Category Archives: Personal

December 5, 2014

Double Chocolate Scones

A couple months ago I posted a recipe for savoury bacon and cheddar scones. I love those things, as does Rob, because they’re my new excuse to make bacon, which we normally have only for special occasions. That recipe had several suggestions for alternate flavours — some of which I tried out — but there was also another recipe for chocolate chip scones. It’s not a lot different from the original, but it packs a lot more flavour in there. This scone is definitely not for breakfast unless you’ve spent many years honing your chocolate intake capacity. It does really well as an evening snack… with Bailey’s.

November 28, 2014

Christmas Shortbread Bites

A few weeks ago, this recipe came across my Facebook page. It looked very festive, and though I’ve never tried to make shortbread before I was sure I could handle it. The problem was that I don’t have a food processor, or the pan size listed in the article. With a few workarounds, though, I made things work – so don’t let that stop you from making a recipe you really want to try! This is the first recipe I’ve posted on this blog that I hadn’t already made successfully several times, so I’ve critiqued it at the end.

November 25, 2014

Travel Tuesdays | Yangshuo, China

Yangshuo is a popular tourist destination for people in China, and that much was obvious when we got off the bus. The streets were full of people who were clearly on vacation. The city of Yangshuo is beautiful, but it’s the surrounding karst landscape that really steals the show. And with hostel beds at $1.50 each and full western meals for even less, this place was paradise. Our hostel was clean and super cheap. It had a lounge with English movies (not subtitled) and was full of western backpackers that we could easily converse with. Keep in mind that during this trip we’d been living in Korea for over a year, and we were welcoming any signs of home.

November 21, 2014

Fudgy Peppermint Cookies

Can I just start with the fact that I’m really getting into this cookie photography thing? The challenge of keeping shots clean and crisp (as is needed with food photography) — yet using a background/setting that isn’t always the same — has proven to be pretty fun! This past weekend, before prepping early-Christmas turkey dinner, I made three recipes. That’s right, I’m a binge baker. It was the last day before we got snow, so there were still leaves on many of the trees. I ran out to grab some for this photoshoot.

November 18, 2014

Travel Tuesdays | Amsterdam, Netherlands

Exactly six years ago today, Rob and I woke up in Amsterdam. That sounds a lot more salacious than it was; we’d taken the train from Berlin the evening before and slept like rocks in our hostel. The weather was getting colder, the days shorter, and after 3 months on the road we were getting tired – sleeping in longer, and looking forward more and more to new socks, clean sheets, and not being on our guard all the time again losing belongings or being pick pocketed. We were starting to lose our edge as well: a few weeks earlier in Poland I left my iPod in a hostel and it was taken. In Berlin, Rob left our collection of foreign currency in the hostel, but they retrieved it for us and held it for us for over a week before we made our way back to Berlin just to pick it up.