Weekend Recipe-testing: Now with Vegan Possum

put frosting outside to cool to the right texture...

went to get it and there's a possum sampling it.

— Lyn Thorne-Alder (@lynthornealder) December 18, 2016

There was a possum eating my chocolate frosting.

— Sam T.C. (@samttc) December 18, 2016

So yep. That was my weekend: possum frosting.

(Turns out, if you google possum and chocolate, what you get isn’t a whole lot of good information on if possums are able to eat chocolate. You get mostly possum recipes. Oops.)

We were testing vegan frosting to go on a vegan cake for a vegan Christmas present for my vegan father (help I can’t vegan stop). The cake turned out great, actually — a Depression-era “crazy cake” recipe with no eggs and no butter or milk (“no eggs no butter, no flour no sugar” says the woman on the bus whose parents probably remembered the Depression). And the frosting — once we scraped off the top where the possum had gotten his nose into it — that turned out surprisingly tasty.

This week is all the vegan food-testing and making: soups for mom, cake for dad, and the bread might not be vegan but it’ll be tasty too. It’s the time of year where I’m making a lot of bread, trying new recipes or just throwing stuff in the mixer and seeing what happens (“either not enough molasses or too much” last week; this week turned out pretty good). Bonus of all the baking: it heats up the far end of the house, where the wood stove’s heat doesn’t really reach. Bonus of making soup in the winter: cooking it on the wood stove and making the whole house smell like soup.

The weather outside is frightful — by turns freezing and raining, snowing and blowing — but the fire is burning hot and the candles are lit in the windows. I’ve got silk poinsettias for my vases and bandanna-patterned wrapping paper for my presents, cookies for the baking and fresh bread hiding in the microwave (Otherwise the cat eats it).

Happy Holidays, my friends. It’s a wonderful life here in West Nowhere, NY.

Helping a Friend Out, Part Two

Part One
Addergoole-verse, Early 2012 (in the middle of the Apocalypse)
Written to rix_scaedu's commission.
I do not have an Agmund icon. But here's Luke looking uncomfortable about the whole thing.

The boy was not happy about Agmund’s presence, but he was more than willing to lay out the details of the attack. The Nedetakaei nest had at least ten human hostages, was in the middle of what had been a very populous area before the gods came to town, and had been lain with booby-traps, Worked wards, and at least three explosive trip-lines.
( Read more... )

Being Polite, a repost story of Dragons Next Door for Patreon

This was originally posted in August of 2011 and follows Junie from the Dragons Next Door story, pictured above in a sketch by Meeks.

🐲

The Smiths had been living next door to us for several months before my daughter informed us, in that self-assured way of children everywhere, that we should stop calling them “Mister and Missus Smith,” that “Cxaidin and Zizny” was correct...

read on...