Model Trebuchet

This past Halloween I overheard Scott and my BIL, Robert, talking about building a trebuchet.  A real trebuchet.  They wanted to launch pumpkins and rocks and pianos into an empty field.  They were even talking about whose house to store it (notminenotminenotmine..).

This. must. not. happen.  

Time for me to intervene.  In my most subtle way, I took matters into my own hands and ordered a model trebuchet kit for Christmas in hopes of satiating his siege engine desires.  

Scott was thrilled.  

Scott reminds me of my Dad in this picture:

Several hours later --Tah-Dah!!

Quite a bit of calibration:

Scott and Steven did some catapult vs. trebuchet experiments.

The victims: animal army led by Darth.

Success!!  I haven't heard more talk of a large trebuchet, but who knows -- I may have only fanned the flame...

Pinwheel Cookies

So Alton Brown is a genius. The Food Network ran an old episode of Good Eats in which he made Christmas cookies this past week. One of the features was the Pinwheel Cookie.

 It looked fun enough that we gave it a try. Alton's recipes are often far trickier than they seem on the show. I guess that's the magic of TV coupled with a handful of years of culinary school.

You make a batch of sugar cookie dough and then halve it flavoring one half with melted, unsweetened chocolate and the other with smashed up candy canes (which are strangely abundant this time of year.) You then roll out the dough, stack them, and roll them to form a nifty swirl.

We had a pretty good time rolling them and only screamed for Mary to help us 4,000 times.

 You're supposed to let the loaf sit in the refrigerator for two hours, but since Alton didn't, we started after an hour. The two doughs cooled at different speeds leaving us with a cookie that baked at different speeds. This caused a problem, as you can see, since the chocolate part set up quite nicely and the peppermint part oozed all over the cookie sheet.

We'd doubled the recipe, so the second loaf stayed in the refrigerator overnight, and our results were much, much better.

Tasted good - fun to do - a lot of work for not very many cookies.