The first post is always the hardest

I have been wanting to start this blog for a while now, but had NO idea what to start with. This very lame sentence is the kind of blather I would ream my students about, but it seems to be working, so here goes: While I debated for a while about what kind of blog this should be, baking or reporting on life here, I decided to go the way of some of my favorite blogs and do both. So all you readers, potential and real, can find out about what is coming out of my kitchen and a bit about the rest of the house, too.

For starters, if you didn't order from Dvora's Cookie Creations last week, here is what you missed!

First on the menu was Alfajores - a South American specialty. Tender vanilla wafers sandwiching caramel filling and rolled in coconut. Even people who hate coconut seem not to be bothered by it here - it just adds a lovely accent and makes the cookies even cuter.

Next was chocolate peanut butter brownies - rich, fudgy brownies, with a swirl of peanut butter filling running through. This was an experiment, which I thought was pretty successful: deep, dark chocolate, sweet creamy peanut butter, great texture, and so rich!

This week was a double whammy for my son Dani, who is allergic to tree nuts and peanuts. He is a good sport about it, and doesn't complain if I make some items he can't eat, like these chocolate pecan fingers, just as long as I save some of his favorites just for him. This bar is like a pecan pie in a bar, with the added bonus of chocolate, which can never be bad.

These are glazed orange bars - an orange infused bar with a fresh orange glaze. The picture is not great, but I hope to improve my food photography skills to do these things justice!

Last but not least, we had chocolate dipped chocolate chip cookies - take delicious chewy chocolate chip cookies and just gild the lily by dipping them halfway into chocolate.

And that was this week in cookies. Of course, this week was also Shavuot on Friday, which gave us in Israel two day chag - UGH! I guess you are no longer an olah chadasha when the idea of two day yom tov gives you palpitations. And Shavuot is complicated by the whole chalavi v. b'sari thing, which we did 50/50, two dairy meals and two meat. We certainly had to have Michele's favorite mocha cheesecake, Faigy's Great Horn Spoon Dirt Cake, and Dina's Marble Cheesecake Brownies, plus cheese noodle kugel, and too many other things - I did not even get to make the blintzes!!! I guess that will be dinner one might this week... Anyway, we had great company for two meals and had lots of fun, and a really nice chag all around. Special yasher koach to Dani and Ayelet who both stayed up all night learning and made it through vatikin!

Ayelet's Hebrew birthday (# 13) is tomorrow night - now she has a numeric reason to act the teenagy way she has for so many months. Have to come up with some kind of special cake to mark the event,w hcih we will celebrate on Shabbat. I am hoping to attempt a tiered, doweled cake, just a little one, but that may be too ambitious for this week. Shana took a matkonet today, has a history test later in the week, and then her very first bagrut on Sunday. I truly admire how hard she has been studying, and I am sure it will pay off. She will also need some pampering on Shabbat, along with Shanie, who is coming with three friends for their last (?!) Shabbat in Israel. Now I just need to come up with a menu for Shabbat and for this week's orders, and restrain myself from too many new baking experiments...

Have a great night,

Dvora