After admitting last week I am quite unromantic, and well, feeling somewhat bad my better half always exceeds me in anything thoughtful or romantic, I decided to attempt an intervention on myself. We’re headed to the Big Apple next week for four whole days and three long, wonderful, uninterrupted nights and I wanted to pack up something especially thoughtful (in the way of the belly) for the journey. Unfortunately, I do not think any amount of bribes or sharing would persuade airport security to give us a break enabling us a non-packaged snack mid-flight. Thinking on my feet, like I do, and being in love with anyone willing and ready to make a celebration longer than it was intended to be (i.e. birthday celebrations spread out at least a week in each direction instead of crammed in one long weekend) I made our anniversary, ahem our fifth anniversary, begin a whole week early.

I’m starting with chocolate pudding — a little obsession of my husbands. He’s a big lover of the snack packs and in my somewhat pretentious disdain for the one-noted goop filled cartons I let him grab them without the faintest thought of making it for him myself. I’m not a big chocolate lover to begin with (surely I must be damaged) and pudding, frankly, is just not that wow-ing to make me change my mind on chocolate or the fact that pudding is boring. It reminds me of school lunches and a childhood bereft of excellent chocolate goods, my own damaged fault I’m sure. But here I am, trying to be a thoughtful un-standard-male-like girl and wife and it struck me that I could make him something so much greater and deeper and intense than the instant packages we very rarely bring home.

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After coming out of a highly cookie-packed season in December, I feel you all are probably groaning in your seats that you have to look at another one so soon. My response to you groaners is, good for you. I’m glad December brought a cookie avalanche your way, that you got to feast on creamed butter and sugar for a month, that your stockings and gifts from baker friends consisted of such wonderful, homey, twine wrapped packages of delight. Mine was filled with rest and recuperation. No cookies. No joy. No baker friends kind enough to give me any left over scraps.

I can’t really say I’m planning on turning this January into my supposed-to-be-cookie-packed December, but I did want to at least mention the current cookie stocking our cookie jar. You see, because it’s January and there is usually someone in my house (and it’s never me) who likes to start the New Year off detoxing from the holiday season prior, I usually have to walk through a certain equation to get my better half to see the benefit of January cookies. This year it went as so: brown butter (heavenly) + oatmeal (healthy) + chocolate chunks (pockets of warm gooey delight) = heavenly healthy cookies with pockets of warm gooey delights that cheer anyone up from the typical wintery depression that hits us in the middle of January when the sun ceases to give us rays of joy and warmth — the last part was my mad salesman skills, I admit, but the husband agreed. I could eat them all by myself.

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There are cooks and there are bakers. Chefs and pastry chefs. Those that find pure satisfaction from pulling a mirepoix from the brink of burn-dom and turning it into the greatest base from which to cook anything and those who find absolute glee in burning sugar until it becomes a burbling cauldron of deep, dark, salty caramel. I like to think that I live in both camps. That I can cook anything my heart desires and can top it off with an equally decadent and breath taking tower of butter, flour and sugar. Someone who has found the perfect balance between the teetering pots and pans and the tottering baking sheets and blowtorches. The recipe index begs to differ.

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Marshmallows are a sticky, messy business people. Had I known this prior to setting off to tackle awesome mom-dom by way of making fun mallow shapes dyed the color of a rainbow (because what adult kid would turn this down) I became tangled in a rather large sticky mess of mallow strings and almost gave up the notion of being anything resembling a cool parent. I know, my kid is a mere seven weeks and not in the least able to get messy with me in mallow webs of yummy, currently preferring a good hoot with his forest friends over rainbow stickiness, but when the day comes, I will be prepared.

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