This is not your normal "adventures in cooking" post. Because this is the special Topin Wagglegammon edition of Adventures in Cooking! And for Topin Wagglegammon, we need something extra special, extra nifty, extra... ridiculous. We need... penguins.

You see, my friend Eric has an ice cube mold in the shape of a penguin, probably 6 inches high. And he has maple syrup. Thinking this over, he decided that these held all the makings of a special form of tire a l'erable (apologies for the lack of accents, I'm doing this in real time and not on my own computer). "What if," thought Eric, "we could do tire a l'erable on ice penguins!"

Once the idea was born, it had to be seen to completion. The first attempt to heat the maple syrup (in a glass bowl double-boiler) failed, because I hadn't thought to mention that double-boilers must use low heat, not high. Once we'd set aside the imploded glass bowl, we promptly started heating more maple syrup, because Eric is one of those wonderful people who plan for contingencies. A recipe told us we needed to heat it to 115 C. We got it to about 98 C when it started boiling, and then came a long, long waiting period as the water boiled off and the syrup got incrementally hotter.

At last, we could wait not longer. We brought out the hot maple syrup. We brought out the ice penguins. We poured the one on top of the other.

Now, tire is usually made over crushed ice, so that the syrup doesn't fall off the ice before it hardens, as it might do off, say, the curved body of an ice penguin. But we are persistent! We are stubborn! We are undeterred by the laws of physics! And we continued in the face of all evidence!

Pouring maple syrup over ice penguins in such a way that it sticks long enough to harden is not a skill I think I'll use often, but it is a skill I now possess. And I'm assured there are pictures of maple-covered (and slowly melting) ice penguins as proof. Until then, I'll leave you with the visual image, which is probably much better than any picture I could think to post. And I'll write again after my hands have stopped vibrating from the sugar high.

Yes, today is the niftiest day of the year. Has it only been a year since the last time? Well, that's plenty long enough for me! Yes, indeedy! Today is


TOPIN WAGGLEGAMMON


(Why yes, I did just pick random colours from an HTML chart, with no care as to whether they clashed, meshed, or otherwise wanted to be at the same party. Why do you ask?)

So eat a cookie! Snuggle with a stuffed animal! Roll some dice! Give some fnords! However you choose to celebrate it, have an utterly nifty day!

Happy Topin Wagglegammon!

Eat a cookie! See the fnords! Snuggle a teddy bear!

And, above all, have an utterly nifty day!

First and most importantly: If anyone was confused by my somewhat-cryptic reference to Topin Wagglegammon, the niftiest day of the year, Eric has actually explained what it is. I include this link only because I was instrumental in founding (or at least discovering) the holiday, and feel that if Eric is going to credit me, by name, the least I can do is send my readers to see it.

Next, I was feeling really good about the Origny Saint Benoite project yesterday. I was. I'd got 2 pages transcribed and was feeling happy about the whole thing. "What happened?" I hear you asking. Well, today my Prof. (for whom I am doing this paper) greeted me by telling me she wasn't sure if my topic was a good one. She hadn't had time to think about it. This, you might understand, annoyed me greatly, especially since most of the rest of the manuscript won't ARRIVE for another 3 weeks. I was extremely dejected through most of my morning class.

In the end, she grudgingly agreed to let me do it. So I'm back where I started now. Ah, the status quo. How elusive you have been lately.

As a point of note, I will be mostly incommunicado until about 9:30 tonight. So don't expect me to respond to anything before that. You have been warned.