Monday, December 14, 2009

Yummy

Clare's Black & White Squares
A delicious holiday treat

Grease 8 x 8 pan
Preheat oven to 325 F

Cream:
1/3 C butter
1 C white sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla

Add:
3/4 C flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt


Divide mixture, adding 2 tbs cocoa to one half and 1/2 C cocoanut (I use medium shred) to the other.

Spread the chocolate base over the pan and top with the coconut. Bake for 30 to 40 (you know your own oven) minutes. Cool. Frost with your favourite chococlate frosting. Yummy!


AKA "Burke's Law Treats" because they're black & white and full of flakes.

Gene Barry
1919 - 2009

The recently departed Gene Barry, Tony nominated (La Cage Aux Folles) actor and singer, sci-fi hero (The War of the Worlds) and debonair television crimefighter (Bat Masterson, Burke's Law, The Name of the Game) also qualifies under today's title of "Yummy".


Saturday, December 12, 2009

Daddy


William Daniel Nolan
February 19, 1928 - December 12, 1986


The Middle

When I remember bygone days

I think how evening follows morn;

So many I loved were not yet dead,

So many I love were not yet born.


- Ogden Nash


Thursday, December 10, 2009

Some thoughts of the Season - blogathon season


It's been over a week now, but I'm having trouble letting go of the Boris Karloff blogathon. Everything around me is all Boris, all the time.

It being thet time of year that it is, I got to thinking of what a wonderful Ebenezer Scrooge Karloff would have been. Seymour Hicks? Alastair Sim? Ha! Yes, I said "ha!" (and with an exclamation mark).

Boris could give us quite the cold and forbidding man of finance. Boy, could he give us cold and forbidding. And could he give us the warm and fuzzy old Scrooge of the reclamation? There would be no one warmer or fuzzier! However, Karloff could also be a perfect Marley's ghost. After all, we have seen him come back from the dead and fix us with a baleful stare. Oooh, that baleful stare. On the other hand, he could give us a most genial Ghost of Christmas Present. Karloff as everybody in A Christmas Carol! I believe Tiny Tim was not outside his talents.




This time of year is also a prime time for mysteries, particular mysteries shrouded in fog and set in Victorian England. Karloff as Holmes? Well, at the time he might have been considered for the screen the role was most felicitously taken over by Basil Rathbone and no matter how many Holmes there have been or will be, it is Rathbone's voice I hear when I read Conan Doyle or any of the countless pastiches and homages.

However, if Boris wearied of touring in Arsenic and Old Lace, surely a revival of William Gillette's Holmes would have proven popular. If not tackling S. Holmes, then perhaps Boris as a most diabolical Moriarty or Col. Sebastian Moran might have been fun.

Happy thoughts in the alternate casting line perhaps fueled by too much or too little Christmas cheer.










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