Teacher's Pet Shortbread Cookies

Anyone who knows me, knows I am chronically disorganized. I consistently forget to charge my cell phone, misplace everything and always forget things that I'm suppose to do. Such is the case every end of school year when it comes time to give my daughter's teachers a little something thank you for resisting the urge to strap my child. Every year I mean to bake cookies but only end up remembering late the night before and rushing out to Jean Coutu to buy the last remaining $5-boxes of chocolates on the shelf. However considering there's roughly a dozen people I need to thank for their restaint, this adds up to being quite expensive. Again this year I forgot till the night before but decided to make them anyways and avoid the expense... it was early enough in the evening.


These are about the easiest cookies you can make, in terms of minimal number of ingredients.


Shortbread Cookies
1 lb unsalted butter (make sure it's unsalted!!)
1 cup fructose (fruit sugar)
4 cups white flour


Make sure the butter is still firm but not too hard to work with. Leaving it out for an hour or two usually does the trick. Cream the butter and sugar then add the 1 cup of flour at a time. This is the fun part where you can get your hands all gooey.

The worst part of making shortbread would have to be the time and trouble it takes to roll out the dough and carve it up with cookie-cutters, so we just decided to make little discs out of the dough. Er, well I tried to make little ones anyway.

Bake at 275 F for 20-25 minutes and transfer to another try for cooling.

We decided that to make them extra yummy we'd drizzle melted chocolate over them. Just throw a square or two of semi-sweet chocolate in the microwave, drizzle over them with a spoon and voila! Make sure to put them in the fridge so the chocolate can harden. (And for some reason these cookies taste so much better after they've been chilled).

Lastly—after a trip to the dollar store—we put them in bags, tied them with ribbon and added some little flowers to make our efforts extra pretty. 

The whole thing took under two hours and rang in at a cost of under $15. I hope they like them!

My December

Snow flakes dance upon the window sill

sparkling in their own delight

majestic and wondrous

making everything seems anew

and vivid with possibilities

inside ballerinas dance 

churning the room beneath their feet

their laughter seeps into our souls

the air thickened by cocoa

and the sweet smell of serenity

tucked in, safe and warm

in calm calamity

your timid smile reaches mine

your eyes say it all

I've found my place

home.

Felicity's School Concerts

Ok, ok, so I suck at taking video with a camera—the picture is fuzzy, the sound is off and at one point I almost fall over and dropped the camera—but these kids were amazing none the less. Felicity isn't in the choir but the kids did such an amazing job singing Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen and Waving Flag by K'Naan. Plus the choreography to waving flag is so adorable.

Verdun Elementary Senior Band Concert from Stephanie Little on Vimeo.


Verdun Elementary Senior Band Concert, Part 2 from Stephanie Little on Vimeo.


Verdun Elementary Choir from Stephanie Little on Vimeo.

Michelangelo's secret message in the Sistine Chapel: A juxtaposition of God and the human brain

Michelangelo's secret message in the Sistine Chapel: A juxtaposition of God and the human brain: "

R. Douglas Fields in Scientific American:

At the age of 17 he began dissecting corpses from the church graveyard. Between the years 1508 and 1512 he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Michelangelo Buonarroti—known by his first name the world over as the singular artistic genius, sculptor and architect—was also an anatomist, a secret he concealed by destroying almost all of his anatomical sketches and notes. Now, 500 years after he drew them, his hidden anatomical illustrations have been found—painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, cleverly concealed from the eyes of Pope Julius II and countless religious worshipers, historians, and art lovers for centuries—inside the body of God.

This is the conclusion of Ian Suk and Rafael Tamargo, in their paper in the May 2010 issue of the scientific journal Neurosurgery. Suk and Tamargo are experts in neuroanatomy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1990, physician Frank Meshberger published a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association deciphering Michelangelo’s imagery with the stunning recognition that the depiction in God Creating Adam in the central panel on the ceiling was a perfect anatomical illustration of the human brain in cross section. Meshberger speculates that Michelangelo surrounded God with a shroud representing the human brain to suggest that God was endowing Adam not only with life, but also with supreme human intelligence. Now in another panel The Separation of Light from Darkness (shown at left), Suk and Tamargo have found more. Leading up the center of God’s chest and forming his throat, the researchers have found a precise depiction of the human spinal cord and brain stem.

More here. [Thanks to Ali Altaf.] 

Marinade FAIL

Thanks LEE KUM KEE, but I prefer my chicken sober!

Found at my local Chinese Market

FAILblog seems way to inundated with posts to included mine so I'll post them here for you blog-nuts. 

Math That Cuts Like a Knife

"Beautiful Nesting Knives Designed by Mathematics:"


Instead of actually designing a set of knives to match their individual purposes, designer Mia Schmallenbach turned to math to tell her what shape they should be. The beautiful Meeting set is the result of drawing a diagram based on the Fibonacci sequence and almost literally joining the dots.

Despite this arbitrary choice, the knives look pretty handy, comprising a paring knife, a carving knife, a 15cm (6-inch) utility knife and a 20cm (almost 8-inch) chef’s knife. All of these knives nest together like Russian-dolls and fit perfectly inside a big stainless-steel (or wooden) block.



The Fibonacci sequence, you’ll no doubt remember from school, starts with 0, 1 and continues by adding the previous two numbers together: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 and so on. It can then be used to make shapes. Plotting squares whose sides are the length of successive Fibonacci numbers and then drawing an arc through their opposite corners will give the Golden Spiral, a shaped found in nature: the nautilus shell, for example. By making this shape, along with others suggested by the sequence, Schmallenbach came up with the design

These knives don’t come cheap, though. The full-metal set, made by French cutlery manufacturer Deglon, will cost you over $900 (if you can find it in the US). The wood-encased set is a more reasonable €400, or $490.

Kitchen knives [Mia Schmallenbach/Coroflot via Oh Gizmo!]

A Thin Line Between Entertainment and War

"Creative people are just high functioning schizophrenics: "

New research shows a possible explanation for the link between mental health and creativity. By studying receptors in the brain, researchers at Karolinska Institute have managed to show that the dopamine system in healthy, highly creative people is similar in some respects to that seen in people with schizophrenia.

High creative skills have been shown to be somewhat more common in people who have mental illness in the family. Creativity is also linked to a slightly higher risk of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Certain psychological traits, such as the ability to make unusual or bizarre associations are also shared by schizophrenics and healthy, highly creative people. And now the correlation between creativity and mental health has scientific backing.

'We have studied the brain and the dopamine D2 receptors, and have shown that the dopamine system of healthy, highly creative people is similar to that found in people with schizophrenia,' says associate professor Fredrik Ullen from Karolinska Institutet's Department of Women's and Children's Health, co-author of the study that appears in the journal PLoS ONE.

Just which brain mechanisms are responsible for this correlation is still something of a mystery, but Dr Ullen conjectures that the function of systems in the brain that use dopamine is significant; for example, studies have shown that dopamine receptor genes are linked to ability for divergent thought. Dr Ullen's study measured the creativity of healthy individuals using divergent psychological tests, in which the task was to find many different solutions to a problem.

'The study shows that highly creative people who did well on the divergent tests had a lower density of D2 receptors in the thalamus than less creative people,' says Dr Ullen. 'Schizophrenics are also known to have low D2 density in this part of the brain, suggesting a cause of the link between mental illness and creativity.'

The thalamus serves as a kind of relay centre, filtering information before it reaches areas of the cortex, which is responsible, amongst other things, for cognition and reasoning.

'Fewer D2 receptors in the thalamus probably means a lower degree of signal filtering, and thus a higher flow of information from the thalamus,' says Dr Ullen, and explains that this could a possible mechanism behind the ability of healthy highly creative people to see numerous uncommon connections in a problem-solving situation and the bizarre associations found in the mentally ill.

'Thinking outside the box might be facilitated by having a somewhat less intact box,' says Dr Ullen about his new findings.

From www.sciencedaily.com. Posted by Jedi Mind Traveler."

A Terrific Gay Wedding Announcement

I love an engaged lesbian couple with a sense of humor:




Is there anything that’s equally funny that you could use when two atheists get married?

(via Joe. My. God.)