This was filmed at Type Books on Queen West, one of my favorite indie bookstores in Toronto. I’ll have to make the time to stop by this weekend and pick up a new book or two, to show my appreciation for them allowing the filmmakers after-hours access to the shop*!

* – I say this despite having gotten a whole new stack of lovely books for Christmas, along with an e-reader which I’m excited to try out. Good thing I also have a new bookshelf!

Then he showed me this:

It’s a 1939 MGM cartoon called “Peace on Earth”. It stars a couple of no-name squirrels who tell the tale of a world that is finally at peace – because the men have all killed themselves off through warfare. It is the ultimate perky-goth blend of cute and morbid, and I can not imagine why it has not entered the ranks of the holiday classics.

(Disclaimer: I am not responsible for any loss of seasonal cheer which may result from watching this clip.)

On that last topic, Corey Mintz offers up some sharp and useful advice on How to Be a Christmas Party Guest. After my own unpleasant encounter with a drunken young miss last Saturday night, whose belligerant kindness drove me to flee the party earlier than planned, I can not stress the importance of #4 (Don’t be a Drunk) strongly enough. Not to mentioned tips #1, #2, #3 and…. oh heck, they’re all bang-on.

Also related to seasonal events, this New York Times op ed about the rise of store-bought treats for potlucks and bake sales touches on some interesting points. Personally, while I understand the time and energy crunch that leads to picking up a batch of grocery-store snacks for sharing with friends, it does make me a bit sad whenever I see handmade goodies being ignored at the buffet spread in favour of Timbits and pre-packaged spinach dip.

It’s worth noting that John is an AMAZING cook. And the offer included mention of turducken. And a cherumple (cherry, rhubarb and apple pies baked into cakes) by Emma, who is an AMAZING baker. So we knew we were in for a belly-busting evening of foodie delights. Turns out the company, many of whom I hadn’t met before, was also excellent, which made the evening all the more wonderful!

Sorry the photos aren’t up to my usual quality – I just got a fantastic new smartphone on the weekend (yay!) and could not resist trying it out.

Turducken, rested after nine hours in the oven and ready to be served!

The master chef, making the first cut. We were pretty much vibrating with excitement by this point!

The center cut, showing off the three layers of bird – chicken, duck and turkey – plus the delightful stuffing.

Time-lapse video of John creating the turducken – this process involves deboning all three birds, then stuffing them together with lots of twine. Pretty amazing stuff!

A plate of Tribute Thanksgiving joy: turducken, stuffing, mashed potatoes, turducken gravy, pomegranate salad by Panic, and spagetti squash by me! I used the Moroccan Spice Spagetti Squash recipe from Smitten Kitchen for this, it was super-easy and got rave reviews – definitely one to add to the regular rotation (also, how did I not know how much FUN spagetti squash was? So fun!).

Amazingly, after all of this great food, we still had room for desert. Well, maybe that’s not surprising, given how awesome the desert was!

Emma makes the first slice. A cherumple is a delicate creature – those four splints are necessary to keep the whole thing from cracking and collapsing – but well worth the effort of keeping it together.

Just look at those layers! Emma made a different flavour of cake for each layer, to compliment the pies (and so she could tell them apart when it came time to construct the cherumple). Top to bottom, it’s chocolate, vanilla and red velvet – yum!

A perfect slice! The icing is buttercream, and I love the addition of the tiny silver balls, which were one of my favorite decorations as a kid.

Jim is pretty darned pleased with this whole affair.

As if that wasn’t enough, John dished up some home-made ice cream (!!!) to go along with the cherumple, which you can juuuust see in the bottom edge of that last photo. It was pretty much an elabroate exercise in delicious excess. I am a lucky, lucky person to have such talented and sharing friends.

I suppose, given my obsession with macarons, it was inevitable I would try my hand at making them sooner or later. To be honest, I’d always avoided it for two reasons: one, descriptions of the process made it sound terrifying and near-impossible to master, and two, I enjoy the indulgence of buying them. That said, the challenge of point one finally got to me, and after making up some cookies last week that called for three egg yolks, I realized I had the start of a macaron trial on my hands.

The other thing that inspired me to give macarons a try was this wonderfully detailed tutorial on Food Nouveau. The photos and tips made it surprisingly easy. Yes, macarons are tricky and require precise steps and a lot of time. But if you have all day to putter with them among other tasks – as I do, when I work from home – then it’s not nearly as hard as it seems.

I didn’t take any photos of the making process; perhaps next time! But here are some shots of the final cookies and their assembly into filled macarons:

All baked and ready for filling! I had to play with temperature a bit – 285 F seems to be the sweet spot for my oven – and many of these are slightly hollow from being overcooked, although not by much.

I was so excited to see the “feet” when the first batch came out of the oven! I’d left them to dry about 2-3 hours after piping – which turned out to be the hardest part, as my piping bag is terrible and the original tip I selected was far too small.

Although they did rise, they did so unevenly in most cases. It was fun matching them up to create slanted macarons! It’s possible the humidity did me in – I’d prepped the egg whites last Friday, and then we launched into a week of rainy weather, which brings macaron-killing humidity along with it. Yesterday was rain-free but still pretty humid, although it’s possible there are other reasons for the uneven rising as well. I’ll have to try again to be sure!

Jim has no objections to my macaron experiments, so long as I am willing to share my findings with him. He was pretty amazed to discover the complex process behind macarons – all the waiting, and beating, and waiting again for caps to dry and the weather to be just right.

I decided not to bother with making up buttercream filling – the macarons took hours and hours to make, on and off, and by the time they were done, I was too lazy to do any more cooking! I opted for three pre-made fillings that were already in my pantry: dulce de leche (caramel), nutella and pomegranate jelly. Yum!

Well, sort of. They’ve finally begun putting in the concrete for stairs; I have some concerns about how it’s going to look when finished, and how much it’s going to stick out onto the sidewalk, but I get the impression part of the delay has involved clearing things with the city planning folks, so presumably it’s all within regulatory allowances. It does have some pit-like qualities still, as you can see below, but at least it’s progress!

As mentioned elsewhere, my pal Brian recently had a birthday celebration, namely a night of board games and drinking at his place. This is what Brian’s parties tend to look like:

There are four board games going simultaneously in that photo. I think we got up to five at one point in the evening. To be perfectly honest, it’s not really my thing – I’d rather be talking to people or playing in a smaller, more focused group – but everyone else seems to enjoy it, and I’m happy to tag along for the crazy ride.

There was one thing about the night that did not make me happy, however…

We wound up with way, way, way too many baked goods. We could have fed a party three times our size and still had leftovers. Since Brian made nothing but meat, by the end of the evening, people were crying out for vegetables, dairy, anything that was not either sweet or meaty.

It was a bit of a bummer, to be honest. With so many baked goods, none of them really got the spotlight for long, which meant the bakers didn’t get much feedback for all their hard work. Brian had a birthday cake that didn’t even get touched because there was so much other sweet stuff taking up space!

Part of it was my fault: I’d let our key baking folks know well in advance that I planned to make the three-layer brownie cookie combo for Brian’s birthday, but then I came up with the idea for the bacon cookies and HAD to make some of those, too. Then Andrea brought along her Settlers of Catan Cupcakes and Wheeler dished up some red velvet mini-cupcakes, and we were drowning in refined flour and sweetness.

Not actually good. I’m not sure how to handle this in future (it does seem to be an ongoing problem which has been getting worse and worse among our social group), aside from not baking for parties any more. That option makes me sad, but at the same time, it’s the only solution I have any control over, and it will free up more time for other projects.

Teaser image for tomorrow’s recipe post. So excited to share this one!

I know everyone is flipping out about The Hunger Games trailer today (and it does look fairly awesome, I’ll be honest), but here’s what I’m more excited about: the trailer for the new Studio Ghibli film, “The Secret World of Arrietty” which hits theatres in North America on February 17, 2012. The screenplay was adapted from Mary Norton’s classic children’s novel, The Borrowers, but even in these short clips, you can see the Ghibli magic and wonder shining through.

Although I’ll want to see it in the original Japanese at some point, the English-language voices seem well-done (at least in the trailer). I’m a bit sad about the mid-winter schedule dump – generally February is a weak month for movie ticket sales, and thus a landing pad for films that studios want to release but don’t have much faith in – but at least it’s getting moderate distribution and a bit of that lovely Disney marketing heft to help it reach a North American audience.

(Sorry the final shots are rather blurry – they were taken in a crowded kitchen at a very crowded party, which made things like composition and lighting, and not getting jostled, rather difficult)

Since I had other baking on tap for the day, I opted to make this in the laziest way possible, namely via box mix. Here’s my ingredients all ready to go:

I wanted to shake things up a little, so I opted for a very Canadian maple cream cookie in place of the Oreo, and swapped in peanut butter instead of the standard chocolate chip cookie base to help balance that out. I also added butterscotch chips to the brownie mix, since I had some kicking around in the pantry.

Step one: the cookie layer. This was pretty simple to set up, and using parchment paper to line the tray made getting the finished cookie-bar thing out a snap once it was baked up!

Oh no! It turns out that maple cream cookies are a wee bit smaller than Oreos, and a full box is not quite enough for a second layer. What to do?

To the rescue: the only other cream-filled cookies in my pantry! These are actually quite tasty, and I’m thinking about using them to make a peppermint-flavoured Christmas version of this dish.

Brownie layer ready to go! In hindsight, I should have skipped the added chips – the whole point of the brownies is to have them flow between the gaps in the cream cookies, and the chips interferred with that process, leaving me with little pools of brownies and exposed butterscotch along the top. Lesson learned!

Action shot of brownie pour in action!

Incidentally, it is not easy to take an action shot with an SLR camera in one hand and a heavy bowl of brownie mix in the other

Ready for the oven! You can see the spots where the butterscotch chips are playing a bit of havoc with my brownie layer. I followed Amanda’s directions to bake at 350 degrees F for 45-55 minutes; while the mix was in the oven, I did the only logical thing that came to mind:

I strapped on my shoes and went for a run.

Complete! Since I was carrying this to a party, I let it cool in the pan for a bit, then transferred to a wire rack for a while. This particular pan has a snap-on lid, so when we were ready to head out, I transferred the combo back into the pan (without the parchment paper this time) and used it to transport my concoction safely to its destination – where it was promptly destroyed:

NOM NOM NOM

It was super-tasty, but also super-sweet. I initially cut off regular brownie-sized chunks, but then chopped those in half as people complained it was far too sweet to finish a whole one. Ice cream might have cut the sweetness down to a tolerable level, but we forgot to bring out the Maple Bacon ice cream I’d gotten to go with it, so that’s still in Brian’s freezer.

And lastly, in context.

Overall, these were surprisingly easy to make, and went over very well with the hungry, drunken masses. I recommend them as the ONLY baked good for the evening, however: they are sweet and very filling, and combined with everything else that had been supplied, came off as a bit of overkill. I wasn’t able to serve these warm, but I imagine they would be even better that way!