A baking kick has ravaged my kitchen. I've done cookies and cheesecakes, tortillas and breads, all to my boyfriend's delight. And with all this baking, it's starting to feel like recipes make sense. Rather than aimlessly scooping cups of flour and teaspoons of baking powder, I understand why each of those ingredients is added. Perhaps that's something I should have understood much earlier in life, but it's truly been my enlightenment. With that being said, I'm posting this recipe because I've gotten a bit more comfortable with a batter and a dough and have adjusted a conglomerate of lemon cookie, sugar cookie, and brown sugar cookie recipes found on Pinterest to my liking, creating this recipe.

These cookies take minutes to make and yield over twenty cookies depending on how big you make them. Just eight ingredients and ten minutes in the oven.

You will need:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

In a large mixing bowl, combine the butter and both sugars until completely smooth and creamy. I hadn't softened my butter for long enough, so I set the mixture in the microwave for a few seconds and nearly melted the butter, but I still very much liked the texture.

Add the eggs and lemon juice to the creamed butter and sugars and mix.

Sift the flour, baking soda, and salt into the wet ingredients and mix thoroughly. The dough should be sticky and doesn't need more flour.

Form heaping spoonfuls of dough into balls two inches apart on two non-stick baking sheets. Bake for 9 to 10 minutes without letting the edges brown.

Let cookies cool for five minutes and enjoy!

Sprinkle brown sugar or lemon zest for a subtle decoration.

For a tangier cookie, try 2 or 2 1/2 teaspoons of lemon juice. And for the freshest lemon juice, I squeezed the juice from a lemon myself.

For a more buttery, dense cookie, try adding another half stick of butter.

Shady spots on long walks; bright ideas in cool breezes. 

Wrinkled sheets and iced coffee.

Maps open wide.

For those courageous enough to spend this time alone with thoughts and reflections & for those surrounded by loved ones with comfort and hope.

Here is a playlist for whether you find yourself on a walk far from home or stuck between the layers of your bedding. Whether you listen to this with your hand out a window and wind on your skin or with flour in your hair and cookies in the oven, I trust you've found a way to smile.

For more mood playlists, find me on Spotify.

Stars: ☆☆☆☆☆

Publication date: August 13, 2019

Historical fiction has quickly become one of my favorite genres over the past year. With Outlander, Alex & Eliza, and All the Light We Cannot See, I was hungry for another story set in a time long ago. When my boyfriend's grandmother initially told me about The Winemaker's Wife, I wasn't certain how interested I would be or what the writing would be like but upon my next visit, she handed me the book and I couldn't refuse the very sweet gesture. Now, I'm secretly aching to talk about it with her.

It'll be difficult to discuss my favorite aspect of the book without giving away any spoilers, but I will say that the use of the three perspectives and the choice of those perspectives was pure art. The story, like any great tale, weaves together several relationships that at first appear to have nothing to do with the next. But the closer their relationships become with one another, the further their divide becomes.

Something that cannot go unmentioned is Harmel's attention to detail and obvious strenuous research. There is not a historical stone left unturned. The French language and the war history is immersive--I learned what makes a good wine as well as what makes a good resistor. And with her vivid diction, I hardly realized I wasn't in Champagne hiding wine in the cellars.

The story was highly unpredictable in the best way. While a twist such as what is adopted in the end of this story would seem like an unprecedented curveball in any other novel, when I reflected on the path to get to that twist, I realized it couldn't have been any other way. Each turn is tight and clearly aligns with the sequence of events, but none are obvious to the entranced reader.

The Winemaker's Wife is a heartbreaking look into the French winemakers of World War II. The story of Ines, Celine, and Liv was truly one to be told.

Besides Ned Stark, the kindest soul this side of the wall, there is hardly a character in George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones that I liked at all points of the series. Part of that comes from the brevity of his character within the series, but I like to believe that it's because he has the purest conscience. 

The angelic aura of Ned Stark is amplified by the actions of every other character in the series. In a series of gruesome, power-hungry, unstable characters, there is one light that burns brighter in the darkness of everyone else. If there is one character that should be highlighted among the rest for their innocence or their kindness, they should be placed in a world of heathens and blood-shed. Think of Rue in The Hunger Games, encircled in a bed of flowers.

In contrast, main characters are best served messily. No reader will relate to a character who makes no mistakes, and no reader will be entertained by a character who does only good. I stand by the belief that, for a fantasy series that follows any exceptional length of time, almost every character in that series should pass through a phase of ultimate unlikeability. They may become the village drunk or become a child-king and reap the benefits of his privilege. Afterall, the villainry and the misfortunes are what drive a series. No one reads a story through to the end for the sake of a really kind character.

A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas, without giving away any spoilers, isn't a renowned fan-favorite, but one thing any reader of the series can agree on is that first we hate the High Lord of the Night court, then we hate the High Lord of the Spring court. You can't learn to love the former without first loving the latter. Perhaps the reason we learn to love one and truly despise the other is that those emotions grew out of a feeling that so incredibly contrasted what preceded it. Demonstrating a change in character can be as simple as portraying the character first in a golden light then extinguishing it and vice versa.

I say this for fantasy series especially because in most of these series, the author is crafting their own world with its own rules and its own ways of life. In a contemporary romance, it is believable that the average character is generally good. I'm not reading Eleanor and Park expecting one of the characters to be a nasty, dirty liar and a homicide hobbyist. While that may be a suspenseful, though disturbing, twist, it's not plausible for the setting. In a world set in a medieval age or any brute-force-trumps-all era, it's almost expected.

I always held my characters in that sweet, golden light and never dared to take it away. When I finally decided to create a character who is quite literally a homicide hobbyist (yeah, I'm proud of my alliteration there), I was stunned by how much more exciting the story was even just for me to write. It made me want to go back into the story and weave a more complex web of brutal characters who better represent the result of their brutal world.

Historical fiction and period pieces always have a certain magic to them. Playing with the past offers a sense of endless creation, and it makes the real world feel smaller but so much brighter. That said, I requested The Woman in the Painting by Kerry Postle from NetGalley with the expectation of being sent back to 1500s Rome where I could feel the strike of Raphael's paintbrush, smell the market streets, taste the fresh herbal breads. Following Pietro, a young artist apprentice trying to please his father, I expected this book to be so much more colorful and vivid. But very little of the story dealt with him specifically, despite it being told from his first-person perspective.

I have very low expectations for historical realness given how much I adore the genre. As long as there's era-appropriate clothing, slight speech differences, and a carriage or two, I'm pleased. However, I didn't feel transported back to 1500s Rome, and that's my main difficulty with this book. Artists see life differently than the average person or character, so the world should look as contrasted, vivid, and colorful as that character would see it. The story should be told from the tip of a paintbrush, but it was clearly told from the tip of a pen. And 1500s Rome was a society booming with color and life, both good and bad but all-around intriguing. There were so many opportunities for the setting to be really shown, but I instead believe that this story could have taken place in any time period if it didn't feature 16th-century artists.

Along similar lines, the characters and their dialogue didn't feel era-specific. I don't expect true dialogue of the 1500s because not only would that be boring and hard to read, but it would take away from the story. But a lack of any semblance of this being a period piece as seen from the modern language also takes away from me believing this story.

Combining modern-feeling characters with their unpainted emotions created a deep rift between me and them. I knew what all the characters felt, for the most part, but I couldn't feel with them or understand them. I don't understand Pietro's pain after Luca, I don't understand Pietro's undying jealousy, and I don't believe he truly felt how he did toward Raphael. I can't feel the swelling love and crippling heartache that is written in this story. The descriptions and unraveling of their emotions and thoughts never pierced the surface level of what could have run much deeper into the story. 

Given Pietro's place in the story, as the sole narrator with a first-person perspective, he should have had more to do with the plot, which can essentially boil down to a Romeo and Juliet trope. He is placed in the story only to feel the actions of the other characters, and I'm left wondering why he was chosen as the narrator. Pietro isn't even mentioned in the book's blurb despite him being the central character. He feels like a Nick in The Great Gatsby, the outsider looking in, but he lacks the power and the plot center that Nick was. The story could have easily been told from a different perspective and the plot wouldn't have changed. Touching back on his purpose as 'the feeler,' his main emotion is jealousy, and he feels it for most characters in the story. Overwhelming at times, I wish he had grown from his jealousy more as so many years had passed since we first meet him. In the beginning, especially, his jealousy made me slightly uncomfortable because of how young he was and how quickly sexual his first love interest was. But that leans into the pacing being slightly off as the chapters were chopped into such small segments that things just seemed to happen without reason or introduction.

This story was unpredictable only because there wasn't time to connect the events given the brevity of the chapters and their segments and the glimpses of the true story that are told.

I do admit that I truly wanted to enjoy this book because the idea of 16th-century artists and impassioned love sounded enchanting. The plot, overall, was also interesting in how it progressed; I only wish the chapters offered more time to feel the plot and live in it.