ISO poison tester for sprinkles--POSITION FILLED

We had a very nice Thanksgiving around Generous Servings.  Our whole family came into town and we immediately put them to work, as has been our tradition since the first Denver Brinig Thanksgiving three years ago.  One of our sisters is an expert at holiday light installation, so she was in charge of interior and exterior decoration.  The building is looking very festive now.

We also got our family to help make hundreds of cookies, which we decorated in the first of our two Holiday Cookie Decorating Parties this past weekend.  It's always fun to see how people of all ages approach the process of decorating cookies.  In this last class there were two very cute brothers who were about 4 and 6 years old, and they were really intent on tasting all the decorations--more than once.  They ate the frosting directly off the plastic knives we gave them, and they ate the sprinkles by the spoonful.  Here's one of them:

This week I've been working on a new dessert for Après: ginger crème brûlée with cranberry-pear compote.  The flavors are very good, and that's the most important thing, but the most dramatic element of this dessert is the garnish:

That caramel spiral is just about the coolest thing I've ever seen.  It took me a while to work out the kinks in making it--this is what my work area looked like a few days ago:

Smashed between the holidays is an exciting milestone for us: yesterday Generous Servings was three years old!  We always have a public celebration of our anniversary in January at our Cook for a Cause event (this year scheduled for January 30; register now to join us in this fun all-day Cook-a-Thon for charity!), but Jill and I privately observe the actual day by going out to dinner at our favorite Vietnamese restaurant.  This year we might have to order in, since we're adopting a dog this weekend (named Gravy, to be friends with Biscuit), but one way or another, we'll raise a fork to Generous Servings.