use real butter

Recipe: chinese stir-fried rice cakes

Congratulations to Jenny Williams! She won the raffle prize I offered for the Menu for Hope fundraiser. Jenny, I’ll be emailing you shortly to find out which photo you’d like. The entire effort raised over $62,000. A big thanks to all who participated.

This week, I baked a birthday cake for someone’s surprise 50th birthday party. The original plan was to bring a bunch of macarons, but the day before the party, I thought I should ask her husband if he had arranged for a cake. I normally wouldn’t volunteer during such a busy time, but I have a soft spot for guys who are so sweet on their partners. He was cooking dinner for 30 people, so I said I could handle the cake. I doubled this chocolate espresso fudge cake with beautiful results. Probably the most nerve-wracking part was driving it down Boulder Canyon, but the structural integrity of this cake is rock solid. Love that Marcel Desaulniers.

simple decoration

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: mussels in white wine sauce

My dad skyped me this evening and I was all giggles because Jeremy and I had already broken into the champagne. Even though we stay up past midnight most evenings, we usually turn in before the year flips on New Year’s Eve. We enjoyed a bottle of bubbly with our dinner tonight.

i know this is a favorite of squid, barbara, and mollie

The typical thing to do at the close of the year is to reflect and perhaps list favorites or tick off milestones of the year. I feel I got a very good look at 2008 during 2008 – like traveling the road with my face 2 inches from the pavement. All of the bad times are quite fresh, but more importantly all of the good times are also vivid in my mind. I am really happy to not only be alive, but to be more or less healthy (it’s hard to really know), and definitely living on my terms. In volleyball, we always used to tell each other, “on your toes!” so you’d be ready for anything the offense would dump over the net – a dink, off the block, hard line, cross court, six-pack in the face. I feel as if I live my life “on my toes” now. That comes with the territory when you lose someone close to you or don’t know if you will survive your disease or experience one of those curve balls (I like to think of it as a wicked floater serve instead) that life pitches and sends you sprawling on your ass. Keep your eye on the ball.

back to breckenridge with my honey

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: lychee martini

It’s the 18th. One week until Christmas. But I’m not stressing because we don’t celebrate Christmas. It’s not that I didn’t grow up celebrating Christmas, because in my non-religious family’s house – we celebrated the hell out of Christmas. My mother always made a phenomenal spread for dinner with lots of snacks sprinkled throughout the day to keep us out of the kitchen. As I’ve said before, my family does not have a baking tradition – *I* am the baker. But I do remember that my mom would make cookies once a year: puffy hearts and rings. I think it was a kind of cream puff dough, shaped into… hearts and rings, and spread with pink and green frosting and sprinkled with almond slivers. That frosting contained almond extract, which I looooooooved. I thought my mom was the best baker in the world! Kind of like when I thought my paternal grandmother had really stumbled onto something when she made me my first piece of toast :)

a snapshot from christmas past

**Jump for more butter**