Running Into Joy

 Happy Sunday, internet people!  This week has been a blur of exhaustion, with Battle of the Fandoms continuing, Andy being out of town, and Azula being her usual energetic self.  I am beyond grateful that Andy is home from his business trip and that I was able to approach my bake on Saturday as a little me-time. On with it then, shall we?  This Week's Recipe: Little Pink Rose Cakes Cookbook pictured is Great British Bake Off: At Home The Prep This week's ingredient in question: edible rose petals.  I am not generally a fan of floral flavors, so when I saw we'd be using rose in this week's bake, I got a little nervous. Then I realized most of the flavor is chocolate and raspberry, and the roses are a garnish. Since we're approaching Valentine's Day, I resisted my urge to skip them altogether and began a search for where I might buy edible rose petals.  My friend found some great local recommendations for me, but between having Azula duty and generally a bad...

Happy Sunday, Internet people!  I write to you from my couch, where I’m curled up next to Azula. She’s chewing her bone, and I’m nursing incredibly sore, tired legs.  In the Fandom Running Club , we are three days in to one of our virtual race events: Battle of the Fandoms. Divided into teams centered around different movies, books, TV shows, etc, we walk and run as many miles as possible to move our team along a virtual race course in the fantastic Racery platform. It’s fitting that I managed to secure a spot on the Great British Bake Off team, Running Choux. Each race course gives us a virtual tour of someplace new, and this time around, we’re in Greece! In the past 2 days, I’ve walked and run 17.8 miles, and boy am I feeling it! Today, I’m hoping to achieve what we call a “cap”—hitting the daily upwards limit of miles allowed per person: 15. But before I get moving, I owe you a recap of this week’s bake, which I managed to squeeze into my 10 mile day!  This Week’s Rec...

Happy Tuesday, internet people!  I know this post is coming to you a bit later than scheduled, but January has been, well.. a lot. The tension leading up to the presidential inauguration knotted up with continued exhaustion from the pandemic has underscored a slow start to the semester as students undergo entry testing, and I feel a bit like I'm floating outside of time.  In spite of having a three-day weekend to look forward, I reached Friday feeling utterly drained and lacking in enthusiasm. In spite of my low energy levels, I've continued with my New Year's fitness challenges of the Yoga With Adriene 30 Day Journey, Breath , and the PB21 program from Bad Yogi. This leaves my body feeling sore and strong, intermittently and sometimes simultaneously.  Last week, I also added in the beginning of training for the BadassLadyGang winter racing series , which sounds like a lot but I promise you they all fit together more neatly than you'd think with the staggered start dat...

 Happy 2021, internet people, and welcome to the first bake of 2021!  As you may have noticed, this post comes a little later than the usual Sunday morning. I ended up taking a long hike with my fiancé and my pup that resulted in my being just too tired by the time we got back. So, my apologies for the delay, and without further ado, let's get on with it!  This week is extra special not only because it's my first Great British Blog Off bake of 2021, but also because I was joined (virtually) by my real life friend Mel, who writes the phenomenal travel blog The Scaredy Cat's Guide to Travel .  Mel and I watched many an episode of Bake Off together in our roommate days and were often inspired to bake (or grab dessert from the Whole Foods down the street) as a result. So, it seemed fitting to collaborate for a bakealong!  Since I began this self-designed challenge, I don't think there's been a week where I've thought less about the bake to come. This is mainly ...

 Happy New Year, internet people!  This is my first blog post of 2021, although I baked the cake on the last day of 2020. These past weeks have been slow and reflective for me, even more so than the usual still at the end of a year.  I wrote earlier about my intentions and goals for this fresh new year , and here I am, pursuing one of the biggest ones: writing. This blog has been my way of slowly returning to a more consistent writing practice, of feeling my way back to thinking of myself as a writer.  Towards the end of last year, I began working on my book manuscript, which I hadn't even been able to look at after my thesis board in 2018. It's taken me a long time to process some of the feedback I received, and I'm finally ready to return to the work and bring the past two years of learning and reflection into the draft.  It is scary to return to some of this material, and scarier still to bring in new ideas and consider the ways in which my material has shift...

 A happy holiday season to you all, dear readers!  This week has been one of those strange, slow weeks where I repeatedly lost track of what day it is. Not that it isn't a common occurrence in these pandemic times, but I had an extra dash of holiday time off to add to the confusion. I'm very lucky to work in higher ed and receive a nice long winter break around the holidays, and adding a few vacation days to round out the year means that Wednesday found me searching for things to do.  Then it hit me. There are no rules here. I can do my bake on Thursday!  Those who celebrate Christmas might note that Thursday was Christmas Eve, and since we had no place to go and it did indeed snow, snow, snow, I decided to spend the morning in the kitchen with my next recipe: bitter chocolate stout cake!  The past few weeks have been a strange leadup to Christmas, with gifts coming in the mail sometimes disguised as ordinary Amazon packages which I accidentally opened early....

What a week it has been!  This Wednesday, we had a massive snow storm here in Pittsburgh, with around 10 inches of accumulation here in Brookline. My general orientation to snow is that I love it on the day of, provided I don't have to go anywhere. Unfortunately for my snow enjoyment this time around, we very much had somewhere to go--Azula's vet, for her appointment to get spayed.  If you know me IRL, you know that I'm pretty anxious about pet-health, so this date has been looming large in my mind for a while. Wednesday dawned with the promise of snow and thoroughly in the worst of my PMS-heightened anxiety, so my brain got to work running circles about all the imagined possible outcomes of Azula's relatively routine procedure.  Thankfully, there were only three surgeries on the docket for the day, so before I'd really worked myself into worry mode, the vet called me to say Azula was out of surgery and doing well. Because of the snow, they said we could pick her up...

 It's BUNDT week, bakers!  Okay, maybe that's not actually a thing. But this week, I was very excited to pull out my brand spanking new Bundt pan and bake my first Bundt cake.  And thank goodness I had something to look forward to, because our semester officially ended on Friday, and it has been without a doubt the strangest, longest, most unpredictable semester in my career as an educator.  As I begin working to wrap up grading and post final grades before the deadline on Monday, I am overwhelmed at being asked to put a letter grade on the act of surviving a first semester of college during a pandemic. It feels very strange to have to quantify that. We survived, and I want to give them all gold stars and be done with it.  But alas, that isn't an option. So I've been working through how to grade fairly and compassionately while looking very much forward to the stress-relieving activity of baking that loomed on the Saturday horizon.  This Week's Bake: Lemon ...

 Welcome to Week 3, bakers! Er... readers! l If you're new here and need to catch up, you can find the introduction to this project here , and catch up on Week 1 and Week 2 at the respective hyperlinks.  Cake time marches on, this time moving away from the loaf and into the territory of springform pans, stacking, and curd! Join me on the exciting adventure of continuing to zest the everloving daylights out of more lemons than I ever dreamed.  This week's recipe: St. Clement's Orange and Lemon Drizzle Cake The Prep Looking over this recipe after last week's loaf, I was equal parts excited and terrified for the dramatic uptick in difficulty. Pouring batter into a loaf tin isn't particularly challenging when you've done it plenty of times before, but this week's cake boasts several new techniques and tools.  The list of ingredients is also decidedly heftier, so I decided to take a separate shopping trip later in the week to avoid asking Andy to add 8 lemons an...