Ice Ice, Baby

That's what we've got at the moment. Along with blizzard winds and a forecast involving up to 8 inches of snow. Joy and rapture.

Anyhoo, we've been busy with traveling for the holiday. We came home early because of the storm... so glad we did. We were able to get groceries stocked up yesterday before the rush too!

Michelle asked about the cheesecake recipe I used last week. I had planned to use this recipe from Fischer nuts, but I couldn't find it in my bookmarked links. I made it two Christmases ago and it was awesome, if a little sweeter than it needed to be. What I found this time was this recipe from Taste of Home, which is almost the same as the one from Fischer. Also great, but a tad on the sweet side.

In both cases, I made my own salted caramel sauce starting with this recipe, but using 10 tablespoons of water and a small squeeze of light corn syrup to help prevent the sugar from seizing.

I think I personally prefer the nutmeg that the Fischer recipe uses in the crust. I used Gala apples the first time, per the Fischer recipe, but this time I used Cripps Pink (Pink Lady) apples. I think the Cripps apples retained more crunch through baking, giving you a lovely texture difference in the cheese mixture.

Next time I will be trimming back the amount of sugar in the crust, trying for the Cripps Pink (Pink Lady) apples, remembering to use nutmeg in the crust, and still using the homemade salted caramel sauce.

Now that the recipe bit is out of the way, I've been a busy bee today!

We've said goodbye to an old dresser that was in the guest room and in its place installed two curio cabinets and moved a small bookshelf to that wall.

In a perfect chance of fate, our groomer needed a dresser so she came and picked it up today!

I've got more miniature scenes that I'll be moving out of my studio and into the cabinets soon.

The furniture shuffling continued...

And we we have a huge empty space in the dining room!

Victor bunny will have his house moved into that space to make life easier when taking care of his needs. He won't have to be downstairs in the sewing room anymore. Plus he's unphased by linoleum, so it won't matter that he won't be on the carpet anymore. And it will be easier to keep the area around his house clean too!

I need to get back to finishing up the cleaning aftermath of moving furniture and do more laundry. I'm hoping to not only do some more baking in the next week, but also get the Yule decorations up. We'll see how that goes though.

Stay warm!