He’s a big foodie. He’s just a wonderful and intuitive cook. He tastes, gazes upward, stirs again, tastes, and at the end he’s made us something delicious for dinner. He never makes the same thing twice, even when he’s trying. That’s fun, but sometimes I really want that orange shrimp he made me 5 years ago!

One thing he doesn’t do is bake, so luckily that’s what I love to do. For his birthday breakfast, he wanted sour cream pecan biscuits – a Dorie Greenspan recipe, from her book Baking: From My Home To Yours. It’s a fantastic book, and spawned the wonderful group project called Tuesdays With Dorie. I participated for several months, and it was loads of fun. So here is a picture of the biscuits, to tempt you. They have brown sugar and chopped pecans in them, so they’re slightly crunchy and slightly sweet, and quite luscious with honey drizzled inside:

cooling biscuits, just out of the oven

see the drizzle of honey oozing out? and the chopped pecans?

For his cake, he wants carrot cake, with orange cream cheese frosting. It’s hard to find a bad recipe for carrot cake, but this one is my very favorite. No pineapple – I never really understood the addition of pineapple – but it’s incredibly moist and rich, and the hint of orange in the frosting makes it special. Here’s one I made before:

carrot cake with orange cream cheese frosting

Apologies for the quality of the photo – I took it before I really knew what I was doing. So my day will involve a bit of fresh flower shopping, some Post-It Note posting….every year I put little Post-It notes everywhere around the apartment (on doors, in the fridge, in surprise places, in cabinets, hanging down from cabinets,  each with a little note of some kind) and they stay up all year long. So today I’ll take down the old ones and put up new ones. I’ll make that carrot cake, and he also wants me to make a batch of oatmeal cookies to have around. We’ll have pork tonkatsu for dinner – he’ll make that – and tomorrow we’ll go to Queens for dinner with our youngest daughter, to celebrate over a wonderful Greek dinner.

Happy birthday and many, many, many more.

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So, WOTN! Item #1, the wedding shawl. Nupps are “fun.” I won’t show the shawl in its entirety, to preserve the surprise, but little bits here and there seem ok. Case in point: nupps.

nupps (unblocked, of course)

Next up on the needles: socks for my youngest daughter (nonrav link), whose dorm floors are very cold. I want to finish them by the time she comes home for spring break in a couple of weeks, so I’m alternating these with the shawl. (Doesn’t that gusset look mighty huge to you? It does to me.)

A's socks

While not technically on the needles, these are destined to be on the needles very soon – sock yarns chosen by my oldest daughter. Katie, which one do you want me to use first?

Lorna's Lace Shepherd Sock: Beverly

Knit One Crochet Too: Meadow

When I showed my husband this photo of his blueberry coffee cake, he said “I want some now.” Me too honey, me too….but we’re back on our diets. Too bad:

I. want. some. now.

And finally, in this brief period between snows, we walked over to Riverside Park – our back yard, kind of – and I took a picture I take over and over, in all seasons. Here it is today:

winter view

And here it is a few months ago, and a few before that:

November

May

Seeing the park blanketed with snow, and ice in the Hudson River, made me think about Lent. I didn’t grow up in a church that focused on Lent (ours focused on the fun combination of both fire and brimstone), and I’m not religious in that way, but the idea of it struck me. There’s a longing for life to come – the life that’s pent up in the trees and plant life buried under the snow. The wheel turns, it’s bleak now, but rejuvenation is coming. It’s coming. The world will begin again, as it always does.

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On the knitting front, I made it through the entire part of the shawl chart with the big set of nupps. And they were fun! I definitely learned how to do them better by the last row of them, but I was happy enough. Then, knitting the last set of lace rows to complete the chart, and *clunk*. Something was way wrong. After each row – partly due to overweening pride – I’d stopped, stretched out the lace, admired it, looked for problems, found none. After each pattern repeat, I rechecked the stitches. If each pattern repeat was correct, and each row was correct, I’d be in good shape, right? And yet I’d really screwed up something, somewhere. How hadn’t I seen it in all my looking?! Too much pride, too much “look, isn’t that cool what I did?” I guess. And so I had to pull that whole section out. Had I put in a lifeline? NO.

So I held my breath, got out a small tapestry needle and a roll of dental floss, and tried to put one in, below the nupps chart. A tiny little stitch at a time, through the cobweb-weight lace. plink. plink. plink. plink. plink. Across the row…..and then pull pull pull pull, unknitting. It worked, and so now I begin again. At least this time I’ll do the nupps pretty well from the very first row. So with the shawl too, I’m back where I started.

My sweetheart and I have been dieting – him on Atkins, me on low-cal – but here it is, Valentine’s Day (tomorrow). We’re going out for dinner at our favorite Ethiopian restaurant, Awash, and then we’ll come home for something sweet. He really loves blueberry coffee cake, so I just popped one in the oven. Photos of a slice tomorrow, but for now, The Making of the Coffee Cake, followed by its recipe.

rich batter chock-full of blueberries

sprinkled with a yummy streusel topping, ready to bake

Want to make it yourself? Here’s how:

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