Alas, yesterday's hot chocolate experiment was such a disaster, I'm not even going to report the fine details here (except to say: TEN CARDAMOM PODS IS DEFINITELY TOO MUCH)! On the upside, though, my 8-year-old has volunteered to join with me in the experimentation process, making his own search for a new favorite hot chocolate recipe - and I have ( Read more... )

Readers who've been keeping me company for the last few years might remember that when the Kat trilogy was re-released as a boxed set, I declared its publication day (October 7, 2014) to be Hot Chocolate Day. In the week leading up to it, I posted one hot chocolate recipe after another, including guest recipes from friends. (There was Hot Chocolate ( Read more... )

1. Hamilton: the Musical. I discovered this through the cast recording, and WOW.

So, for context, I've always liked musicals, as a genre, without feeling a great urge to watch or listen to them all that much...except once, when I was 12, when one hit me like a lightning-bolt: The Phantom of the Opera. It was soooooo romantic! And historical! And ( Read more... )

I've never been to Paris, but all of my ideas about hot chocolate changed the first time Patrick and I went to Edinburgh and visited Plaisir du Chocolat, a French-stlye chocolaterie where the hot chocolate was mixed in gorgeously aromatic dark, steaming vats near the front door and the scent drifted down the street like a trap for the unwary. They ( Read more... )

Before I move on to today's fabulous guest post, I just want to say: THANK YOU to everyone who read, signal-boosted, and/or replied to my blog post yesterday. It was a really scary post to write and to make public, but the support I've gotten for it has been amazing.

Thank you.But today I am practicing stubborn gladness and moving back to hot ( Read more... )

It's just one week until Hot Chocolate Day, so today I'm posting the first recipe for hot chocolate that I ever learned when I was a kid. This is the kind of hot chocolate that my parents used to make for us after we got back from a cold, exhilarating day of sledding down snowy hills in the middle of a freezing Michigan winter. Bundled up in coats ( Read more... )

Before anything else, I keep on forgetting to say: I've had a new short story published! This is my very silly, lighthearted King Richard III short story, "The Spell Misspelled: or, The Trouble with Kings and Ghosts". Here's a snippet from the opening:

The summer Meredith Wrack went to England, she sat for hours under the ancient oaks of Sherwood ( Read more... )

Oof. I can't believe I have a nearly-four-year-old son! MrD and I are reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's On the Banks of Plum Creek together right now, and he's even starting to read a few of the words himself. How did that happen???

Seriously, look at this tiny baby:


( Read more... )

Oof. Well, I hadn't meant to wait quite this long before I went back to blogging regularly, but I kept waiting for LiveJournal to become reliable again first ( Read more... )

Thank you guys so much for all the good wishes after my last post! MrD is feeling much, much better, thank goodness. Toddlers are amazingly resilient. By yesterday, he was running around like a 2-year-old ball of energy again...while Patrick and I were feeling totally flattened. Funny how that works ( Read more... )