Man oh man, the end of the year came up FAST. Christmas was wonderfully hectic this year. I made apple pie spice candied walnuts, coffee muffins, almond white hot chocolate, Reese’s Pieces chocolate chip cookies, honeycomb candy, almond toffee, wine-marinated frozen grapes, and SO MANY batches of peppermint humbugs! 🙂 So if I’ve seemed absent on social media or took forever to respond to blog comments, I blame the fact that Christmas was holding me captive in my kitchen. 😉
In the midst of the craziness, I still managed to crank out a menu I’ve been wanting to make for a looong time: food for The Nutcracker! I always have fun with festive, seasonal menus, and Nutcracker was no exception. Let’s take a look at what we made!
Can you believe Advent is already here? I haven’t even used up all my Thanksgiving leftovers yet! Still, despite the chaos of the holiday and weekend baby shower travels, I managed to find an hour or so on Sunday night to do most of my Christmas decorating. I set the lights low, turned on some instrumental Christmas hymns, and set to work. Believe it or not, it was super cathartic. I feel SO READY for Christmas now, which is great, considering my January baby is probably gonna make this the last Christmas I decorate for in a loooong time! 🙂
But you probably wanted to hear about the blog, didn’t you? We wrapped up our very last Moby Dick recipe on Thanksgiving day. It featured delightful lemon cookies with white icing and gold sprinkles, inspired by Captain Ahab’s gold coin. I gotta admit, I’m pretty proud of them. They’re my own recipe, and developing baking recipes is HARD (at least for me). It feels really good to have a cookie recipe to call my own! ^.^
Let’s take a look back at the rest of our posts for the month, shall we?
So it has been raining for almost a week straight. I kid you not. This was SO not what I ordered when I asked for fall to come soon! The fall flowers I planted have all but drowned, and taking blog photos has been tricky with the perpetually darkened skies.
It’s times like this that I need some cozy food in my life, and this month’s menu DEFINITELY delivered. Let’s take a look back before I share our next Book of the Month hint:
So far the weather has teased us with a few deliciously crisp days, but mostly it’s been muggy and rainy. Words cannot express how ready I am to be done with this ungodly heat! Plus, autumn is my favorite time of year (changing leaves! Oktoberfest! Pumpkin stuff! Halloween!), so I’m impatient for it to get started. Luckily, I’ve already started work on my September menu, which is making it easier to wait. But first let’s take a look back at what we did in August!
I’m not sure what the weather is like by you, but here in Chicago it’s HOT HOT HOT! I’ve been hiding shamelessly inside with my air conditioner all month and cooking up all kinds of yummy goodness to take my mind off the oppressive heat. Let’s take a look at what we made this month!
July is here, and with it, summer is in full force! I’m loving how long the sun stays up now, but I could do without the 90° heat, humidity, and mosquitoes (Oh, Illinois, why must you treat weather like an intensity contest?). On the upside, I got to spend all of June making a menu I’ve been looking forward to for AGES! 🙂A
April is over and May is here—time to wrap up our current Book of the Month and introduce a new one! But before we get to that, let’s sum up all the awesome stuff that happened this month:
Normally I feel like March drags on FOREVER (perpetually gray skies are NOT my thing), but this year I had loads of exciting blog stuff to keep me busy!
Our Three Musketeers menu went off without a hitch. Five shiny new recipes are now tucked safely away in the archives. This month, I made my very first copycat recipes, and I did them back-to-back: 3 Musketeers candy bars and Cafe Angelina’s French hot chocolate! I made mini versions of the candy bars for my family’s Easter party, and they were a big hit. And my oh my, the French sure know their hot chocolate! For a chocoholic like me, it was like drinking liquid happiness. Milady de Winter’s Soup
I also premiered a delicious new tea. While we’re on the topic of 3 Musketeers bars, I should probably mention All for One and One for All Tea: my new chocolate caramel tea from Adagio. I designed it to taste like a 3 Musketeers bar, and I daresay I succeeded. It’s super chocolaty and sweet enough to make a perfect dessert tea with a some milk and sugar. You can order it here.
On a more embarrassing note, I had my very first blogging snafu this month. For some reason I cannot fathom, I thought it would be a good idea to schedule my Drunken Ham post before it was finished…and I accidentally scheduled it to publish a day early! The post was up for an ENTIRE HOUR before I realized the mistake, and although all the text was ok, the pictures were all placeholders from old posts (I hadn’t uploaded the edited pics yet). YIKES! Lesson learned.
The Mister and I went to C2E2, a Chicago comic con, where we had a blast. There were babies dressed up as BB-8, steampunk cosplayers selling tea, and SO MUCH FAN ART. It was perfectly awesome…though I may have dropped the ball and forgotten to get us tickets for some key YA fiction panels, which would have been perfect for the blog. * sigh * C’est la vie, I guess? Anyway, I promise to plan better next time! 🙂
We also threw a Daredevil party to marathon Season 1 before Season 2 came out on Netflix. I didn’t have time to make a post about it, but I shared the food in some tweets. We made Kingpin Omelets (which were basically the Aramis Omelets I made earlier this month), Anatoly Applesauce (this recipe from Taste of Home), Avocados at Law (aka Epic Meal Time Guac Grenades), and World on Fire Cupcakes (which are the same as my Girl on Fire cupcakes from The Hunger Games). All the food was well-received, but I think I had the most fun with the Avocados at Law! 🙂
 But now it’s time to bid March adieu and turn our gaze towards April. Ready for your photo hint? Take a guess at what our next Book of the Month will be:
HINT: It’s a series.
The new menu premieres this Thursday!
Any guesses at what our next Book of the Month will be? 🙂
As a rabid X-Files fan girl, I cannot express in words how excited I was to make an X-Files menu this month. There is absolutely no joy like being able to marathon the first six seasons while still feeling like a responsible adult because it’s “research.”
Though to be honest, I was a little nervous about timing my menu to coincide with the new season. If the new episodes were terrible, there was a good chance I’d spend most of February sobbing into a pillow instead of cooking. And I’ll admit, the first episode didn’t help my nerves much (for those who haven’t seen it, it was…weird). Luckily, Season 10 got steadily better with each episode, and I was soon gleefully reminiscing over the good old days while I re-connected with all my favorite characters.
