Free for 12 days.

The second potluck was as I predicted.  I'm running about 50% with those folks.  First year: bust.  Second year: hit, third year: hit.  This year: half bust.  First year was sausage and cheese.  Second year was warm vegetarian version of chestnut stuffing without the bird cavity to cook in.  Third year was dates stuffed with cream cheese & toasted pecans.  This year was madeira cake and madeira - people really liked the madeira.

However, I am happy with the cake recipe that I finally found.  I had originally done a recipe for a Madeira Cake that I found in an Australian Woman's series cookbook because the picture was so pretty.  I've wanted to make that cake for 15 or so years.  I carefully converted the recipe (cup sizes are different, and we don't have self-raising flour) - and it was very dry and tasted of baking powder biscuits.  Instead I used Brian Edmond's posting of the Sunset Magazine's Pound Cake (http://www.gweep.ca/~edmonds/recipes/desserts/pound_cake.html) with a few modifications (I added the juice of a lemon + some cardamom).  Then I glazed it with a sugar and lemon juice glaze full of finely minced mixed peel.  I am very happy with the cake - and it looked *very* pretty - but it is a heavy-hunk-of-pound-cake cake.  I made it in the tube pan, which made for a pretty presentation, but I might look for some little loaf pans so that the slices would be smaller (and one could freeze a whole small loaf for later, and so on).

And now I don't go back to work until 03 January 2012.

Yay.  :)

PS - my SOGP quite likes the cake because I have gotten it decently lemony.

Happy Solstice.

So, here it has already been Solstice, but it appears that it is not Solstice until later elsewhere, but I thought it crossed the meridian at one particular moment and didn't spend time hopping back to do it again.  But someone whose birthday was today in the UK did not actually have a Solsticey birthday, and they would have if their birthday had been celebrated here.  I think my brain hurts.
http://www.archaeoastronomy.com/2011.html

In other news I shopped my face off and I am bagged, pooped and exhausted.  Lots of little things here there and elsewhere, which meant for tricky bus connecting in ways that the people who designed the system probably never thought anyone would want to do.  Every now and then I miss my car, if for no other reason than that one doesn't have to carry one's shopping every bloody where.  On the other hand, I didn't have to try and find a place to park even once, and that is a gift that nobody can give you.  :)

Strangely enough, I can't find Christmas tree garland anywhere.  We got a new artificial tree last year, and it turned out to be a lot bigger that I expected, so my little dribs and drabs of garland are seriously not going to cut it, so: new garland it is.  It seems like no one is carrying it at all.  There is none to be purchased, but usually, if there had been any, there would be an empty spot on the shelf, or one badly damaged and pathetic package, or something.  But not one twinkle of the tinsel boa anywhere.  I will search one more day - and that's it.

I must say that I do like sleeping in.