love of my life, babka of my heart

About once a year, Elie makes babka. It's his mother's recipe and it kicks butt. The babka is just sweet enough and great with coffee. It's a whole wheat-ish yeast dough made with a good bit of buckwheat honey. The dough is rolled out and spread with cocoa powder, butter, sugar, walnuts, and some raisins. Then it's rolled up, given a crumb top, and baked. It comes out good and dense.

This year he used our terracotta bread pan. We don't use it often, but when we do I am pleasantly surprised by how well it works. FYI.

Here's something else deliciously good: Cupcakes of Catan! Do you play Settlers of Catan? You should! It's a fun game, a board game in the role playing style, but without the extreme dorkiness or commitment. Everyone in Elie's lab and a few of the programmers I work with like to play it. (Really, scientists and programmers like it and you say it's not dorky? Whatever-so much fun!) Anyway, someone on flickr has made an all-cupcake version of the game--Cupcakes of Catan. So cool.