12.24

So on Christmas Eve, I thought it would be festive to try my hand at baking a Yule log. For some reason, probably because I knew my dad despises my method of grocery shopping, (which consists of running laps around the store until everything is found), I went with a roughly 5 ingredient recipe to ease his pain. This was slightly disappointing as an EEEVOO blogger, but I figured an easier recipe may allow for more precious family time, especially it being Christmas Eve. 

Neapolitan

Because I know that baking is not my strong suit, I made sure to follow this recipe exactly as written. This is contrary to how I read cooking recipes, whose ingredients and steps I look at as mere suggestions. anywho, followed the recipe, got to the step where I add the Neapolitan ice cream as the creamy filling and roll the whole thing into the quintessential Yule log, and the damn cake was dense and brittle, unlike the cakey spongey consistency I had hoped would come out of the oven. 

Irrelevant, but we got fancy with our eggnog selection this year.

I tossed the Yule turd* in the garbage, let out a big harrumph, and announced to my mother that the contribution I would be making to the Christmas dinner would be helping her make deviled eggs. Much to our chagrin, my aunt also brought deviled eggs, so our deviled-egg-sudden standoff-competition was pleasantly entertaining. In sum, I'm going to leave a very angry comment on the recipe website. 

Aforementioned Yule turd*. Simply recipes, my ass.

I dunno If you figured it out yet, but if I'm on my A-game, I'll post two or three entries once every two or three weeks. I'll let you in on a little secret: I create most of this blog on my iPod, whether it be the written word or pictures I take (what you miss from these pictures is my exclamation, every time, without fail: "oh my goodness I forgot to take a picture!" Maybe someday I'll video tape a cooking escapade and edit the boring parts out, it may actually be pretty comical). I am super lazy when it comes to taking booting up my computer at home, and manage to do it at around the same time as when I'm craving to watch Big Bang theory, so I end up doing both in one fell swoop. So maybe ill up my ante and post every week if/when this blog goes viral if/when I become a celebrity cook. 

*Speaking of turds, here's something funny that happened in the past few weeks: so for years, my father has so affectionately named me his "dog turd", which is a homophone for "daughter". As part of our gift-free Christmas, he got a donation to a Hurricane Sandy relief project from me for Christmas, and I signed the donation card with "Love your dog turd." A few days after Christmas, I received the following personal message from a woman from the organization:

"Hi Dana,

I apologize you did provided me with Scott’s mailing address, ignore the last email.  I will have the notification in the mail to Scott today. 

By the way, I have heard some interesting dog names in my life but Turd is now at the top of the list. 

Cheers"

There you have it, America, yet another example where punctuation indeed does matter. 

Feliz Navidad, little chefs!