by jessica yoon
Last night, I had the sudden desire to make Halloween cookies. I have a couple gatherings this weekend and thought it would be nice to have some festive treats with me. Since it was so late minute, I decided to forego coming up with a new concoction and came up with a Halloween cookie idea using a recipe from my archives.
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It’s been a crazy long time. Life has changed quite a bit since I last posted. It would take awhile to share everything, but in a nutshell: I graduated my Food Studies Master’s program, moved from NYC to LA, bought my first car, started a granola company (which is on hiatus right now, more on that another time), worked as a Product Manager for a bakery brand, turned the big 3-0 (still coming to terms with that), and adopted a sweet pup with my significant other (we named her Flower after the skunk in Bambi).
Yup. A lot has happened.
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When I began this site over six years ago (already, gasp!), online and social media were not exactly what they are today. Instagram didn’t exist yet and the number of popular food blogs could be counted on fingers. My own online presence has evolved over the years, from actively creating content here to being more present on social media. I’m still learning about who and what I want to be online, but I’m beginning a slow crawl back here to my home base.
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In the past few months my family has formed a fragile relationship with three stray cats. Despite our better reasoning, we’ve been feeding them meals now and then when they come sit at our back door. For the most part they visit individually, but on the rare occasions that two of them cross paths icy tension ensues. Out of the three, an orange and white tabby reigns fire over the two smaller grey and white cats. They fall powerless while in her presence and reluctantly bow away from their precious meal. I’m not particularly fond of cats, to be honest they intimidate and scare me (dogs on the other hand are a different story), but my heart goes out to these underlings and I sometimes wonder what it would have been like if they had proper homes and owners. They may have been a close knit family, or feline frenemies, but a lot more comfortable and pampered, the life all cats deserve in my mind. I guess that’s what pulls at me the most, but perhaps I’m naive in thinking that their lives would be better living trapped within four walls…
In any case, I feel this give and take can’t last forever. This “relationship” walks on eggshells and at some point someone will forget, to set out a plate or wait, and the fragile symbiosis will lose its rhythm and break. I hope, when that happens, they’ll find another backdoor to go sit at and another family will take notice or invite them in.
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Until I moved to Paris, chestnuts didn’t hold any holiday significance to me. But two winters of seeing marrons glacés everywhere changed me for the better and now I can truly relate to the words of “chestnuts roasting on an open fire…” It’s Christmas Eve so I’ll keep this post short and sweet. These macarons make up the last third of my cookie list this year. The filling is by far the easiest thing, and although used for macarons here, I can imagine it going well with any sort of wafer, shortbread, or vanilla cake. It may not be the day to try making macarons for the first time, but if, by any chance, there is a can of crème de marron lying around, this is definitely something that can be made in a pinch. Oh, and there’s butter involved…but who DOESN’T have that lying around?
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