Usually when I do my baking, only a relatively small portion of whatever it happens to be serves as our Friday-evening dessert, the rest left over to be had on succeeding days. And if they're cupcakes they stay light and moist and fluffy, and pies keep over well too for several days, but anything baked with a yeast dough tends to taste at its optimum the day it's baked. I try to keep what I bake varied, although we do have favourites, like butter tarts and cheesecake. On Friday I thought I'd try something a little different and we ended up with yeast-raised cinnamon twists that I drizzled melted chocolate over.

 

They were quite good and since they're not very large, we enjoyed two apiece on the day they were baked. Gratifyingly, several days later they still taste fresh enough to be enjoyed. It's the sweet nature of the yeast dough, made with milk, egg, sour cream, butter and honey that allows them to age gracefully. The semi-sweet chocolate they're topped with adds little sweetness, but the chocolate serves as a good foil and goes well with the cinnamon.

I hadn't wanted to bake too many of them, knowing we'd never be able to eat more than eight or so between us over a succession of days, so once the dough had risen and was ready to be worked with, I halved it, froze one half and used the other for the twists. I'll find some other use for the portion that I froze, some time soon.

Speaking of projects, Irving is finally in the completed stage of one of his projects. He started it last winter, worked on it fairly steadily, then left it for the summer. When winter returned he did too, to his project, kind of sporadically. Now it's done, for the most part. He had constructed a door frame while he was working on what would become a stained glass insert. Then he discovered that the wood  he bought as kiln-dried mightn't have been, because the door, while awaiting its insert, became slightly warped.

So he took it down and continued working on the insert to completion. Once the stained glass was finished, he then built another door frame and installed it. The final piece of the project was the installation of the insert into the waiting door frame, and now it's complete.

 

Many things happen that don't quite meet expectations. As an example, approaching the end of January usually heralds the depths of winter, at least by the calendar. Not this year. This winter and for that matter fall as well, have been quite untypical. Our brief cold snap that was far more alike a normal winter has transformed into a spate of much milder-than-normal days. So mild in fact, at 3C, under cloud-crowded skies and little wind, creating melting snow conditions that it seems more like spring.

 

We're still pulling little rubber boots over the puppies' paws to keep them warm and dry. The snowpack on the forest floor while still considerable, is nowhere near the depth of a normal winter. And it has become a bit sludgy, sucking at our boots as we tramp through the forest trails. Still, we certainly don't miss the icy fingers of cold guided by winter wind that usually creep through our jackets. And this winter season hasn't yet signalled it's been defeated. There are many more snowstorms that can and will erupt on the atmosphere as winter wears on.