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Sunday, July 14, 2013

Vive le Macaron

This morning, I got to spend a few hours perfecting my pastry chef skills with my very talented friend Andrea at Sur la Table. Our task: macarons. We were quickly corrected that American macaroons are the coconut desserts, where the French macarons are the shelled sandwich creme cookie. There's your lesson of the day.



Our creations included strawberry with Champagne (eh, sparkling wine, we saw the bottle) buttercream, bacon with maple buttercream, and mint with dark chocolate ganache. While I don't see myself making these very often--they are pretty labor intensive and apparently not for the amateur baker-I could see a batch for a special occasion as definitely doable.

A very fitting way to spend Bastille Day :) Vive le France!

Make way for baby

I'm trying to keep a pretty minimalistic approach to baby gear considering our sprawling estate and the space available. While some of the minimalistic suggestions have included keeping baby in a laundry basket and downsizing to one car, I'm not quite that extreme. The child will have a crib. And his own room. Space must still be made, thank goodness for Craig's List.

In the past week, I've sold my desk and set of dining chairs. Still have my grandmother's vintage sewing machine and cabinet up for grabs (and to any family reading, I was given the ok by my mom!) to anyone locally interested.

Come to find out I was strangely attached to the chairs, since they were a CL purchase and project. But, they are on to another great home and we are creating space for this child.

Since the desk sold, my plan to was to turn our front closet into an office closet. My desk primarily acted as storage and a dumping ground for bills; it was rare that I sat there to work. So, this past 4th of July, I did some major purging and organizing, creating the office closet, cleaning out the garage, and rearranging what will be the baby's closet. And then I took a lavender epsom salt bath.

The vacuum has to go somewhere. Somewhere is next to the party supply box.
These people require more space than a laundry basket.