Views from the Back Porch

I was watching the view out our back windows this evening and got inspired to try to capture a little bit of the sunset with my camera. It was a great opportunity to use my telephoto lens.  

The sunset through the branches of a tree in our backyard.

A bright contrail highlighted by the light of the sunset.

Another recipe...

Last weekend I tried out a recipe from the newspaper that piqued my curiosity. It's called Chocolate Chai Pudding, and, yes, it's very tasty! It's basically a home-made microwave pudding, with an added step of steeping chai tea in the milk. The result was a nice chocolate pudding with the spicy taste that you would normally enjoy in your chai tea. It would be easy to make variations on this recipe. Here's a link to it: http://www.relish.com/recipes/chocolate-chai-pudding/.

A Knitting Project

I've never blogged about my knitting projects... but here's one I just finished. It's from a cute book I got called Knit and Purl Pets. I thought the projects looked fun and that they would be good things to give away. I just finished my first one, this cute little dog. It took me a while to finish it, but it was a fun project!

Tiny works of art

It was really foggy early this week. It's also been pretty cold in the mornings lately, so the frost was quite thick. Since they were coated in little ice crystals, all the spiders' webs outside really stood out. The two below are actually two halves of the same web that some spider decided to spin on either side of a post in our porch railing. They were obviously corresponding pieces of the same web, but there was a big, thick pole in the middle. It made me think--isn't it amazing that tiny little creatures like a spider the size of my fingernail can create something so beautiful? If any human made something like that, we would think he or she was a very creative artist, but these little spiders are just doing what they were made to do! The real Artist in this case is the one who made the spider.

A Cinnabon Recipe!

I've never blogged about food before, but last Saturday I tried a new recipe that I think is definitely blog-worthy! To begin with, a little background. My family loves Cinnabon cinnamon rolls. There used to be a Cinnabon at the Vancouver mall, but it closed and now the closest one is at Lloyd Center. Needless to say, we haven't gotten any in a long time! However, the other day a friend told me about this cookbook called Top Secret Recipes, and that there was a recipe for Cinnabons (thanks, Kathy!). Well, I found it online here. It seemed worth a try. I tried to do it just like the recipe said to and the results were amazing! It truly tastes like a Cinnabon cinnamon roll. Some parts of the recipe are a little unusual. For one thing, several ingredients are measured by weight. It also requires kneading the dough and beating the frosting for a really long time, but it's totally worth it. I'm not sure if my family will ever buy Cinnabon again...