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11.11.09

It's the blackout

So you wanna be a superhero?

I'm ready to jump

I am going to be at the Topatoco open house this weekend, in western Mass.

And I put up some new matted prints on the store.

On Saturday the 14th at 4AM UTC/GMT we will be upgrading the operating system of our network load balancers to a newer version, one that will allow us to use both CPUs! Nifty, because multiprocessing is nice.

Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials.

We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait!

As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work.

Or baked milk xD It's the simplest and more delicious dessert I've tried in my life *---* Really, i love it and I would prefer it over a decadent chocolate pie with ice cream or anything like that! I don't have pictures 'cause it doesn't look cute... in fact it looks awful xD It would look life flan or creembrule if you do it on individual pots, but I did it in a cake pan xD

( Recipe and pics )

What is one thing someone has done for you that just melts/melted your heart?

Do you think you could ever do the same thing to that person who did it to you?

Yes or No? Why or Why not?

There are no more secrets in the queue (after this next one I'm posting shortly after this). If you have any questions you'd like to pose to the community for the weekly secret submission, please do so!

Just create a journal entry as normal, make sure you're posting it to this community, make sure the entry is public and anonymous commenting is enabled, and submit! That's it. It will post to the queue to await mod approval. You'll even get a notification when your entry is posted.

Any questions, please don't hesitate to comment with them here and we'll respond as soon as we're able.

This is a long shot but I am hoping to talk to a group of year 6's (namely 35 x 11 year olds) about South African food. As part of this I'd like them to get involved in cooking some yummy treats! I've found a few recipes that involve making coconut ice (easy is vital) and biscuits / cookies with apricot jam and coconut.

Any ideas would be fantastic!
TIA

Okay, so I decided to make a pan of apple crisp, since I wanted to do something with this package of pre-sliced granny smith apples we bought this weekend. It was extremely easy, since I used a packaged topping mix.

I peeled and cored the apple slices that still had a core (Motts did a pretty good job for me) and mixed the topping with 5 tbsp of butter like the package told me, but I added two handfuls of chopped walnuts and a bit of allspice and nutmeg to the apples (just to make it taste less... packaged). Baked at 375 for 25-30 minutes and TA-DA!

( pics under cut )
I wish I had vanilla ice cream. ;_;

Around holidays at work, people always bring in the most amazing baked treats for each other.  But for the last 4 years, there's one goofy kid who's always left out.  He can't have anything with dairy or soy in it, and no one yet has come across a recipe that wouldn't kill our little buddy.  So I call upon you, genius goody-makers of this cummunity, help me satisfy my coworker's allergy-ridden sweet tooth without causing his untimely death!

Much love and appreciation :]

I just received a whole bunch of not-so-fresh oranges and I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions for what I could bake with them. They're still good, just getting to the end of their freshness and I know I can't eat them. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Hey! Thanks for for all the input I got on making a shortbread crust on a pecan pie. And here's my results... oops...


Well, that didn't last long. I used a slightly non-standard recipe (which was gutsy since I've NEVER baked one before, of any kind. I'll give my notes from doing this one, too, for the next time I make it or you might make it, so you have a little easier time than I did.
 
( Recipe follows... )

Baked some peanut butter oatmeal chocolate chip squares on a sunday afternoon, and I've got a surprise for you!

( Who doesn't love Peanut butter? )

Hey guys! I don't know if all of you saw the webisode Subtle Sexuality buuuuuut I did a picspam of the music video!




HERE

I hope you like it, I thought it was just hilarious. :D

hello all!  first post here ^_^  normally i don't bake at home, only at school, but we had 18 egg yolks from making angel food cake and white cake that i needed to make something with egg yolks

i really wanted to make else but i am a poor college student so luckily i found a recipe that had what i had at home

( cookies ahoy )
also i've never tagged a post before so i have no idea what to do XD..thanks

I've always wanted to make this, and my fiance has mentioned that he hasn't had one in a long time, so for Halloween I decided to make it. I used a recipe from this one book I bought, called The Essential Baking Cookbook. Enjoy.



( Recipe and more pics )

My friend was in a horrible car accident months ago. She's still in the hospital and is very slowly trying to recover. It's not even guaranteed that she will survive this. Many fundraisers are being held to raise money for her hospital bills. I'm trying to stay involved with them raising as much as I can. The reason I'm posting this here is because in a couple weeks there will be a very large bake sale where all the proceeds will go towards her. I've never been involved in bake sales before so I was wondering what you guys think would be good sellers there. I'd like to keep the recipes as basic as possible but still want them to stand out. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! I'm not sure if it matters, but I'm fairly certain that over half of the buyers will be of the "elderly" crowd.

Thank you guys!