But before that, the rest of last week *grins*

Not that I actually did a whole lot, I was mostly lazy. I made it to four miles cycling which made me happy. And on Friday I made a whole new cookie. I had found a recipe for ‘Cowboy Cookies’ cookies with pecans, oats and chocolate chips. The site I found it on also suggested using coconut too. So I decided to give them a try. I ended up using peanuts (home roasted) and almonds in place of the pecans as that was what we had. Where it said chocolate chips I used a mix of white, milk, semi-sweet and swirls with bittersweet and white.. Mixing it together I also added raisins. So it became a mix of oatmeal-raisin, chocolate chip, peanut butter and macaroon cookies *grins* all in one!

Saturday, with some help, we got the vegetable bed built in the garden, and planted out the peas, beans and garlic. The peanuts will have to go out soon, they’re doing really well.. They probably could have been planted straight out there. It’s looking good, and we’re all excited now! We put the extra stones around one of the trees to see how it looked as our eventual plan is to do that around all the trees.

Once everything was done and I was taking photos I decided to play about with the macro settings on my camera for a bit, just to get more practice at getting good photos with it!

Sunday evening we went to the Alamo, as one of their ‘Big Screen Classics’ they were showing Princess Mononoke. I’m not a big anime person, I don’t go crazy over it. However I do really enjoy the work of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. To date I had seen four of his films (this made the fifth). Spirited Away remains the most visually stunning, and Howl’s Moving Castle is still my favourite. But it was good to see some of his earlier work, billed as his ‘epic masterpiece’ I thoroughly enjoyed the film.

Monday it was back to class. We were finishing off our gingerbread houses, presenting them yesterday. We made these in pairs, and my partner and I decided to make a Starbucks, so it’s more of a gingerbread establishment *grins8 We had good fun with it, and I’m pleased with it, we lost points on tidyness, it didn’t fit together amazingly well, warping with the shape of the tray it was baked on, but we put lots of details in and we did well on it.

Now, and for the rest of this week and next, we start on our wedding cakes. Three tiers, 12, 9 and 6 inches. Today we have the loong lecture on it, and our ‘consults’ we’ll also have to cost it out, and we’ll hold a tasting next week for our ‘clients’ (both Chef instructors). I’m excited, I’m allowed to do a mad-hatter cake, so it’s going to be a challenge, but it will be fun!