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I find it difficult to buy gifts for people, especially for the holidays, so this year I decided to bake a bunch of cookies and give cookie out cookie boxes along with some copies of the new Puzzmo book. This worked out well, because in addition to two cookie boxes I gave to coworkers, I had four more boxes worth of cookies to go with four books to be gifted to four couples in my girlfriend's family (including us 😉).
Pictured above are more of the same cookies I made for a party with our D&D group to celebrate my girlfriend coming back home from Switzerland. The recipes used are:
King Arthur Baking Company's peanut butter cookies (recipe link), to half of which I added some Hershey's kisses.
Eric Kim's gochujang caramel cookies (recipe link). I've made these cookies around ten times by now, and they are a crowd favorite every time. I've become very methodical in how I distribute the gochujang mixture into the cookie dough, rolling the dough out, spreading the gochujang, and folding it a few times before chopping and rearranging chunks of layered dough.
Jesse Szewczyk's chocolate and vanilla swirl cookies, which you can find in his book Cookies: The New Classics. My girlfriend's sister actually got this for me for Christmas, and it immediately became my favorite cookbook.
Finally there are some snickerdoodle shortbread cookies, also from Jesse Szewczyk's book, which were also a favorite among my taste testers.
Trump is re-elected, cohost is set to finally disappear at the end of the year, and my attempts to "do everything myself" with respect to personal web development blew up in my face. I'm no longer an idiot who tries to self-host an open-source CMS to store blog posts.
On the bright side, my long-distance relationship is soon to no longer be long-distance. My girlfriend and I are both very excited to hibernate over the holidays together and get married next year. My parents still don't approve of our relationship, but at least they're sorry they weren't upfront about that. 🤷
Not sure what the future holds, but overall I want to take my personal projects less seriously and take some time to reassemble my portfolio in a way that blends into an RSS feed.