and it's cool, and it's totally awesome!

For any of you who haven't yet seen the Harry Potter musical, you really should check it out.  I've had the first song stuck in my head all evening.  It is amazing and hilarious and, most importantly, people like me who were never into the books/movies can love it too!  Just a warning, though: this is a full-length show, so you may end up losing a lot of time.

Lately, I've been losing what little time I can find by making crazy upcycling plans.  What is upcycling?  I'm glad you asked.  It's basically the process of taking clothes you don't want and using the fabric to make something you do want.  I have several shirts that I can't wear anymore, some because they are worn out and some because they are too big, and so I've been trying to find interesting things to do with the ones I can't bear to throw away.  Well, that and trying to screw up some courage to resize my big stuff, now that I have a sewing machine.  A couple weeks ago I made a t-shirt quilt out of a bunch of my old Threadless shirts.  My next project is to make a little shrug.  Hopefully it'll be totally awesome ^.~

 116. Fig Bars
These cookies look a lot like the ones I made the week before, but they aren't the same!  The filling for these is made with figs, red wine, cinnamon, honey, and pepper.  I used a cheap cabernet for the wine, because I try to use up the things I buy and have never really liked merlot much.  The cookie part is a simple white flour dough with lemon zest in it.

These cookies were alright at first, although I think the cabernet was a bad choice - I guess the thing about red wines is that they are meant to go well with savory things like steak or pepper, but some go better than others - it probably would have been a good idea for me to think about what kind of wine to buy rather than to pick up something with a kangaroo on it.  The strange and cool thing, though, is that after a few days the cookies became a little softer and the flavors mellowed out, and all of a sudden these cookies were really delicious.

 117. Cassis Chambord Crisps
These are very simple cookies.  In short, they are low-butter sugar cookies with a hefty dose of Cassis, a blackberry liqueur, to give it flavor.  The recipe suggested Chambord, a raspberry liqueur, as a substitute, and since I love raspberry and couldn't find any creme de cassis on short notice, I made the suggested substitution.  Little did I expect, however, that I would end up having to buy a holy hand grenade filled with liqueur!  Or that it would set me back $30.

The holy hand grenade of raspberry liqueur.

These cookies just came out of the oven about half an hour ago, and I'm not entirely sure what I think about them yet.  They aren't particularly crisp, and I can't detect any raspberry flavor in them.  I'm hoping that they might taste better in the morning, but we'll see.  I suppose I'll have to update again then to let you know.

Edit: the raspberry shows up after about two bites, hooray!


I think that's it for now.  Perhaps in a future entry I'll post some of the products of my sewing adventures, but that will all depend on how they turn out.