Book & Baking Blog Entry 34

I love to bake cookies.  Really.  And I prefer baking for others to eat.  Mostly because I put on weight easily and couldn't possibly eat all the cookies that I really would like to eat.


I just had to share the experience of making the rare, almost never seen out of its natural midwestern habitat, Orange Cookie.  Orange Cookies were almost never found at my house even  at Christmas.  Nope.  Why not?  They are delicious.  They are cakey and sweet.  They actually taste like orange.  They have lovely icing--AHA!  There's the kicker.  As a kid I had no idea that there were people out there regularly icing  their cookies.


I can't speak for my mother, but I suspect that she did not like to frost cookies.  For example, I thought that sugar cookies were called sugar cookies because you sprinkled sugar on them.  I didn't realize that it was because they are sugary goodness and most people put even more sugary icing on them.  Who knew?! 


So, of course, we all like to think that we don't have the hang-ups of our mothers.  So why don't I make the sugary, sweet, orange, frosted cookies?  Well, I don't keep orange juice in the house.  I should find out if there is such a think as powdered orange juice, not Tang, but real stuff.  There has got to be.  Seriously, you can get powdered milk...


I don't mind frosting the cookies and the best part about these is that the frosting gets nice and stiff.  You're supposed to use wax paper to separate the layers of cookies, but I don't.  Honey-badger just don't care....


So, rethinking the cookie line up.  What was really fun was that I know mom would always use orange food color so that the cookies were "orange." I made the frosting, well, mauve? even towards a lilac.  I used pink, but the cream color of the frosting clearly influenced the end color more than I figured.  Too cute.  My daughter LOVES it.


Happy Baking.

Book & Baking Blog Entry 33

WARNING:  some bad language and spoilers

Well, it's time to think about novellas.  First, one of the great thing about Kindle is that novellas are affordable and can be downloaded without an anthology.  I just wish that it was made clear when one is buying a novella.  If I'm on the amazon site I usually double-check but on the kindle itself, at 10pm when I'm reading by flashlight....you get it.

Anyway.  Coffee Clutch by Marshall Thornton.  Wow.  Didn't like it.  At all.  Wouldn't recommend it.  Even for .99. 

First I object to the title.  Please.  I hope that the author was trying to be clever, but I get the idea, based on the rest of the novella, that he was just ignorant of the spelling.

One of the amazon reviewers says that she can't point out what she doens't like without spoilers, so HEY, THERE MIGHT BE SPOILERS AFTER THIS POINT.

I don't like the characters.  Are ALL men of the sixties truly heinous assholes?  Are all of the women ineffectual wimps who just take it?  And why are they friends when they don't seem to like each other?

And, the plot.  Our main character, a wimpy, sixties housewife who gave up her non-career that she never really tried to get to be a wife and mother decides that her risque, divorced neighbor must have been murdered by her other neighbor.  So she sets out to prove this?  Not really.  She does a bunch of stuff and accidentally finds the killer BUT because she's so wimpy she won't do anything about it because he (the killer) will actually prove that she did it because her husband and ALL of the other husbands in the neighborhood were actually having affairs with the divorcee?  Really?  And she's not going to confront her husband and she'll continue to live next to the killer. 

I get the idea that there will be more in the "next" Jan Birch novel and that she'll "grow" as a person and find herself, blah blah blah.  The characters couldn't be more one dimensional.  Everything we know is because the author tells us it's so.

The kicker?!  There is a movie short with the same name.  Based on the novella?!  I hope not.

Book & Baking Blog Entry 32

So, I've been lazy and have not been blogging.  And now I have a second blog.  I only have one entry, but I set it up today, so don't expect too much.  I thought that I would go with the professional blog.  But enough about that travesty....


So I finally "read" (audiobook) Darkly Dreaming Dexter, by Jeff Lindsay.  Not bad.  It didn't enthrall me as much as it might have but I did enjoy it.  I understand that there is a TV show.  People love it.


I would say that it was better than a large number of books that I've read, but I'm not beating down the computer to download another.  Perhaps it was the narrator, but I don't think so.  First, I'm not just how Dexter is so smart that he is finding serial killers when no one else can?  Is it merely that monsters can find each other?  Having only read the one book it just seemed to be a matter of the author "said so" and that we, the reader had to accept it.  I might consider another to see if the characters develop at all.  They seemed pretty one-dimensional and, frankly, some of the stupidest cops that I've ever read about in a novel.

I have also recently finished Sworn to Silence by Linda Castillo.  I enjoyed this book (audio) quite a bit.  Well, right up until the last 25%.  But I enjoyed the characters, they seemed to be somewhat developed, their interaction seemed true to the story.  Until: our chief of police, who has 8 years of law experience prior to her current job seems to lose any sense of how the law works and her rights under the law.  She actually just walks out of her office and doesn't fight her contractual rights and then allows herself to be manhandled by her successor.  I plan to read at least one more by Castillo.  I thought that the rest was interesting enough to give her another try.

Good reading.