Willow Bird Baking’s Best Recipes of 2014
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Hot Cranberry Orange Cake
Hot Cranberry Orange Cake
On the last day of school before winter break, the entire middle school sits around in jammies, performs holiday skits, and exchanges white elephant gifts. Last year around this time I was still trying to find my place in a new city and a new school. I hadn’t been a new teacher in so long that I’d forgotten how kids don’t immediately love you. They don’t get your jokes. They don’t know with what weight to interpret your reactions. They don’t know if it’s cool to want to be around you. You spend a lot of time strategizing about where to sit, what to do, and what to say to introduce yourself day after day. Even once the kids choose you as their own, you must continue to nestle into the fabric of your colleagues and learn the culture of the school. All this while you’re struggling to manage the simplest things: trying to find the closest gym or the best route to work. It was a hard year.
Super Fancy Chocolate Cheesecake Cake (and Other Perfect Christmas Desserts)
Check out 14 Stunning Holiday Desserts
by Julie Ruble at Foodie.com
Thanks, Foodie, for sponsoring this post.
If you’re sad because you keep scrolling through photos of homes decorated for Christmas and beautiful cookies and homemade gifts and holiday parties and hot chocolate breaks and meticulous Christmas lights and PERFECT FAMILIES, come here and let me give you a dysfunctional hug. You are so not alone.
Super Fancy Chocolate Cheesecake Cake
Just remember that everyone picks out the bright spots to share. Almost no one posts their struggles, especially not the ugly struggles. And if they do, their friends give them the side-eye and they become That Messy Girl Who Shares Too Much. So no one does. Instead we all sit in our messy houses staring at stacks of unaddressed Christmas cards and and feel like we belong on the island of misfit toys.
I’m going to be That Messy Girl today, because I’m not willing to let you feel that way. Or I’m not willing to let you hang out on the island alone, anyway.
Gingerbread Gooey Butter Cake Ice Cream Sundae
I wrote this post as part of the Plugrá Butter Brigade. Thanks, Plugrá, for sponsoring the development of this Gingerbread Gooey Butter Cake Ice Cream Sundae recipe and for making my favorite butter!
My current working hypothesis is that every family has a stellar-gift-giver and a terrible-gift-giver. My brother- and sister-in-law are my family’s stellar-gift-givers. Plenty of people give great gifts, but their gifts are stellar: the perfect blend of thoughtful, fun, useful, slightly poignant. Mike’s dad was a Marine, and after picking up on a couple of nostalgia stories, they paid his way to the shooting range so he could fire an M4 again. They bought Mike’s grandmother a real tumbleweed. I know that doesn’t sound like a good present (actually, it sounds like it could rival coal for the new naughty-list gift) but she loves the southwest and it fit perfectly with her eclectic home decor. Who thinks of this stuff?
Drenched Lemon Cream Cake
Drenched Lemon Cream Cake
Y’all, let’s get real. There’s nothing wrong with taking nude photos. Nothing.
I’m a middle school teacher, so let me qualify that: there may be moral and practical implications with sending those photos to people, posting them online, or Snapchatting them to someone (good grief, DON’T DO IT). In any of those scenarios, you’re voluntarily giving the photos to someone else you may or may not be able to trust. In the case of Snapchat, you guys know nothing is ever really deleted for good on the internet, right? So trust me, some of those things are not wise.
But acting like Jennifer Lawrence and other violated celebrities somehow “should’ve known better” than to take nude photos in the first place is so odd to me. Why? What’s wrong with that?
