All tagged Food

In Which I Bake November Cakes

In Which I Bake November Cakes

Sarah Moon
Bookish Finds, Books

It's a known fact that Maggie Stiefvater is cool as hell and that her books are pretty damn outstanding. It's hard to pick a favorite--and I won't--but there's a special place in my heart for her lone standalone novel, The Scorpio Races, which has a unique connection to the month of November, 

It is the first day of November and so, today, someone will die.

In addition to the month of November being when the novel's titular races take place, there's a special cake Finn and Puck eat in the novel, November Cakes. 

Finn finds my left hand, opens my fingers, and puts a November cake in my palm. It oozes honey and butter, rivulets of the creamy frosting joining the honey in the pit of my hand. It begs to be licked. Someone nearby screams like a water horse. My heart goes like a rabbit’s.

Maggie created a recipe for this fictional cake (though, read through to the end and you'll find that it's not so fiction for me), and the first of November seemed like the perfect time to bake them. I generally followed her recipe, though I bake like a champ, so I made some adaptations on the fly to suit my tastes. 

I Love... Bittersweet by Sarah Ockler

I Love... Bittersweet by Sarah Ockler

Laura
I Love

A few weeks after I had joined Goodreads last December, Sarah began evangelizing some book that everyone else described as being about cupcakes by some author named Sarah Ockler that I had never heard of.

I thought, 

Eh… She probably just likes this author because they have the same first name. Whatevs. I’ll get to reading it eventually.

(This was before CEFS, before Sarah and I realized that we are SSBDs, and therefore before I automatically began reading anything she recommended the nanosecond she recommended it.)

Then Maggie’s status updates as she read Bittersweet started invading my feed. First came a gif from one of my favorite movies ever, The Cutting Edge.

“Eh?” I thought, my interest thoroughly piqued, “Figure skating and hockey? Methinks I need to read this sooner rather than later.”

But at the time, I was in the midst of reading the Tomorrow, When the War Began series, as well as the Ruby Oliver quartet. This cupcake/figure skating/hockey book was just going to have to wait.

Maggie’s next status update was from the 2nd installment of one of my all-time favorite movie franchises, the incomparable Mighty Ducks.

“Eh!” I declared, “I will read this as soon as I’m done with Ruby and Ellie!”

10 minutes later…

“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEH!!!!!!!” I squealed “A cupcake/figure skating/hockey/winter book set in my hometown! I must read this NOW!”

Obviously, I began reading Bittersweet immediately.