Blue Cornmeal Dulce de Leche Buttercream Cake topped with Pecan Brickle!

The BreadMan Ultimate Bread Machine is back in our lives and regardless of the snow flurries outside I declare Summer!  In honor of the first BreadMan loaf I made bacon and scrambled eggs with toast and we ate it at our dining room table where, at some point, I looked up to notice we have a ceiling fan in that room.  "Good!" I said, "We will spend a lot of time in here during the Summer!"

a miniature vacation

I always have some kind of small injury, I love to cook but have no real knife skills.  I'm impatient and I guess a little obsessive compulsive when it comes to doing things the most efficient way.  I'm not a bumbling moron but I do lack grace, or finesse, something like that.  I fell on the ice last night on the way home from work.  I gashed my knuckle opening the door to the manager's apartment building, but we live in an apartment building!  I'm cooking food, I don't care!!  I replanted six baby cacti today.  I didn't know I would have to do this when I bought them, tiny little things in tiny little thimble pots.  But then they started to look to be on their way out so I googled it.  Like goldfish, they will only grow as big as their container.  My fingers are tingling as I type this.  How do you replant a cactus?  Like a child tossing around as you try and change their diaper.  I've never actually done that - changed a diaper.  I dreamt about it once.

I'll tell you about it later.

I made the aforementioned White Chocolate Raspberry Cake for Christmas dessert!  I ended up making the cranberry filling as well and alternating the two in each layer.  It is absolutely delicious.  Merry Christmas!!

There's a vacant house across the street from my mom's house in Florida. It isn't completely finished, no railings on the stairs or a driveway, but you're not gonna get rained on if you're inside. My mom said it was intended to be a model home.  It was going to be auctioned off, but then the economy lost it and they had to abandon ship. It's a horriying thing, gaudy with no trace of human craft. It's what would happen if an English castle and a Spanish colonial revival managed to reproduce. You should see it, just standing there, a giant monument to the failure of America.

But who knows, maybe it will sit there for another 100 years and then people will travel here to marvel at it's unfathomable quality. I guess that's the only question, how long does it take for something to be interesting? Myles and I spend hours driving through suburbs - like a safari. A few weeks ago we found the most bizarre neighborhood in the suburbs of Atlanta. It was just off this vicious causeway, which made it even more bizare because as soon as we made the turn we were transported into to this hilly, dank green neighborhood with moss and trees and lots of cars from the 1990s but not a person in sight. It was full of large middle-class houses, mostly two stories with yards to scale. They all looked to be by the same builder - wood paneling painted dark colors - and here's the thing: each and every one of them had been converted into an apartment home. They looked just like your everyday middle class homes doing their middle class thing, except they each had two front doors and next to them the letters A and B or sometimes 1 and 2. If it weren't for the cars, we'd of had no idea anyone even lived there. I'm fairly certain there was trash in the breeze. Yet there's a mansion designed by Disney across the street from my mom's house with no one living in it.

This is a photo from last winter that I never thought anything of but I like it now for some reason.

This is a recipe from a magazine in the check-out lane at Home Depot for White Chocolate Cranberry Cake. I've seen it before and thought to myself, "yum", but in my mind it was White Chocolate Raspberry Cake, which to me sounds better, so I cut out the ingredients for the filling and am inserting my own. It's mainly here for me, but let it be known - this isn't the first time my iPhone has cost Food & Wine $4.89.

These envelopes are made from recycled maps and are soon to go out of stock as I am going to purchase them all.  Leave your address if you want to receive mail in them!  From StartMotions - environmentally friendly animation.

I've been on a bagged nuts craze lately.  The little white one comes filled with cashews and is sold in a convenience store in the shopping plaza connected to the W hotel where I work.  The little brown one comes filled with peanuts (in shell!) and is sold at a gas station in west midtown where Myles works.  It was the packaging that initially sold me, but I think they are the best cashews I've ever had - the peanuts are good, but remarkably little!  Usually there are four in a shell you'd expect to hold two.

Tonight I made my first pizza!  Originally I had planned to use the pizza sauce I bought from Trader Joe's, but when I tasted it it reminded me of those pizza Lunchables (and also pizza Combos) so I decided to make my own.  At the time I was baking an acorn squash that I was going to eat for a snack while I was waiting for Myles to get home from work, and it occurred to me to smash the squash into my pizza sauce.  Then I added some cinnamon and the result was really, really good.  You can't tell me that pizza doesn't look good.

So I started an internship at an interior design company last week, my duties for which have consisted mainly of creating this blog for them.  Due to this and the fact that I've been working twelve hour days, my little blog has suffered some neglect.  I've been meaning to get on here and post a few pictures of Myles and my "project crayon" (it isn't actually named that).

A few factors resulted in project crayon.  First, while we were visiting my mom in Florida before moving to Atlanta, I combed her house for things we might find useful during our time here.  Muffin tins, spare toothbrushes, a garlic press.  While I didn't come upon any particularly exciting items, I did grab a 14"x17" sketch pad that must have been mine a long time ago when I was trying to do something with pastels.  At any rate the pad sat around in my car for a few weeks while we were busy scouring the metro area for jobs.  At that point we had spent all of our money (most of it on unforeseen costs such as Hunter's vet bill when he ate Myles weed cookies) and were in desperate need of some cash, especially because we kept on renting the next disc of Freaks and Geeks even though we couldn't decide if we actually liked it.  Three weeks and three jobs among us later, we still don't have any money, which means we can't buy anything to hang on the desperate, soulless white walls of our apartment.  This is where it all comes together:  We are the ones in the crayon aisle at Michaels', weighing our options.  Ninety-six colors for eight dollars or a hundred and twenty for twelve?  Ultimately the box with the glitter crayons will win.  Aside from onions, "crayons" is the only thing on our grocery list right now.  Here is what we have so far (minus a few that I hung in the kitchen to cover up some wall damage).

The one in the center with the popcorn bowl floating among the high-rises was the first to go up.  Can you tell who did which?  Our plan is to cover the entire wall by the time we leave the South.  That goal seemed a lot more feasible before I started working seventy hours a week.  In truth it's become Myles' project.  He didn't want me to put my high heel picture near his Nike sneaker picture for reasons he couldn't really articulate.  It's his vision, I go with it.

there's little I love more than well made versatile clothing

We caved in at the Target today and bought a bag of candy corn and pumpkins.  One of Myles' favorite things is when I bake miniature peanut butter cups (or once, Rollos) into sugar cookies.  This is his new favorite.  I haven't tried one now that the candy pumpkin has probably hardened up again, but when they were melted they were genius.

In BB 2.0 - A Collaborative Music/Spoken Word Project