nutmeg buttermilk cookies

I don’t usually keep buttermilk in the fridge, because when I do, it invariably goes bad before I can use the entire container.  And buttermilk that has gone off smells DISGUSTING.  Beyond belief gross.  If you’ve experienced it, you know.  If you haven’t, don’t ever let it happen.  Also, if you have any tried and true ways of using up buttermilk, please list them in the comments!  Anyway, back to the story, cookies, #lalala.  I had a little less than a cup of buttermilk in the fridge after making a loaf of soda bread, and (naturally) I went searching on the interwebs for cookie recipes made with buttermilk.  Then four and a half dozen cookies happened on a weeknight.  I never claimed sanity.

Nutmeg Buttermilk Cookies (cookies modified slightly from Jen’s Favorite Cookies’ recipe, glaze from King Arthur Flour)

INGREDIENTS

Cookies

3/4 cup butter, room temperature

11/2 cups sugar

2 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla

2/3 cup buttermilk

1 teaspoon nutmeg

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

3 cups flour

Glaze

2 1/4 cups powdered sugar, sifted

2 tablespoons milk, plus 1 teaspoon milk

2 tablespoons light corn syrup

1 teaspoon nutmeg

DIRECTIONS

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

Cream butter and sugar. In my case (without a stand mixer), this meant mixing by hand until most of the sugar was incorporated, and then beating with an electric hand mixer.  Add eggs and vanilla and beat until fully incorporated.

Add buttermilk and mix well, and don’t worry if the mixture curdles – adding the dry ingredients will sort it out. Sift in the dry ingredients and nutmeg and stir gently with a spatula until the batter comes together completely.

Drop heaping teaspoonfuls of cookie dough onto a greased baking sheet (I lined sheets in foil and then sprayed them with baking spray) about 2 inches apart.  Bake for 12-15 minutes, switching racks halfway through baking to ensure even heating.  Take cookies out when edges turn very light golden brown.  Cool cookies on wire racks before icing.

For glaze, combine all ingredients and whisk until smooth. Spread small spoonfuls of glaze over cookies, and let sit at least 20 minutes for icing to harden.  If you have any questions about the glaze consistency, check out the tips and video on the King Arthur page.

Store cookies in an airtight container.  Makes 4-5 dozen.

You may have already gleaned this from the recipe, but it’s the tiniest bit fussy.  The ingredients are simple enough, but what with the glazing and sifting and shifting trays in the oven, they really take your whole attention for the duration of baking.  Be prepared, is all I’m saying.  As for the cookies themselves, they are very cake-y, with just a hint of spice.  The batter tasted like mild eggnog, but when it baked up that went right away.  My roommates and book club friends liked the finished cookies, and though I’m not a cakey cookie sort of person, I think they’re just fine (and I loved the glaze).

Recommended for: those who prefer a mild, unexceptionable cookie with a cake-like texture, and for the perfect thing to go with afternoon tea.

Interested in other food-related posts?  Check out Beth Fish Reads' Weekend Cooking!

nameless

I'm a big fan of fairy tale retellings.  One of the first young adult fantasies I ever fell in love with was Robin McKinley's Beauty, a classic reimagining of the story of Beauty and the Beast.  I know there's some fairy tale fatigue within YA circles, but as long as publishers release books that might have the potential to enchant me the way McKinley's did, I'll keep on reading new fairy tales.  Lili St. Crow's Nameless is an inventive take on Snow White, and the first standalone in the new series Tales of Beauty and Madness.

When Camille was six years old, she was discovered alone in the snow by Enrico Vultusino, godfather of the Seven—the powerful Families that rule magic-ridden New Haven. Papa Vultusino adopted the mute, scarred child, naming her after his dead wife and raising her in luxury on Haven Hill alongside his own son, Nico.

Now Cami is turning sixteen. She’s no longer mute, though she keeps her faded scars hidden under her school uniform, and though she opens up only to her two best friends, Ruby and Ellie, and to Nico, who has become more than a brother to her. But even though Cami is a pampered Vultusino heiress, she knows that she is not really Family. Unlike them, she is a mortal with a past that lies buried in trauma. And it’s not until she meets the mysterious Tor, who reveals scars of his own, that Cami begins to uncover the secrets of her birth…to find out where she comes from and why her past is threatening her now.

Camille Vultusino mysteriously appeared in the snow ten years ago, and ever since she’s been both blessed by those who found her and wary of accepting that she truly belongs.  The Vultusinos are one of the Seven ruling Families of New Haven, and as the adopted Vultusino daughter Cami could take whatever her world has to offer – if she could forget the unknowns in her past or the fact that she’s full-human. Cami’s identity crisis comes to a head when a growing number of mysterious disappearances, family change and the appearance of a gardener named Tor (with scars like her own) converge during the darkest season of the year.  This is Snow White, with a bloody bite.

Cami is a privileged girl with a charmed life – if you don’t count the missing memory from her early years, a pronounced stutter, feeling like an outsider, and the unsettled state of her adopted family.  Still, she has friends, supporters, and Nico, her brother-who-has-become-something-more.  It might be enough, if sudden changes and dangers didn’t upset the careful balance.  When they do, Cami’s constant brushes with sinister magic build tension and mystery.  These, cut together with memories resurfacing as dreams, engender an overall sense of all things horrifying and compelling in Nameless. 

The best part of the story is the world-building.  Families who aren’t just families, but actually inhuman.  Fausts, twists, minotaurs, St. Juno girls, prep boys, the rotten Core of New Haven – these are all cornerstones of a world that is fully realized and incredibly interesting.  I kept thinking that the setting deserved more time on stage, but I understand why it wasn’t granted that – this is a young adult novel with a VILLAIN, and there had to be time to set up and introduce characters to care about, as well.

St. Crow’s fresh take on fairy tale blends stories and myths in a fascinating concept followed up with good execution.  Cami’s life among the Seven Families is suitably messed-up, leading to believable tension between characters and in the world overall; these issues then translate into problems that must be solved.  Cami creates some of her own roadblocks through sheer voicelessness (her stutter and general difficulty speaking), and that can read as passivity.  But in the setting, with this character, it makes perfect sense. That’s not to say that I as a reader didn’t want to shake some sense into her head.  I did.  However the characterization (in Cami’s case) was spot-on.

Add a creepy, mounting sense of doom to all of the above, and you have perfect reading material for Halloween.  The only thing that spoiled it was a too-tidy ending.  But then, I like a bit of open-endedness in my stories.  One more minor nitpick I had was with the character Tor.  His part is obvious, and his involvement rushed.  I have hopes that he’ll return in a future installment, complete with a full backstory.  I was also wary of the Cami/Nico dynamic suggested in the summary, but it mostly worked, given their intense history together (it didn’t make me cringe, as I feared it would).

Recommended for: fans of fairy tale retellings (the darker ones like Kill Me Softly or Jack of Kinrowan), and those who like young adult fantasy with a contemporary urban flavor, a la Holly Black's White Cat.

waiting on wednesday (65)

Today I’m participating in "Waiting On" Wednesday, a weekly event hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine. Its purpose is to spotlight upcoming book releases that we’re eagerly anticipating.

Dear Everyone: Sci-Fi Dystopia/Western with Aliens and Mystery is my jam.  I mean, I saw Cowboys & Aliens in the theater on opening weekend.  And not just because of Harrison Ford and/or Daniel Craig, either.  I've never heard of a premise quite like this one in young adult lit, and I'm unbelievably excited to see what it looks like.  How will the author play with a landscape outside the laws of nature, with an 'infinite sunset?'  Just how terrifying is the alien going to be?  Plagues of fishes and ravenous bears, oh my!  Philip Webb’s Where the Rock Splits the Sky will be released by Chicken House on March 25, 2014.

The moon has been split, and the Visitors have Earth in their alien grip, but Megan just might be able to free the planet--if only she can survive the deadliest desert crossing. 

The world stopped turning long before Megan was born. Ever since the Visitors split the moon and stilled the Earth, infinite sunset is all anyone has known. But now, riding her trusty steed Cisco, accompanied by her posse, Kelly and Luis, Megan ventures out of her Texas hometown and sets off on a journey across the vast, dystopic American West in search of her father. To find him, she must face the Zone. Laws of nature do not apply to the notorious landscape. Flying towns, rivers of dirt, plagues of fishes, ravenous bears: The desert can play deadly tricks on the mind, and the quest will push Megan past her limits. But to solve the mystery of not just her missing father but of the paralyzed planet itself, she must survive it--and a showdown with an alien.

What books are you waiting on?

top ten scariest book covers

Top Ten Tuesday is a meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish, where we all get to exercise our OCD tendencies and come up with bookish lists.  If you’d like to play along, check out this post.

I don’t do horror, either in book or film form.  But.  I have a weird thing about zombies – I’ll try them out.  And if there’s a little bit of humor involved (like in Zombies vs. Unicorns or Zombieland, for example), I’ll make an exception.  Still, I was surprised to see so many books I recognized on the ‘horror’ shelves over at Goodreads.  I guess I’ve been exposed to a lot of creepy books, even if I choose not to read them.  Yikes.

Top Ten Scariest Book Covers

1. The Black Spider by Jeremias Gotthelf, translated by Susan Bernofsky – I saw this cover in a publisher’s promotional email last week and was horrified to imagine that it will exist in hard copy form.  Stuff of nightmares.

2. Tales from Lovecraft Middle School #1: Professor Gargoyle by Charles Gilman – Okay, so it’s not run-away-screaming scary, but it’s pretty freaky.  Not a book I’d ever leave around, lest I scare myself when walking by.

3. Rot & Ruin by Jonathan Maberry – Arresting and alarming.  Also a really great book, but that cover!  Eeek.

4. The House of Dead Maids by Clare B. Dunkle – If you ever want to freak yourself out completely, do a Google image search for ‘black eyed children.’ 

5. Scowler by Daniel Kraus – I feel like I don’t even need to read the book, because I know already that it’d be too scary for me.

6. Execution (Escape from Furnace #5) by Alexander Gordon Smith – My brother loves this series, and while I was happy to give him books 1-3 for Christmas a couple of years ago, this cover gives me pause.  Extremely sinister things seem to be going on.

7. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls by Steve Hockensmith – There’s something spooky about certain small children anyway, and then when you mesh that with zombification…

8. Zom-B by Darren Shan – UGH get it away from me right now!

9. Tales from Lovecraft Middle School #4: Substitute Creature by Charles Gilman – Another entry in the Lovecraft Middle School series (is it cheating to put in two?).  That face is the kind of thing that gives me chills.

10. The Monstrumologist by Rick Yancey – Tell me I am not the only person who thinks that a bit of organic matter in a pickling jar isn’t freaky beyond belief?!  Or maybe I just have an overactive imagination.  Okay, turning away now.

Which one of these book covers is the scariest?