Did you guys see this yet? I don’t get too excited over press (no, don’t take this the wrong way. It’s always a thrill to see your name in print, but when it comes to translating to direct sales, press isn’t what it used to be), but I have to admit I was really excited when I saw how our Valentine collaboration with West Elm turned out! It’s SO fun. And they did such a terrific job styling the 3 recipes we gave them: a cardamom spiced hot chocolate with orange whipped cream, star anise panna cotta with ginger poached pears, and a meyer lemon cake with blueberry lavender sauce. I LOVE it, so be sure to check it out.

Also in biz news, we have more new retailers who will be carrying our products. This Wednesday we’ll be delivering to Foragers Market in Dumbo and The Plaza Food Hall by Todd English, inside the Concourse level of The Plaza Hotel (yes, *the* Plaza Hotel).

Our marshmallows are also on the shelves at the just opened Haven’s Kitchen, a specialty food shop and cooking school, on 17th Street in Manhattan. Don’t forget we’re also at Gourmet Guild over at 110 Broadway in Williamsburg – all locally sourced products.
 
I think that about covers it, whew!

I thought I would have to work right on December 26th on a new project, but in fact I didn’t end up working the entire week. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t do much at all.
 
I went to sleep very late almost every night (3am!) but slept in till 9 or 10pm. The girls did not wake me up.
 

The Wall Street Journal picked up a story about our calendars online and in print over the weekend and I sold a bunch of calendars.
 
I finally bit the bullet and bought a new and bigger dining room table and chairs that I’ve been wanting to buy for the past 3 years. Sure, the table ended up being backordered, but after 3 years, what’s another 5 weeks?
 
I went and bought our plane tickets to our annual August Seattle trip because I found a good deal. I bought trip insurance for the first time because geez, that is more than half a year away.
 
TOY PURGE!
 
The weather stayed mild and sunny and it was a pleasure to walk around Central Park and climb big rocks and watch ice skaters at Wollman Rink (even though it’s now TRUMP Wollman Rink – when did this happen, have I been living under a rock) and watch tourists snap all sorts of pictures of themselves in front of…trees.
 
Despite swearing we’ll never go to midtown during the month of December if we can avoid it, we found ourselves doing just that very thing because we forget that it’s special kind of hell reserved only for the holidays, but this year, not only do we survive the crowds and walking against a wall of people coming at you down Fifth avenue, it’s bearable because of the nice weather.
 
Continuing on with the “why are we doing this” line of holiday activities, we ducked into Trump Towers (what) for a little ice cream break in the cafe. Sure, Claudine had a mini tantrum when she realized that what she really wanted was lime sorbet and not coconut (grrr), but other than that, it was almost pleasant to sit there, stare at the Christmas tree and listen to holiday music even though I was asking myself “why are we here” pretty much the whole time.
 
The tree at Rockefeller Center, which in past years has always been a bit of a let down when we go see it in person, looked more enchanting this year. Maybe because as we were walking away towards the Subway Station the tree started *twinkling*.
 
By the way, doesn’t Claudine look fancy in her shiny new silver coat? She looks like a little lady.
 
Happy new year.

Oh, December…you are here. And we are in the throes of Holiday!Cookie!Madness! for our 4th year. Thousands of cookies will be baked per day, hundreds of bows will be tied (have you ever had to tie 200 little ribbons? It always takes longer than you think. 4-5 hours to tie 200 ribbons, for real – and by the 50th ribbon, your fingers forget what to do. I have looked up “how to tie a ribbon” videos on youtube, true fact), paper will be trimmed, folded and stacked for wrapping, and hundreds of packages will be made and stamped. It’s true, every Fall fills us with a little bit of dread as we head into 16 hr work days until the Christmas holiday, but at this point in our 4th year of business, we know what to expect and how much we can handle so we can minimize the crazy at least just a little bit.
 
This year we’re lucky to have a little more help than the past 3 years as two of Mark’s old pastry staff from his restaurant days are coming in 2 days per week on their days off all month to help him bake those thousands of cookies (although Mark can and does bake up to 2000 cookies himself and I still don’t understand how that’s humanly possible, I really don’t). Hopefully that means that we can extend our ordering deadlines by a few days and not turn away some of the larger orders that we sometimes need to in order to maintain our sanity.
 
And the holiday fairs! The season is here and we’re kicking it off by participating in the West Elm/Etsy Handmade Holiday Fair tonight at the West Elm Dumbo store in Brooklyn from 6-9pm.
 
Next weekend, Dec 10 & 11, the Bust Magazine Holiday Craftacular expands to 2 days with a new location in Soho, and we’ll be back at the Brooklyn Flea One Hanson for 5 dates starting December 16th. We’ll have calendars, prints and tea towels available at all 3 events (and thanks to Epicurious for featuring our calendar in their gift guide)
 
The holidays wheeeeeeeeee……zzzzzzzzzzzz

Mark’s the kind of guy who randomly finds himself on TV (by comparison, I have never been on TV and I’ve lived in NYC most of my life). Within 3 months of moving here way back in the 90s, he was randomly videotaped by a news crew coming out the doors of the train, and one day he saw himself on a news story about subways. That clip got a lot of mileage because he saw that same clip on other Subway stories a few more times. During his time as a Pastry Chef, he did some cooking demos for news shows – you know, where you see a chef on TV cook a dish in under 3 minutes for the “lifestyle” segment or whatever. And then of course, there have been some other brief sightings for the few times our business has been featured on TV.

On tuesday night we tuned into the Cooking Channel’s United Tastes of America’s show about cookies not really knowing what kind of footage we’d see. Well, rather than the usual 30 second mention, they showed the host chatting with Mark at the Brooklyn Flea for quite a few minutes about the Massaman Curry Peanut Butter Sandwiches and the Chocolate Chili Cashew Biscotti. The clip was long enough for me to go get my camera and snap like a million screenshots. Of course Mark and I sort of watched with eyes half closed. You ever watch or hear yourself speaking? It’s nervewracking!!

So we’re doing a Fall sale on our Etsy store. You can use code FALLSALE to get 15% off your entire order. [edit: The Sale is now over. Thanks everyone!]

And lastly, I was interviewed on Donny Tsang’s Great Food Photos. Go check out the site and read about other great food photographers. This interview was particularly fun because for once, it wasn’t about cookies or parenting!

Oh, did you think we were done with vacation photos? I have a few more posts lined up, if you don’t mind. Nothing much is going on back here in NY anyway except I’m still trying to get my bearings on jumping back into the swing of things. Summer is most definitely here, though.

So…these crazy colored houses. During our stay we joked that the house we were renting was like an M.C. Escher house because the house was all stairwells in the back and front off the exterior porches on every level. The kids would run down one side of the house and disappear and I’d have no idea which end of the house they’d end up in, and I’d go down one staircase and end up in a place I wasn’t expecting. I’m not used to multi-level living like this, but we all did get a workout going up and down 3 flight of stairs all day long.

PS. thanks friends, for alerting me to the Australian Sunday paper write up we were in. I got a scanned copy and it’s quite possibly the greatest piece of press we have every gotten. Not really sure whose life they’re talking about, but I want it.

We try and bring a new summer drink to the Brooklyn Flea every summer. Our first year we made Watermelon Shiso Lime Coolers. We alternated that drink our second year with our Passionfruit Mint Limeade, which we sold as our summer drink exclusively last year (and which we made mojitos with all summer long if Mark brought back any leftovers). This year we’ll bring those back since they were wildly popular, but we concocted a new drink that I really like: Hibiscus Lemongrass Lemonade. It’s got a splash of lime and ginger.

We’re bringing that along with other goodies (have I mentioned our Massamam Spice Peanut Butter Sandwiches that we’ve been bringing to the Flea? No? More on that later) to the opening day of the Brooklyn Flea Smorgasburg in Williamsburg this Saturday. Somorgasburg? What’s that? It’s the first all food flea market in NYC (maybe the country? Who knows!). You can read about it in this NY Times article if you non-subscribers haven’t reached your paywall (on a total tangent, the geeks on our NYU ITP listserv, my grad school, are all sharing ways in which they’ve successfully found a workaround with the paywall). A full list of vendors is in the Times here (oh hi, our company name and link is in the NY Times).

It’s really amazing how far the Flea has come since it’s inaugural year in 2008. It’s spawned a renewed interest in flea markets which have been cropping up everywhere in the city, worldwide press as a premiere NYC shopping and food destination, and it’s even changing the food scene here in NY. We’ve been a part of the Flea since day 1, our official business anniversary date, and we’re happy to continue along for the ride wherever the Flea takes us.

This photo is one of the outtakes (and rejects) from this same photoshoot, which was used again in this feature from Momfilter, a new website from the former Editor-in-Chief and the Travel Editor of Cookie Magazine. They’re both moms in the neighborhood. Speaking of moms, I was also selected as one of Babble’s Top 100 Mom Food blogs. I’m honored to be nominated obviously, but as I don’t really think of this site as a food blog – not in the sense of some of the other blogs on the list – I was a little surprised (I’m #84, a fine number, and what is this point system? Are we competing for something? I don’t get it).

Anyway. This week has been extraordinary. It’s amazing what can happen in a span of 4 days. It started really low, just a string of kick me down events, but ended on some really high notes. I acquired a new design client, and remember that client project I really really wanted from a few months back? I’ll tell you who it is in appropriate time, but we got it.

yay me. Happy weekend to you (and what was all that noise about me wanting to take on less work this year ’cause of burnout? oh riiiiight…)

This photo might be my favorite of me and the girls. You may have seen it on Apartment Therapy’s OhDeeDoh yesterday (oh hi, new readers) and you may see it again in another yet to be published interview. We took them last Fall specifically for these features because, well, there just aren’t that many of me and the girls. Sometimes it takes 50 shots before you get one that captures that special something and I think this one nailed it (you can see a few outtakes below). Mia’s expression is so perfect – it’s so her, and I love Claudine’s dreamy face looking out the window.

So with me usually behind the camera, it’s up to Mark to take these rare photos of us. It’s not that he can’t take a good photo, but sometimes I’ll hand over the camera, we’ll take some pictures, I’ll go through the shots and…they’re all blurry. Or blown out. “How are they all so blurry?”, I say, “It’s autofocus!”. So there’s usually a lot of post production Photoshop work when Mark takes a picture, but whatever. Sometimes it not about perfect lighting or the perfect exposure or the sharpness of a photo. The most compelling photos are ones that make you feel something and when I look at that photo I just want to go give bear hugs to those girls. And maybe pinch those cheeks.

Speaking of photos and image quality, I’ve been agonizing and going back and forth about upgrading my camera to a better, but more expensive model for the past couple of months (and getting another lens too). I started taking better pictures when I bought this camera, my first DSLR, but now that I’ve been shooting with it for 2 years, I see the limitations and it’s been frustrating. I haven’t been able to pull the trigger though. I’m not a pro photographer and it’s hard to justify spending that much money on a camera (but write offs! I need tax write offs for 2011!! But OMG, it’s soooo expensive) We’ll see. Mark is the enabler of the family, however, and he’ll tell me to buy just about anything even though he doesn’t spend any money himself (seriously, dude does not buy anything at all). I’m sort of split on the money spending. I can horde money and be afraid to spend it (because see? Our health insurance premiums!), but I can definitely spend (damn you, those stupid JCrew 30% off sale emails that land in my inbox).

But I have to say, I do like Mark’s philosophy: “Sometimes people should buy the things they want, not just the things they need”.

um. ok.

You may have heard that I’m guest blogging over at Real Simple (and if you haven’t already been over there, swing on by to find out what my first “real” job was. Trust me, it’s good). The magazine is opening up their first Pop-up shop in Rockefeller Center from December 1st to the 6th and I’ll be popping in and out to report on the happenings at the shop.

We’ve been doing lots of other press stuff too. Look for us at Apartment Therapy’s The Kitchn this week with a recipe (we’re here!) and a few other places.

And the whole holiday craziness? Not quite feeling it yet, but we will as soon as we are done with Thanksgiving. Ours is usually low-key because that’s when we rest up before Holiday!Cookie!Madness! hits. Can’t believe we’re about to head into it again. Where did the year go?

I have to admit. When the blog was down for a week, there was a tiny part of me that was relieved, only because we were having the most busiest week and I was dreading dealing with the feeling of “neglect-a-blog”. I haven’t even been taking any photos lately.

Mark and I have been working like crazy. Mother’s Day season is upon us and we’ve been getting orders through the site like crazy due to coverage in this month’s issue of Real Simple magazine. It feels like Christmas all over again.

I’m continuing with ad agency freelance work and I don’t hate it which still continues to surprise me despite the crazy deadlines and the fact that I moved over to the “dark side”. I go into the office a few times a week for meetings and I guess it’s still sort of novel because I start humming the theme to The Office whenever I enter the building, walk past security and ride the elevator up to the 8th floor. In a month, however, I’m going back to more art world and educational institution work to balance out my part in helping hawk consumer products to the public.

We’re having a day of rest here in the suburbs before another busy week ahead of us. And guess what you guys? We may no longer be the last family we know with a mammoth, old school tube TV. We rented out our apartment for a photoshoot for a day and a half after being approached by a publishing company to use our place as a backdrop for a book and we took that money to buy a new flat screen 40 inch TV. Hooray! We’re not really TV junkies, but we’ve never bought a TV before and I’m irrationally excited about having a new TV in the house. Just in time for the series finale of LOST!

(ps. some of you have been having issues viewing the site and with rss. You might want to clear your cache and then try again. Thanks for letting me know.)