Are you from a picky family? I am. My Mom won’t touch any nut (besides an almond) with a 10 foot pole, while my Dad thinks that candy without nuts is like a body without a soul. There are lovers and haters of white, milk, and dark chocolate. And don’t even get me started on raisins.

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Christmas is almost here! Yay. That means it’s gingerbread time. Every year we have a theme party, which last year resulted in the Gingerbread Casbah. This year the theme is “Christmas in Summer” so we took Santa to the Southern Hemisphere with a Gingerbread Christmas cabana!

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My parents travel a lot, and on a trip to the UK last year, my Dad became obsessed with Thornton’s toffee. He went through several bags that were supposed to be gifts, and started ordering it on the internet at exorbitant prices. I looked around for recipes that might approximate the taste and texture, and last Christmastime we replaced our old standby toffee recipe with this one from Epicurious.

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You know what makes a fig better? Dipping it in hot caramel and letting it harden and seeing how pretty it is and then eating it, all crunchy and soft and delicious.

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I recently made some brittle real quick like and brought it to a party, and everyone was like “What is this CANDY CRACK? And HOW did you make it?!” But it was just some brittle and it took like 15 minutes to make and I didn’t measure anything or use a recipe or even go to the store. That is the secret of brittle. It takes like 15 minutes and you don’t have to measure or use a recipe or even go to the store.

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Apparently, marshmallow peeps have become their very own art medium. Here is an exhaustive list of peeps-related weblinks, which includes things like porno peeps, how to make your own peeps (why?!), the best way to use peeps as fishing bait, peeps performing scenes from Shakespeare, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings (er, Lord of the Peeps), and much, much more.

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My nephew turned 5 recently and swore he wanted a circuit board cake. At the 11th hour he decided he wanted a car cake instead. Online searches for car cakes yielded a lot of lameness and ugly-ass cakes, so I winged it. Wung it? Whatever. I figured something out, and was pretty pleased when it actually, totally looked like a car.

I know the icing isn’t perfect here- that’s the beauty of making something for a person who is only 5. Perfection is not what they’re after. They are after copious amounts of frosting and candy on a cake that’s shaped like something other than a cake, which makes them pretty easy to please. I think the biggest compliment came when, after admiring the cake for several minutes, my nephew turned to my Dad and with saucer eyes and his jaw hanging open, and said- “GRAMPA- do you realize this CAR is EATABLE?!?!?”

Eatable indeed! I made this somewhat nasty hot pink strawberry cake in a 9×13 pan and then cut a third of it off, lengthwise. Then I cut the long skinny piece I had in half perpendicular. Like this:

I flipped the 2 pieces 90 degrees and set them next to each other on top of the remaining large cake and stuck them on with frosting. They were kind of slope-y which actually made it look more like a car. I wanted really sturdy, fluffy frosting for this, so I used a fluffy meringue frosting (my mom made it so I’m not sure how- something about like this) and tinted it blue to attach the cake pieces and cover the whole thing in gobs and gobs of icing. I made a little bit of white royal icing for the windows, doors, and writing. Tic-tacs for lights and blinkers, oreos for wheels, sour belts for racing stripes and windshield wipers, some weird white tootsie rolls for the bumpers, and voila! A car that any 5-year-old would love.

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.

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Happy Halloween! So, it’s a cute idea to put gooey candy into plastic Star Wars lightsabers, right?

Oh wait. Picture a kid trying to get the candy out. Um… creepy and perverse. Not helpful that it’s called “spliquid.”

YaYa Chou, a Taiwanese artist, created this bearskin-shaped rug out of Gummi Bears and fake nails, and it’s amazing.

I have no words. I love it.

Visit YaYa Chou’s site for more info and photos of this and other works!