Work party

I volunteered to plan my department's work party, and was given two incredibly able assistants to whom I delegated most of the work. Three cheers for them!

With the economy being what it is, our party was pot luck and all of our decorations were made out of office materials that were headed for the trash bin.


Plenty of food, an entire table of savories and another full of sweets. We had people sign up so that we could make sure it would be roughly even, which it was.


Festive tables


And some of the decorations made from old crate stickers and old memos and such

A template for the snowflake can be found here

Christmas cookies

I wanted to make sugar cookies for my department's Christmas party and I wanted to try a new recipe. This basic one was pretty good. I rolled them out half an inch thick and cut them out with a shot glass as I couldn't find my round cutters.


I coated them with a semi-sweet ganache and refrigerated them overnight


And in the morning I coated them with luster dust




They were perfectly soft and chewy and everybody loved the gold.

Cristi's cake

Cristi wanted citrus and berries with her cake, so I chose Martha Stewart's 1-2-3-4 lemon cake which I'd been wanting to try for a while.

Martha Stewart's cake

My cake

Next time, I'll line the sides of the pans with parchment as well as the bottom. My cake didn't come out as gracefully as I'd have liked. That combined with my thin lemon curd meant that the cake simply had to be covered.

Then the seven minute frosting and I had a fight. The frosting won. This doesn't do it justice, but if you look closely you can see that the melted sugar didn't so much become one with the meringue.


Not the unqualified success I'd originally planned, but I was pleased all the same. And more importantly, the birthday girl seemed to like it just fine.

Perfect cookies

What is the secret to perfect cookies? Okay, one of the many secrets?


These will turn this



Into these


Which end up looking like this


Which is, by the way, about four inches in diameter and an inch tall. Now that's a cookie.