Pensive Frog

Behold the famous Canadian Baker chocolate cake! I originally found this recipe via Slashfood, which I figured would be a good resource for a killer birthday cake recipe. Several hours and five sticks of butter later, we had some cake.

So I can definitely vouch for this cake. Unlike the no-knead bread, this [...]

OK, OK, I know y’all are tired of seeing that human fat story at the top of Pensive Frog, so here’s something new. A week or so ago Megan at Not Martha posted a link to my origami star pattern finds, but of course I never posted pics of what I made. So [...]

And the winner for this year’s most nastiest cooking goes to…. Marco Evaristti, for serving up meatballs fried in his own fat!
Now, I’ve wondered aloud about the possibility of making cheese and yogurt from human milk (for babies!) but human fat is OFF LIMITS! Gahhhh…

Before the holidays, I posted about gift tags I made using vintage clip art. I used these tags to label bags of toffee, biscotti, and rum balls, and I think they turned out really swell. Now, I see from my site statistics that some people are landing here after Googling “retro clip art” [...]

I was a very good girl this year, so Santa sent me a yogurt maker.
Yes, that follows.
So I made my first batch overnight!

It only took 12 hours, plus 30 minutes of precision milk scalding.

When finished, it smelled really tangy, a lot like the Mountain High yogurt I used as my starter. It was pretty [...]

I just read this on Slashfood and I couldn’t believe it - marmalade is on the way out! (Or, as they so aptly put it, “Marmalade looks like Toast“) Well, I may not be over 45 like 81% of marmalade consumers, but I love the stuff.
When I was an undergraduate, the [...]

Maybe it’s because I’ve been living on the September to June academic calendar for so long, but the New Year doesn’t cause much of a stir in my life except for the usual tradition of writing “2006″ on checks until March. My resolution every year is to be more generous - perhaps the fact [...]

So what was your reaction when you saw the Antifreeze pattern in the most recent Knitty? Did you smile? Did you frown? If you were wearing a balaclava at the time, no one would be able to tell.
Anywho, I pounced on that pattern like ugly on an ape, and set about knitting [...]

Just got back from my Christmas tour of the great American southwest. Whenever I tell someone I’m going to Arizona for the holidays, they always say, “oooh, you’re so lucky to be going someplace warm!”
Exhibit A: snow-covered succulents in northern AZ.

OK, it’s pretty warm in Phoenix, maybe topping out around 72 degrees in [...]

Hooray for science! Some labcoats down at the University of Washington discovered that last month’s Thanksgiving brought increased levels of cinnamon and vanilla… in our sewage. Oh, that’s so grody yet unsurprising. As the article points out, what goes up, must come down.
So if anyone ever wondered if the fish [...]