SoCS — I cooked it all by myself!

Merry Christmas, everyone!  So I have almost missed the deadline for the SoCS…because it is almost Sunday now. However, I have an excellent excuse: I was busy cooking all day. To be more precise, I was baking. Baking being my favorite subcategory of cooking. We are having dinner with some friends after church tomorrow, and I am bringing the dessert. I decided to go French (vous êtes surpris, n’est-ce pas ???)  and try to make a “Buche de Noël” or “Yule Log,” which is a traditional French dessert made by rolling up a sponge cake with filling and then frosting it to look like an actual “Yule log.”

Mine has a vanilla sponge cake with an orange-chocolate ganache filling and a chocolate buttercream frosting. I’m really not a great decorator, but I made the “bark” look pretty rustic, so I think I got away with it 🙂  In addition to this, I made some delicious gluten-free almond cherry cookies for my gluten-free friend. These are easy to make and taste like marzipan macaroons. (yes, the kind with two “O”s, not the Pierre Hermé kind.)

I also did some other cooking, since we still had to eat dinner. I have to say, cooking, and doing stuff in the kitchen in general is a therapeutic activity for me. My mom let me start “cooking” when I was only about 3 years old, doing stuff like stirring jello or beating eggs. The story goes, (as my mom tells it) that my grandmother was horrified when she saw my mom letting the toddler in the kitchen, and said, “What if she spills something?” and my mom told her, “Well then, mother, I’ll clean it up!”

The other story my mom tells happens when I was maybe 12-ish (I forget exactly, because it’s my mom’s memory, not mine) but apparently I had some Girl Scout friends over and we were baking cakes or something and my friend Rebecca told us about a kid she was baby-sitting, and said, “Do you know, she’s 6 years old already, and she doesn’t even know how to cook??”  We were totally appalled at her apparent lack of education.

Anyway, all that to say, I have been in the kitchen for as long as I can remember and then some, and it is one of the few things I have not gotten tired of in the intervening years. If anything, I am now more passionate about cooking,  and may even be a sort of “food snob.”

 

Before I really do miss the deadline, I’d just like to reiterate:

“Joyeux Noël” 

 

Bûche de Noël

 

 

This post is part of Linda G Hill’s “Stream of Consciousness Saturday”  — Click and read, click and join in!

Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is: “cook.” Find a word that means “cook,” (or use “cook” itself) and use it any way you’d like. Have fun!