2010! It has been a very long hiatus -- the summer, the wedding, Rocky's homecoming, the post-wedding hibernation and dissertation writing .... we even performed a wedding at our home, for our friends Ben and Shannon.
Too much to try and fill in the blanks, so it's better to just dive back in. 
The short story is that we are now married and the wedding was great. 
I can't believe how incredibly lucky I am to have such amazing friends and family who migrated to the middle of nowhere and then pitched in and made it all work while shielding me from craziness. 
My friend Carmen and her husband officiated (awesomely) and Amy was a trooper. A hot trooper. We have literally 800 photos from the photographer Derek from Duluth, our sports photographer turned wedding guy. I still haven't looked through them all. He made us all jump up and down a lot, so maybe that's his sports background showing through. If you happen to be getting married in the WI/MN area, Derek is a great find. 
The pug is now back in Seattle (here's my dad putting him back in the return flight), 
Jake finished his last law school class and is studying for the bar and I can see the end for the dissertation. This is nice but oddly not very motivating. It sort of makes me feel like I can just call it a success and quit while I'm ahead and just focus on all the side projects that have popped up. But I'll write the thing.As for the holidays -- we stayed put in Seattle and spent Christmas with Jake's family, which was nice. I made a cake and some chocolate ganache truffle ball thingies that were a big hit. Jake said that the cake -- a Tres Leches -- should be the post to get me back on the blog thing. He rarely comments on cakes and is more of a cheese guy. So here it is: Tres Leches, Emeril Lagasse's version. I stuck to the recipe, except I added extra vanilla and I used part cake flour. It ended up needing to cook much longer than 25-30 minutes.
Between thanksgiving, Ben and Shannon's wedding and Christmas I baked up a storm -- so plenty of those recipes to post in the coming weeks (hopefully). Along with some dissertation updates (double hopefully).
Much love and happy 2010!
