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Hello, good people,

It is close to midnight.  The bake is done, long live the bake.  We have coffee malt brownies.  We have Jordan Pond House Oatmeal Bars, courtesy of Lora Brody’s brilliant Growing Up on the Chocolate Diet.  We have ginger fingers, which are so spicy they make my bottom lip tingle and my chest and tummy feel warm.  (I was once told by a cooking teacher that she found them too spicy, and that I should “listen” to the flavor of a dish, “and give it as much seasoning as it wants, no more.” I repeated this story to Lloyd, who was incredulous.  “What if you listen to the dish and it says ‘more seasoning, please?’” What a friend we have in Lloyd.) We have a small handful of cardamom rice-flour shortbread, which are going to my college roommate/dear friend in Pittsburgh.  (I do have ingredients on hand to make more, though, so if you want ‘em, please e-mail me your address, and accept my assurances that I will never ever ever ever give your address to anyone else, nor will I use it for any evil purposes, unless, of course, I’m coming to your neighborhood and need a sofa to sleep on.) We have more fruitcake, and this time we remembered to put the fancy Sicilian pistachios in the batter.  One of the mini-cakes came out a little crumbly, so that one is a spoil for the cook.  I cut it open—just for quality assurance purposes, you understand—and even though I make this cake every year, I never fail to be dazzled by how beautiful this cake is on the inside.  “Jewel-like” is a cliche of food writing that I always try to avoid, but the fruit and nuts in this cake really do give it the appearance of jewels, or stained glass.  I can’t believe I made this beautiful cake.  I want to make more.  But not tonight.

Now that I have finished the Xmas baking, I am ready—or I will be—to start my bread adventures again.  While I was chasing down rice flour at the health food store, I found a bag of teff flour and snapped it up.  Teff is a grain grown in Africa.  It is the primary ingredient in the Ethiopian flatbread injera, at which I’ve been dying to take a crack for years.  Thanks to this snappy information superhighway I keep hearing the young people talk about, I now have no fewer than seven recipes for injera, and I want to try them all.  Pictures will be taken, you bet.