How cute is my heart shaped cinnamon swirl bread? A Martha Stewart Cinnamon-Raisin Bread Recipe, I’ve had for years, is easily transformed into these heart shaped loaves! You’ll notice my bread has no raisins in it, and this is because of a childhood trama Kevin had with raisins. I won’t go into detail on that … lets just say it involved his nose and a trip to the emergency room. You’ll still need to buy raisins for the recipe, because you soak them first in hot water and then use the raisin-water for flavor. The trick to the heart shape is, after you’ve rolled the bread out, and applied the cinnamon sugar filling, instead of rolling it up into one swirl, start from each of the shorter ends and roll two smaller swirls into the center. Then pinch the bottom of the loaf to make the heart’s point. Next, use a regular loaf pan to bake the bread, but using aluminum foil, create 2 9 inch long cylinders to place on each side of the loaf pan. When you go to bake the bread in the loaf pan, the heart’s point (the bread’s bottom) will fit in between the foil cylinders, and the top of the bread will rest on top of each side of the foil. Did that make sense?
Makes 2 1/2 loaves!
I’m a big fan of the Daily Dilbert plugin for Firefox, and today’s was one I could especially relate to …
I decided that adding borders to the images on my blog, would give the site a little face-lift, if not take at least 10 years off. I spent a little time researching how to do this, and even though it is quite simple, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to post what I found. I started by finding the img tag in my CSS file. Next, I added some margins and padding around my image, so that the text wouldn’t be aligned right up against it. Then I added my border attribute, picked a pixel size and color, so the end product looked like this:
a img {
margin: 5px;
padding: 5px;
border: solid 3px #E1D6C6;
}
Finally, I wanted to add a hover attribute when one of my images is linked. I used the hover psuedo-class to mimic the img tag attributes, but changed the hover color on the border:
a:hover img {
margin: 5px;
padding: 5px;
border: solid 3px #676E04;
}
Now, here’s one piece I still don’t understand. I saw another image tag in my CSS file, so I added the same type of attributes to it:
img {
margin: 5px;
padding: 5px;
border: solid 3px #E1D6C6;
}
I’m not sure why I need both tags, but it seems that I do. Without this img tag, my latest image post has a black border, but all the rest of my posted images have the grey border. Some research I’ve done shows it could have something to do with the difference in browsers, and that both tags are needed for stability across IE and Mozilla. If anyone knows the answer to this … please enlighten me!
After all the renovating work we did yesterday, I did manage to throw together a nice beef stew for the game. Even though the game was on, we were still cleaning up and getting the house in order, and I was more interested in the commercials anyway. The Snickers one cracked me up, but the GM Suicide Robot was my FAVORITE!! How great is YouTube, by the way?!
Anyway, I am always looking for things to cook in my Le Creuset pot … my best Christmas gift. This was an easy recipe from Better Homes and Gardens, the mother of all cookbooks. Literally 20 minutes of prep, and 2 hours of simmering time … ie: throw some stuff in the pot and let it cook! Perfect when it is -11 degrees in Boston (with wind chill)!
Well, it is superbowl weekend, but since our beloved Pats (ahem … Brady) aren’t playing, we have been busy focusing on other things. We put in a solid 12 hours yesterday finishing up the kitchen. I painted and Kevin did some more tiling, thanks to Fran for letting us borrow the saw! We also finally got to the grouting part, where I definitely got ‘duped’ in the process. It went something like … "honey, I mixed too much grout, and now it is drying out before I can lay it and swipe it off, can you help?". I ended up helping … Yep, duped! I put in some time squeezing and pressing the grout between tiles, then wiping it off with a damp sponge …. about a million times. I hate grouting!
One thing that helped us through the day was listening to some good music. When down in Orlando, we hit up the Cirque du Soleil show, La Nouba. It was simply amazing! We are huge cirque fans (kevin too!) We got to see Quidam in Boston a few years ago, and I’ve seen "O" at the Bellagio in Vegas. In any case, while perusing the gift shop at the cirque tent, we came across a CD/DVD for the newest cirque show in Vegas – LOVE. We had heard rave reviews about this latest show on NPR, so we knew it was comprised of The Beatles music all remixed together to create something new and exciting. There is a CD, great for downloaded to the iPod, but the DVD is so much better. The point of this new show it to take all those old Beatles songs that everyone loves, split them apart, and carefully overlay them back together, so that the strings from one song are the background to a different song. Listening to the show on the surround sound DVD is so key, because you can hear all the little background instruments and subtle remixes that were so thoughtfully layed out. The DVD also plays continuously, meshing the end of one song right into the beginning of the next, just like the cirque show, so you’ve got 26 tracks meshed into 2+ hours of uninterrupted music. Perfect for some hard core grouting!
We are not completely done with the kitchen yet, but all that is left is some finish work around the wall that we (kevin) took down. Here’s a before, middle, and after of the interior of the kitchen though, that part is done, and WHAT A DIFFERENCE!!! My favorites are the new granite counter tops and the brick pattern of the tile floor… I was impressed with the IT guy’s skillz!
Thanks to Kathy for taking some shots from my session! In typical fashion, I was super nervous at first. I didn’t eat much the night before, which was unfortunate because we had a lovely team dinner at the Flying Fish. The scallops I ordered where $10 a piece when you did the math, and I only made it through 1 and a 1/2 out of the 4. I woke up bright and early the next day for a 7:00am BOF before I went over to Hemisphere IV for my 8:30am talk. Even though my stomach was empty, the nerves were getting to me, and I still wanted to throw up right before the talk started. I think this picture sums up that feeling. After I got going though, things went well. My only qualm was with the podium. Is that thing unnecessarily large, or what?! I could barely see over it, so I opted to stand by its side. I think I got my point across in any case … even if the podium looked like it was going to have me for lunch.
