May Reads And Recipes
May was actually a slow reading month for me! It was a month full of fun events - my sister in law got her interior design degree, my mom got a puppy, one of my childhood friends got married, and I finished coaching my first season of Girls On The Run!
Even in all the craziness I did get some good reading in. Our book club book for this month was Daisy Goodwin’s Diva. I enjoyed it as historical fiction and I had never heard the story of the opera singer Maria Callas. I listened to the audiobook and one of the things that I loved the most was that it had recordings of her actually singing in some of the chapter breaks. I didn’t love the book overall though and I think maybe it is because the story had so few high points. I knew it was a sad story before I started listening to it but there were very few moments of levity. Even in some of the saddest books I have read, there were still moments of relief from the dark topics. Regardless, I loved hearing a story about a famous woman in history who often gets overshadowed by another woman’s story.
I sometimes have a tendency to resist jumping on the bandwagon of what’s popular at the time but I couldn’t resist binge-watching Amazon Prime’s Off Campus series. I read the books by Elle Kennedy for the first time a couple of years ago and I was excited and apprehensive as to how it would turn out! I think they crushed it. I have seen some really funny and relevant articles about how millennial women are obsessed. Since the show came out I naturally had to reread a couple of the books and The Score was one of them. Dean and Allie are two of my favorite characters so I love how they started to set up that relationship. I am also completely in love with Khobe Clarke’s portrayal of Beau Maxwell….. If you know, you know, and I can’t say anything else.
I reread Frank Herbert’s Dune for a super fun project I’m doing with a friend (stay tuned!) and that was super interesting. Most of my friends read it in middle or high school but I didn’t read it for the first time until I was in my master’s program. It was as weird as I remember! I am not always a huge fan of science fiction and it definitely takes some getting used to. Overall I thought it was a fun read. I often notice new things when I reread a book, whether it’s for the second, the ninth, or the umpteenth time. This really stood out to me about Dune. There is so much detail, some of which gave me a lot of questions! I haven’t read the other books in the series so I’m excited to explore some of those in the future.
I haven’t finished it yet but I’m in the middle of Merijn van de Laar’s How To Sleep Like A Caveman. I have a tendency to nerd out hard about certain non-fiction books and this one is no different. Archaeologists have found evidence that cavemen slept on beds of leaves that we now know repel bugs. That is so crazy and so cool! There is also information about how modern technology has an impact on our sleep. Van de Laar writes that you’re better off having a tv in your room than scrolling on your phone. And one of the worst things you can do is have a clock in your bedroom. My grandma was not excited or pleased to hear this fact! Van de Laar examines a lot of studies and it’s fascinating how much contradictory information and results have come from studying sleep. Part of it is just that there are so many different factors that can have an impact.
Hopefully I can give you a good recap of June when July hits. The reading has been off to a good start with continuing How To Sleep Like A Caveman and finishing Beatriz Williams’ Along The Infinite Sea.
The May recipes were so good! I made The Cake Blog’s Classic Yellow Cake With Fudge Frosting (https://thecakeblog.com/category/cakes/page/3) which is always a big hit. One of our family friends says it’s the best cake in the whole world! I busted out some of my classic chocolate chip cookies to donate to a local women's shelter. And I made the Duncan Hines Butter Golden cake mix into cupcakes for one of my friend’s last days at Starbucks. Let me just tell you, there is nothing wrong with a box cake mix and this one hits the spot every time. My not so secret trick is that I use eight tablespoons of butter instead of seven. The sticks of butter I use are eight tablespoons and I’m not going to have just one tablespoon left over!
I almost forgot the Pantone cookies! As I said, my sister in law graduated with her degree in interior design and my mom, sister, and I made cookies decorated like the Pantone color swatches. Check them out below! We made our family’s classic sugar cookie recipe that we’ve used for as long as I can remember. We brought the cookies all the way from North Carolina to Colorado! Thank goodness they’re better the next day when the frosting has soaked into the cookies a little bit!
