Live life ✔, Write ✔

I love to bake.  It might be partly my personality, but I think it’s also safe to suggest that my love for baking is - mostly - directly tied to my love for eating.  Specifically for eating baked goods.   I enjoy baking all sorts of things: muffins, cakes and cupcakes, brownies and bars, quick-breads… but cookies are at the top of the list.  I’m not sure that I have a favorite kind of cookie; chocolate chip and glazed lemon would be battling it out for the #1 spot, I think.   One of the things that I like about baking is the consistency you can achieve.  My cookies come out just the way I want them to with my favorite recipe, as long as I follow it.  Each cookie has the same amount of butter, flour and sugar.  Each contains an acceptable number of chocolate chips, or has the perfect layer of icing.  Once they’re cooled and lined up on a plate they can be hard to choose from, because they are all delicious and they are all, basi...

The Verdict: Charleston is WAY cooler when you’re 40 and traveling there with your husband (who spoils you rotten) than when you’re a 10-year-old girl scout just passing through.   Not that I didn’t like that trip; I did.  But I LOVED this trip! For one, my hair was much better.  Even on the “bad-hair-days”.   Second, we flew this time, and got down there in just over an hour, rather than driving for a full day.  We also stayed for three times as long. And finally, we were the ones in control of the non-existent itinerary, and could do whatever we wanted.  Which included getting dessert before dinner on the very first night we arrived.  This gelato…  🤤 But I’m getting ahead of myself.  One of the very first things we noticed, while walking around the French Quarter waiting for our check in time, was that female visitors to Charleston all seem to be required to wear summer-y dresses and large, floppy sun hats.  I had brought ...