delicious caramels and a really fun game idea.

first of all, my friend norah gave me three neat boxes of japanese candy for christmas, and these morinaga's milk caramels are rocking my world. i may or may not have eaten half of them in two days. (the link is another blogger's very good description of them.) the box looks like a 1920's cigarette box or something, but opens like a matchbox to reveal the delicious little guys. i am going to save it, obviously. the japanese really do milky candy awesomely, which is odd because as a child i really hated the milk there. maybe it's better for candy than straight-up consumption.
second reason for posting: guess who?
yesterday lora had been diligently studying for most of the day, so she was ready for an evening break. we had already decided to make some vodka sauce and have a little dinner together, and we really wanted to play a game. we only have dice/cards/scrabble here, and none of the above were really appealling to our desire for a relaxing game. i trekked out into the snow to walk to borders and see what they had to offer, which wasn't much. i was pretty disappointed and spent an hour searching the internet for creative game-making ideas online while sipping a beer. (delicious thing: black toad dark ale, brewed for trader joe's. a.maz.ing.)

remember these?

i was getting a bit exasperated with the options, and then guess who? came to mind. remember that game, from kindergarten? "does your person have a mustache?" etc? well we realized we could make our own version!!!! i wasn't initially as creative as lora, and i was thinking i could just do a funny image search and get a mix of random people, celebrities, and cartoons...but lora realized that we could use our friends! much more fun! we just used thirty mutual friends, and used their facebook pictures to keep it easy.

if we were planning on making it look good, i would have standardized the size and used photoshop to add nice, clear text, but as it was we were getting hungry, so i just globbed a bunch of photos on a document and got them around the same height, and then printed three sheets: one set for each player, and one set we could draw from to guess who? about. i cut them up into little cards, and we would just flip them over when ruling out possibilities. we used the coffee table as a divider and just layed everything out on the floor.

it was HYSTERICAL. we decided to nix the questions about physical appearances and gender, and the results were very funny. questions ranged from "does your person subscribe to a monotheistic religion?" to "would your person be described as metro?" to "does your person appreciate chill fashion shows?" etc, etc. it was very funny. i very nearly demolished an entire bottle of wine. i hope we play again soon!

you should try and make one... i think it would actually make a very funny gift if it were made with relatives or family friends in mind. or, for your girlfriends, if it featured past love interests. very amusing. book characters would be really adorable... i might do that for my kid someday. the possibilities are pretty endless... babies could have an animal version...

-papermoon

i'm back!

well!
it was about as much of a relief as a loved one leaving the hospital in good repair...
yes, my laptop is back to me!

if i tried to post about everything at once this would go on forever. i think i will just take it as the mood strikes in the next few days, blogging perhaps more than once a day. i will begin catching up with a few pictures from the class i recently taught at galaxie--'sweet sculpture' again, but this time we went the route of baked goods. the kids were outrageously creative!!! i brought in some 'cupcakes', 'cookies', and an 'ice cream cone' and they took off on those examples with 'donuts', 'gum', 'hershey kisses' and all kinds of modifications on my original ideas. it was great.





on another note, as i mentioned in the last post, i have been going through books with the vigor of a kid eating halloween candy. (unfortunately for my teeth, i have also been going through halloween candy with the vigor of a girl reading books.)

i adore c.s. lewis!

more to come, off to make (or re-warm yesterday's?) dinner!

-papermoon

candy!

my roommate is the best.
she brought me a piece of awesome candy from some brunch place she went to today.
it's by some italian confectioner and it was a pastel pink mildly sticky hard candy in the awesome flavor of PLUM!!!
she inspired me to write this poem...it's very original, if i do say so myself.

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the candy

and which
you were probably
saving
from breakfast.

you're awesome!
they were delicious
so sweet
of you, lora.

cute kids with 'candy'

so i thought i would post some pictures from a workshop class i taught at Galaxie, in Logan Square. the class was called 'sweet sculpture', and it was a blast. i taught them all how to make scented model magic candy. each kid had great ideas i had never come up with... sticks of mint-scented gum, 'melting' wrapped 'chocolates'... even a 'chocolate' UFO and a 'gummi' alien.
look how awesomely everything turned out!