Passover 2010

I began my passover cooking tonight for tomorrow night's Seder.

I started attempting making matzo balls from scratch. They seemed to be fine till I cut one in half to taste. My whole life my dad has made jokes about "matzo bombers" but until now I didnt quite know what he meant. The centers were so dense that they could not possibly float. It was terrible. I made a second batch to much more success. (no pictures)

I then made a cappucino/chocolate/cognac roulad. Its one of my favorites.

The leftover cappucino whipped cream was a great dessert with strawberries

I will make more tomorrow, but my final dish for the night was chocolate chip meringue cookies. The first instruction to making these cookies is Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and then turn it off. So for the next 12 hours the cookies are hanging out in my pre heated oven. Cant wait for morning when they are ready!

Just a Drop of Color

I decided to have a little photo shoot tonight in my apt. The lighting isnt great, and I still need to get a remote shutter release, but I made do with what I had and am happy with the results for a first attempt at this. This was a two person art project. I stood on one side of the room with the camera, and peter stood on the other dropping dye into a champagne glass of water. Here is what I have:

First try with Green and Blue Dye

Second try I managed to capture the splash back from the drop of red dye! That was part of my goal, so even though its not completely in focus I was pretty happy with myself

We branched out to yellow which I think works the best since it is so light and lets the light through

Even after we were done and the dye had sat for a little bit it was still really pretty.

Does Your Sewing Machine Do This?

Mine Does

Lost Party!

I had big dreams for this lost party, but due to the snow that night most people did not end up coming, so I scaled the plans back a little. Alan, Joe, Kate, and Puja made the trek over though because they are awesome:)

First off, we had Dharma Initiative Beer:


There was also water and Peanut butter. Water, because not everyone wanted beer, and peanut butter for Claire, and how she finally got some when the hatch was open.










































There were of course cupcakes with The Numbers on it.



My favorite part was the cake with the picture of the island frosted on, and a matchbox airplane crashed into the island.



Now compare that with the actual island:



Pretty good right?

Cant wait for the rest of the season, and maybe a few more lost parties along the way!

Candy Cane Cookies

Emily and I decided to try and make Candy Cane Cookies in preparation for a small new years eve gathering. I think they turned out well. The only thing I'd change in the future would be not to melt the butter so much for the frosting.

The recipe can be found here

Florentines

I tried making Florentines, and for the most part half the batch worked out well. I made 3 fatal mistakes.

1. I am home for the weekend, and my mom has FIVE different types of sugar, but none were white granulated, so I used light brown instead.
2. I mis-read the amt of cream to use, so i used much less than called for
3. I only flattened 1 pan appropriately, so the not flat pan did not bake evenly

The flattened pan came out well, and a spread dark chocolate over the bottom. They turned out pretty well, but i'll have to give it one more shot.

Ocean Waves Quilt

I completed this quilt while we got about 2 feet of snow outside (exciting!). The pattern is called ocean waves, but it doesn't really look much like waves.

I realized that I'm not very good at assembling the layers of quilts. I'm totally fine making the front, but since its never a perfectly even shape it gets a little messy when I try and add a back and filling. This time I put 2 layers of fleece inside, and miraculously the exact width of the fleece was the width of my quilt otherwise that would have been disastrous!

Here is a close up on one square


I think this is technically my best quilt because all the blocks lined up and you have to look pretty close to see something wrong! Plus peter helped me cut off all the loose threads, so its neat.