I could tell you about my experience eating at The French Laundry last month,, but so many people on the internetz have done that already.  I mean what new information or insights about the food and service do I really have to add to the conversation? Meh, not that much. What I do have to add is this: a picture I took of the guestbook in the front entrance when I first arrived.

I couldn’t believe my eyes! The balls on this guy. French Laundry Rickroll FTW!!!

My friend Eliza gave me these awesome little containers. They are about an inch and a half high and super frickin’ adorable.

Their sole purpose is to allow you to bring a little bit of soy sauce with you wherever you go, just in case. They come with a little tiny eye-dropper so you can fill them up with soy sauce. So far they have never leaked and they always make me smile when I pull them out at lunchtime! Something about those vacant, beady eyes and perky ears- they are really endearing little pals to have around.

Eliza got these for a couple bucks at one of my very favorite stores in the world, Daiso Japan. Daiso is kind of like a super cool Japanese Dollar Store, except most things cost two dollars instead of one. Daiso has a crazy cross-section of stuff, from garden supplies to kids’ toys to dishes to cards (many in hilarious Engrish) to fake flowers to, er, individual soy sauce holders. With ten bucks in hand, you can have a GREAT time in there.

There are 3 stores in the Seattle area and 6 in the Bay Area- here’s a list of all U.S. locations.

I love to play with this SUPER FUN app that generates a lovely harmonious color palette from your photos. You upload a photo and the app processes it and spits out the palette. This would be a great way to think about room decor, website design, or even what color picture frame to get. Here are a some I did from some of my photos:

This is the (amazing, delicious, if you love cheese don’t miss it!) cheese shop in Neal’s Yard, London, that makes a lovely subtle palette.

This photo of Confucius’ Temple in Beijing yields a spicy palette- I think it would make a cool kids room.

This is a horse farm in Kentucky – which gives me a gorgeous palette that makes me want to redo a room right this second! I think my bedroom would do well with this.

You can play with it at Big Huge Labs. Hopefully you will have more restraint than me and not become addicted to it. If you’re clever, you can use this color conversion chart and get something to bring to the paint shop! OK gotta go, I have thousands more photos to try.

And now for something completely different: the GINGERBREAD CASBAH.

The gingerbread casbah came into being because every year, we throw a themed Christmas party for around 100 of our closest friends. Since we just took a honeymoon to the Middle East, we thought we could try out some new tricks at a Middle East-themed Christmas party. After all, that is where the whole Christmas thing started, right? An evite full of bad puns later (”we are Beiruting for you to come”, and so forth) we had our “Christmas at the Casbah” party ready to go, and all we needed was an impressive centerpiece.

This is not really a casbah, but a typical courtyard house. (Casbah sounds cooler though, so that’s more of a marketing-focused name for it.) On our honeymoon, we stayed in a beautiful hotel in Old City of Damascus called Beit Al Mamlouka, and I very loosely modeled the casbah on my recollections of how it looked. I say “very loosely” because their floors weren’t made of sour belts and jujubes, and their walls weren’t edible.

For the gingerbread, I used a recipe that C&H tweeted me- and it was great. Alas, I haven’t actually tasted it, but from a construction point of view it was tops – simple to make, very easy to roll out, not too sticky, sturdy, and kept its shape during baking. Also, it smells delicious, which adds a nice extra sensory dimension to the house. The royal icing that glues the whole thing together is just a stiff mixture of egg whites and powdered sugar with a pinch of cream of tartar, mixed with the paddle attachment of a Kitchen-Aid.

I did most of the shape-cutting freehand, but used a star cutters for the front windows. To make the windows, we rolled out the dough and put it on a silpat. Then we cut shapes out and arranged crushed jolly ranchers inside. When they baked, they became clear and solid. You have to let them cool while carefully loosening them from the silpat, as the candy stays soft and molten for about 30 minutes after coming out of the oven. Once they harden fully, they are structurally quite sound.

I thought that doing this alone would be both boring and incredibly frustrating and also not come out as well, so I assembled a crack team to help out. Rodney the pastry chef is always an excellent addition to this type of team, and did lots of the rolling, fine icing work, and construction assistance. Heather took care of cobblestones and windows, while MJ formed small furnishings including the excellent hookah.

I am a firm believer that everything on a true gingerbread house should be edible, and should be candy. Also, I can make like anything out of marzipan or fondant- ergo, marzipan and fondant are cheating. Sculpting something out of a tootsie roll is so much more impressive. So I refused to allow any non-edible, non-candy/gingerbread/icing objects adorn the house.

I bought electric flicker tea lights to illuminate it during the party, to make the windows shine. Merry Christmas everyone!

Here’s the breakdown of what’s what:

• Windows: crushed jolly ranchers baked into the gingerbread
• Tile floor: rainbow sour belts, jujubes, licorice wheels, and silver dragees
• Balcony floors: red hots, tic tacs, and silver dragees
• Balcony railings: sesame candies, licorice wheels (unrolled), jujubes
• Cobblestones: formed tootsie roll slices with yellow sprinkles
• Hanging lamps: licorice wheels and Haribo raspberry gummies
• Hookah: deconstructed tootsie rolls, sour belts, and licorice wheels
• Table: gingerbread star with dragees and jujubes
• Chair: sesame candies and tootsie rolls
• Tree: iced cookie with Haribo raspberry gummy and tootsie roll
• Camels: iced cookies with sprinkles

I wasn’t able to find any other instances of Middle Eastern gingerbread architecture on the web, but I did come across some gingerbread structures of note. Here are a few of my favorites from around teh interwebz.

• Max’s cave from Where The Wild Things Are, from A Table for Two <<<btw, AMAZING!!!>>>
• Gingerbread Houseboat from Houseboat Eats
• Gingerbread Woodcutters Cabin from Sweetopia
• Not gingerbread, bacon and licorice house from Almost Bourdain
• Cool 2 story house by Brown Sugar Bee

Spotted on Cakespy: this cute cupcake ring.

I like it because from afar it kind of looks diamond-shaped so it’s a little tricky that way! Also because the pieces are handmade by this guy Rusty and I’m always a fan of a master craftsperson. $95 from Pnut Jewelry unless you want it made of gold or with diamonds on it!

Further reading on Cakespy led me to another cupcaketacular item: this cupcake side table for $750 from Jellio.

And also to these cool kitchen appliance handmade sterling silver necklaces for $60 from Etsy:

Love me some Cakespy!

Some supremely awesome and talented woman named Natasha MADE these sugar guys who perch on the edge of your cup- until you push them in. Brilliant. When will these be available for sale? Someone DEFINITELY needs to produce them on a larger scale.

As pointed out in the comments on Natasha’s site, the dark brown guy’s position even makes him look afraid… hilarious. I’d go so far as to say the light brown guy is resigned to his fate, and the white guy is very Zen.

See and read more about Natasha’s project at Nova Culture.

I haven’t been cooking that much lately so I have no recipes to share today, but here are three food-related things I think everyone should be aware of.

• I love this tape-timer from Urban Peel, and it’s a bargain at $19. Housewarming gift?

• I wish my kitchen could absorb this color scheme because these Rangemaster floral stoves are sweet. Looks like they are only available in the UK for now but they are pretty spectacular, and definitely unique!

• This extendable phallus The Spinmallow is a gadget that spins your marshmallow over the fire for you. Because you know, spinning your own marshmallow is really tough on the wrists. They call it “the newest camping and backyard sensation. It’s the most exciting way to toast marshmallows over a campfire or barbeque.” Indeed! You can buy one for just $9.95.

I bought this rice called Tiny Rice, because it’s tiny and adorable, and also because I like saying “Tiny Rice” all together like it’s one word. Tinyrice. Tinyrice. Tinyrice!

So what is Tiny Rice and why is it so tiny? It’s a small (some might say tiny) grain basmati rice imported from Bangladesh. It’s also called Kalijira rice (which incidentally is ALSO fun to say) or sometimes baby basmati. It says on the package it’s the Prince of Rice. (And here I was, not even realizing that rice could be royalty.) It’s cute, it’s delicious, and it’s way more fun than those big awkward rice grains you’re used to, as you can see in the photo below.

Tiny rice only takes about 10 minutes to cook, so that’s pretty cool. It has a great texture because it’s so small- sort of between a rice grain and a couscous grain. When you serve it to people they say things like “what kind of rice is this? I’ve never SEEN such tiny grains of rice!”

I bought it at BiRite Market, but if you need an online source I found it for sale online at at the Lotus Foods website. They Lotus link also has recipes using Kalijira, including a couple of rice pudding recipes which look super tasty. They sell tiny brown rice too, but I’ll be honest, the tiny brown rice grains look a little bigger than tiny. I haven’t tried it yet but that’s next on the list.

Tinyrice tinyrice tinyrice!

My friends got married on a mountaintop in Israel, and had a little local shindig to celebrate the nuptials stateside. I offered to make a wedding cake for the party, and they gave me absolutely NO guidance. These folks are avid kayakers, backpackers, skiers, and mountaineers- but of all those, kayaking is definitely their #1 love. Furthermore, they met on a kayaking trip. So this was a no-brainer: I had to surprise them with a kayak wedding cake!

Of course, I had to make the cake delicious as well as beautiful, because it’s totally stupid to make a cool-looking cake that tastes only so-so. I made a double recipe of hazelnut brown butter cake from Smitten Kitchen and a brown sugar buttercream from Epicurious. I divided the batter between a 5 inch pan and a 10 inch pan. The hazelnut brown butter cake was great to use for this project, because not only was it delicious, it was also dense and heavy, so it really helped everything stay in place. I chose the brown sugar buttercream because I wanted dirt-colored frosting but didn’t fancy chocolate.

As to the decorations, my goal was to make the cake as naturally tasty as possible- meaning no gum paste or real flowers or other such nonsensse. Hence, I used marzipan for the kayaks, leaves, and flowers. (You might be wondering why I opted to make the kayaks in such ugly colors, but I felt it important to faithfully represent the neon hues of each of their real-life kayaks.) I used whole hazelnuts for the boulders, and ground pistachios for the gravel. The blue icing was just the brown sugar buttercream dyed and marbled with 2 shades of blue.

TIP: if you’re marzipan-challenged or even just really lazy, the calla lily is by far the easiest flower to pull off. Roll out a thin snake. Flatten a colored piece into a circle. Wrap circle around snake and pinch off at the bottom.

Now I KNOW I could have made those flowers thinner and more perfect, but to be honest, I’m a little attention-challenged. And impatient. But I swear no one noticed the extra thick petals. I’m all about the gestalt anyway, know what I’m sayin’? Plus when you’re getting a surprise kayak wedding cake for free, you really can’t expect me to give myself carpal tunnel over the frickin’ calla lilies. Thought that counts and all that.

In conclusion, this was a super-fun project, and if I could go crazy like this with other wedding cakes and also make them somewhat imprefectly with no negative consequencs, I would most definitely be more amenable to making them! So keep that in mind if you’re planning to ask for one…