My baking effort last week wasn’t meant to be cupcakes. I was supposed to bake butter cookies, but as life would have it, I was handed some lemons.
Last Saturday saw me up bright and early, ready to hit the oven and churn out 50, yes 50, butter cookies. I mean, I am known for my ambition.
Do you think I blog too much about matcha? No, really. Really? Ok you know what, maybe I do, but this is my blawg, and sometimes I get a little obsessive compulsive from time to time, but that usually passes when the next OMG-delicious-cool thing comes along.
Except I don’t think that’s gonna happen to matcha. Because the more I have it, the more I want it. And scarily, the more I learn about it, the more I realise it’s good for me.
You hear that, Universe? Matcha ice cream is Good. For. Me.
K-O. Catty wins.
Once upon a time, I turned thirty years old. I threw a party, put on a dress and revelled in the fact that thirty, it really is the new twenty-one. I mean, my spritely youthfulness, doesn’t it just eminate from this blog? All that life! love! colour! BAH. What am I talking about. I spotted three grey hairs the other morning and another one yesterday. Life starts at thirty if by “life” you mean “researching geriatric wards”.
But who am I to complain? When I turned thirty, my friends gave me some most awesomeness foodie presents, from gorgeous le creuset pots to adorable silicone cupcake cups and of course, cook books. From the moment I laid eyes on it, the Hummingbird Bakery cookbook had my heart ~ the scrumptious cakes, slices and all things sweet, what was I to do? I hadn’t the will to fight, what with frosting… all that frosting… and more sweet sweet.. frosting.
Wait a minute, is this post even about the Hummingbird? I don’t think it is.
Ok, focus.
So after four months of monogamy to the one cookbook I will utterly love forever, I’ve managed to unearth the dozens of other cookbooks I received and lookie here! Another gem! Not quite sweet, no frosting in sight, but a legend in its own God-given right: the Ottolenghi cookbook.
So, this being my first “proper” post for the year, I had wanted to come up with something really clever, something witty, something that would make y’all wanna read my blog five times a day for the rest of this nice long year.
But I didn’t come up with anything.
I poked around in my head and it seems that whilst cleaning out the nether regions of this thing they call my “brain”, whilst trying to catalogue my achievements in 2009, I also accidentally cleaned out the Creative Department, an archive of the randomness that occasionally makes its way through my head, managed by a miniature gerbil called Ted.
I think New Years for some brings a sense of joy and relief, a feeling that another year has passed successfully, or perhaps just by its whisker, but either way, another year has passed.
Me? I laid awake with raging insomnia on Monday night, playing and replaying my 2009 over and over and over again in my schizophrenic little head. I started to hyperventilate, my shortness of breath accentuated by Panu’s insanely slow and steady breaths. How can he sleep so still? Honestly, sometimes in the middle of the night, I poke him til he grunts because otherwise I wouldn’t know if he was actually alive.
Christmas ~ a time for celebrating the birth of Christ, a time to gather with family, a time to share the wonders of a white Christmas or for those in the Southern Hemisphere, the wonders of shrimp on a barbie.
But for me, too far from home and having no such religious inclination (I’m busy enough what with my worship of all things edible and spend Sunday mornings eating not praying), Christmas doesn’t appeal to me in the same way as it does some others ~ as a highly spiritual and loving time when families far and wide gather to eat turkey (or tofurkey as it may be in this day and age) and drink eggnog. Or vodka.
For me, Christmas is an excuse. An excuse to eat, cook, bake and sleep in. And further more, it’s an excuse to wear green and red at the same time because damned if I’m gonna be caught wearing that at any other day of the year.