In my junior high French class, I had the most wonderful teacher, Mademoiselle Wilson (I think her name is Lisa Zilch now). She is one of the reasons I wanted to be a teacher; she was probably one of my most favorite teachers in the entire world. During Christmas time, to show how the holiday is mostly traditionally celebrated in France, we would do parties and bring traditional food like quiche, crepes, and Buche de Noels (Yule Log cakes).

My mother has been purging the house of most of my stuff now and sending it to me, and sent me a French Christmas packet with the recipe a couple of months ago. I was wondering what to do with it until the other day, some of Jared’s work friends decided to put together a potluck for tomorrow night. I decided to be adventurous and here’s how it went down:

First you make the cake part. It’s a sponge cake baked in a jelly roll pan really flat. Then you roll it in a towel to cool, then unroll it, frost it, then roll it up again:

Then I set to work on the Meringue Mushrooms. Apparently, they are traditional. And since I’m all about doing a traditional French recipe from scratch, I made the candy mushrooms (NOT REAL MUSHROOMS!!!):

While those baked for 40 minutes, I cuddled with Stevie, who felt very neglected, and then frosted the cake part of the “log.”:

Looking pretty log-y! However I was getting pretty tired, so I cheated and just did normal frosting- it still tasted pretty good when I licked my fingers at the end ;):

Then, the mushrooms were out of the oven, so I put the pieces together, dusted the tops with cocoa (it looked pretty!), and stuck them to the cake. Then I dusted the cake with a thin layer of “snow” (powdered sugar):

Voila! There you have it. I wish I had something pretty and green to garnish it with… but this will have to do for now. Not too bad for a first try… hopefully the people at the party will enjoy it!

Har-har.

Two posts in two days! It’s only because I am not feeling well. 🙂 Jared was teasing me yesterday because I had already read so much. He called his mom to chat and told her that I was on my fourth book and had read over a thousand pages and I had only been on break 2 days, and I started to deny it. Then I thought about it and realized that I really couldn’t. lol… I have been doing some binge-comfort reading!

Anyways, Jared and I decided that we would try to budget gifts this year and be more thoughtful and craft-y. I think being crafty is a gene that I didn’t inherit, so I really have to try extra hard to get this sort of thing right, but in the end, I think they sort of look pretty good. These are cookies in a jar!

Then I found cute fabric and ribbons and scissors and tada:

Not too bad, eh? Hopefully they end up tasting pretty good. 🙂 All the dry ingredients for your cookies!

Time is flying by. The first part of the year seemed to creep by, when I wasn’t sure what I was doing and I was just so overwhelmed with all my responsibilities. But from Thanksgiving to now has just flown by and I barely had time to get everything done! I’m just crossing my fingers that everyone gets their Christmas cards in time.

Things at the school are changing dramatically. A couple of key people are leaving after the break (including the 7th grade counselor and the 8th grade assistant principal who set in place most of the structured rules), and I think it will slowly change the dynamics of the school drastically. I’m not sure what to expect. There are a lot of problems and a lot of people are feeling really unhappy and unsettled right now, so it will be interesting to see how things play out.

As for the kids, they are interesting. Somebody asked me the other week how I liked 7th grade. Honestly, I like it better than I thought was possible because most of the kids are extremely intelligent. About half the kids are amazingly mature for their age as well, which makes it tolerable. They surprise me with their insights and ability to rationalize and debate. It’s that other slightly smaller half of immature kids that makes it hard to cope. I do like all my students though, and try hard to find ways to compliment them and put them up during this difficult time in their life. Lets face it…. middle school/junior high is the armpit of society.

This past week had some downs with my health. I went to the doctor again on Monday, and we think we have some additional progress. With the medication however, it’s might make me a little sicker before it makes me better. blech. So when I took this particular addition to my meds, the side affects were some anxiety, 3 hours of sleep, and nausea for nearly 2 days straight. lol. I cut back on that particular dose and I think it’s a little better that way, but that definitely was an adventure to go to school to teach the kids feeling like that!

Anyways… I think I am going to relax and read a little like I am suppose to do on break before I let myself do more preparations for Christmas or grading for school!