The summer before COVID struck, my son was thrilled to be selected for an internship at NASA. He went into the program excited to get a taste of his intended career path; he came out...
When I was a small child, we had a family friend who was very old and well-travelled. I loved to visit her house because she kept a display of souvenirs from the various countries she’d visited. There were...
This tutorial combines two of my favorite things: miniatures and Halloween. The result is a spooky play on my previous miniature projects, Breakfast in Bed for Mom and Dad’s Breakfast. Complete with...
My son is getting ready to head off to his freshman year of college, and our talks lately have centered around his future life of independence. The other day, he sat at the kitchen counter daydreaming aloud about...
I’ve had a hunk of modeling chocolate (left over from this Mother’s Day project) begging to be used up . . . or eaten. So in the interest of my waistline, I’ve been trying to come up with an idea that...
My mom can grow anything. It wasn’t always so. She started out a city kid from New York with little opportunity or care to nurture a green thumb. But with the 1960s came a newfound desire to commune with nature. My parents moved to a...
Easter has been one of my favorite holidays since I was a child. I remember how my sisters and I would spend hours drawing designs on cooked eggs with crayons before carefully dipping them into little cups of dye. Once we had amassed dozens of brightly colored eggs, the treasure hunts would begin. We’d...
Do you have some extra time on your hands? Are you a perfectionist with the patience of a saint? Do your friends marvel at your love of tedious projects?...
My neighbors are expecting their first baby any day now. A little girl! With comically unfortunate timing, our street is being closed for two weeks for repaving. We’ve all had to park our cars a few blocks away on another street or risk being...
Growing up, I was fortunate enough to celebrate both Christmas and Hanukkah. At our house, Hanukkah was always a quiet affair with an understated elegance. As a child, I would have called it “fancy”. Maybe it was the colors, the deep blues and shiny metallics, that made it feel so sophisticated. Maybe it was...
The summer of 1989 was one of my favorites. I spent my days with friends by the pool and my nights camping in the backyard. We watched scary movies, giggled about boys, and crimped each others’ hair. And all the while...
When it comes to creating cookie designs, I find Father’s Day to be one of the most difficult holidays. Every year I look for inspiration, but I seem to find only a handful of ideas, none of which apply to the man I’m trying to celebrate...
I love to take inspiration for my cookie designs from nature. There’s an imperfect quality to organic objects that I find very forgiving; things don’t have to be perfectly straight, smooth, or symmetrical. So I try to...
When my kids were little, they loved advent calendars, especially ones with hidden chocolates. They’d start hounding me to buy them in the beginning of October, long before I wanted to think about the winter holiday frenzy. I assumed it was the (subpar) chocolate that appealed to them. But...
My first child is packing for college as we speak. Her once overcrowded room is looking practically stark as more and more boxes accumulate in the hall. These visual reminders of her departure have me thinking excitedly about where this new journey will take her...
