Names and Pecans

Maybe it is just me but I have this habit to tend to name people. Depending on some characteristics I see on them, physical or personal, I associate people with a celebrity or a movie character and I tend to stick to that name. At least that’s what I do in my head. Some of these are not very flattering.

I can’t say too much about it, since these are real people I work with. However, close to my team we have Gimli. That’s the dwarf from ‘Lord of the Rings’. He’s short, central European and somewhat round with a beard. The only thing missing is an axe and a helm. There’s also Cruella Deville. She’s tall, very thin with pointy skeletal face. She tends to wears somewhat extravagant colourful dresses. She even acts like the queen bee. I can totally see flowers dying when she walks past them. In addition, I’ve spotted Moby, Thor and Will.I.Am. Especially Thor looks amazing. Every time I see him I remember the ‘Adventures in babysitting’.

Thankfully, I can remember their regular names as well. I only hope I don’t call them wrongly. It will not go down very well.

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Since I am a bit all over the place recently, I’m jumping to a very different matter. I tried to bake yesterday. I like cooking and I love baking. I even watch a baking program on the television, like every sixty year old woman that respects herself does. Normally I only do savoury things like pies or quiches. I don’t have a sweet tooth. However, JJ does. He can eat in one go a full ice cream bucket. I might have ice cream in the freezer and it can stay there for weeks. Anyway, he was working last Sunday for a quite a few hours and I wanted to lift his spirit.

So, I googled a cookie recipe. I found something that looked easy, a chocolate and pecan cookie recipe. I bought the ingredients and I started the baking process. From the beginning I saw that it wasn’t going well. When, I tried to melt the chocolate in the microwave, I slightly overdid it and I burnt it. Then, I wanted to mix that with sugar, vanilla extract, butter and an egg before adding flour and soda. I didn’t have a mixer and I started by hand. It wasn’t that easy to do and I also should have left the melted chocolate to cool a little longer.

The final mixed ‘product’ didn’t look that amazing but I hoped it tasted good. At least it smelled chocolaty. I tried to separate it by creating 12 cookies in two trays. I baked them for 12 minutes and I tried to rearrange the trays in the oven so that they are evenly baked. Ha… I wished…

All cookies in both trays merged together. Instead of 12 cookies, I got 2 big ones. I assume my trays weren’t big enough and I couldn’t separate them that much. The single cookie in one tray was a bit overdone as well. The picture I’ve uploaded is from the bunch that looked better.

I did separate the 6 cookies of the good bunch and I took them to JJ. He was very happy about them and polite enough to say they were amazing. Next time I’ll try first buying a mixer. I’m now thinking of starting baking my own bread. If only for the smell of baking bread which I simply love.