Of This and Other Worlds

When my son came home from Junior Kindergarten excitedly waving a recipe for making gingerbread men, I confess my heart sank a little. I've tasted many such cookies, and even though they might look cute on the outside, the gingerbread was always so dry and bland that I couldn't even bring myself to finish it. Besides, who wants to spend all that time messing around with decorations and icing? Not me.

However, this one just said "decorate with raisins", so I thought hm, maybe it doesn't need icing and I should give it a try. And I did manage to find a gingerbread man-shaped plastic mould (it wasn't even a proper cutter -- I got it out of a Rice Krispies box) in my cupboard, so I worked up my courage, followed the recipe, and...

Oh.

Oh my.

You definitely don't need icing for these (in fact the mere idea wounds my soul). You don't need fancy decorations, either. I raided my cupboard for currants, raisins and dried marachino cherries, and a few seconds with a knife gave me all the eyes, buttons and smiles a gingerbread man could need.

And they aren't hard, or bland. They are spicy and chewy and delicious, and the only reason I am not eating the head off my third or fourth cookie right now is because I am heroically restraining myself.

( Recipe below )

Enjoy! And don't tell me you iced them or I will come after you with a wiffle bat, you philistine.

A couple days ago I was tweeting about having to make a second batch of Snickerdoodles because my Evil Family had eaten the ENTIRE first batch -- some eight dozen cookies.

Fortunately making more wasn't a big deal: I like baking Snickerdoodles. Still, I was a bit amazed that my husband and three young boys could have been quite that greedy, especially in just a matter of two or three days.

Anyway, I made the second batch. I let it sit overnight for the flavor to develop. Then I took the nice big container of fresh Snickerdoodles and opened the deep freezer to hide them away so that my Evil Family could not NOM them a second time.

And lo, inside the freezer I found...

...you've guessed it, haven't you?

Yeah. Well.

The plus side is that we now have lots of Snickerdoodles?

Some random linkage for a Friday afternoon:

Community plug: housefic_meta. Right now they're looking for recommendations of "Classic" House fics, by which they really seem to mean "really well-written House fics of any sort, even if nobody's heard of them". So in the end, some useful recs could come out of this. I personally plan to submit a couple (recs, I mean). It's hard to find good Housefic.

Also, probably everybody in creation has seen the best Christmas lights display ever, but here it is in case you haven't. Snopes has the backstory -- it's the real deal, cooked up by an electrical engineer with delusions of grandeur and waaaay too much time on his hands. Now if only I could get my kids to stop playing it over and over and over...

Finally, ursulav has just posted an amusing story about editing one of her manuscripts which I think will be of special interest to lizbee, among others.

* * *

I should probably have mentioned a couple of posts back, since there seems to be some honest confusion on the subject, that I did enjoy GoF. In fact, I probably enjoyed it as much as PoA or more so -- definitely more than I did the first two movies, anyway. Not that any of them were actually painful to watch, IMO. Of course the books are better, but aren't they always?

The best thing about the film, though, I haven't yet seen mentioned anywhere -- ( costuming spoiler ). Comedy GOLD, man. I nearly spit my water all over the row in front of me.

Also, I love Neville like whoa, shiny shoes and all.

...is this (S). Or this (18m).

So. cool.

But seriously, the wishlist thing? Link me to yours in comments, please. I'd like to see what I might be able to do for some of you who brighten my LJ days, even if it's just sharing some music love or hammering out a drabble or something.

Also, I think from now on LOST should just be the Locke and Eko hour. I would so watch that.

I am finally starting to get to the stage in my unpacking where I might be able to fulfill some wishes -- yay!

Only, I stupidly didn't put people's wishlists in my Memories the first time I saw them, and now they are buried all who-knows-where.

So, if you see this, please have mercy on poor pathetic disorganized me, and leave a link to your wishlist in the comments for this post.

Thank you very muchly.