive forest fire. I burst into tears at a couple of points, either from sadness or joy as these real, documented people--and their towns--perish or miraculously survive.

And in the department of consuming other things, I made a perfect-looking batch of Pandora cookies while I listened to my audiobook. They've been cooling while I've been recording my podfic. Now I get to go eat one! Or maybe two.

Ganache-filled shortbread pillows, Trial Number Three, was a tiny batch of eight cookies, which kind of fell apart before I could photograph them. (The crumbs were tasty, though).

Trial Number Four is approaching the goal. I used 1/16"guide strips to roll the dough, and 1/4" strips to roll the ganache (yes, I rolled it out and cut it--used cocoa powder to dust the rolling pin), and everything came out much nicer.

( Big improvements )

I think I'm ready for human trials.

There's the serious stuff in life, and then there's inventing cookies.

I'm trying to invent bite-sized chocolate-filled shortbread pillows. (Why? Because I bought this silicone mold and I wanted to use it for something.) I think I'll call them "coussins ganâchés" because yes, I can totally invent French words.

I've tried sealing ground-up milk chocolate inside the dough, but it got a little burnt in baking. Then I tried Scharffen-Berger chocolate-hazelnut ganache. It held up much better to the heat, but my dough was too thin for it.

( Here's a picture of trial number two. )

Round three will be whenever I recover from the chocolate OD and get the urge again.