Dairy Daze...and Now Beyond

I haven't been doing too well on saluting or throwing back...ha, that sounds indecent, but anyway, I will keep trying. Here's a salute to my pen-pal Daniela, in the Czech Republic. We have been pen-pals for over 12 years now. I received my first letter from her December 1995. How time flies. For putting up with me for so long she deserves a salute of some sort. We have had fun over the years exchanging stories and info. She and her husband do lots of traveling all over Europe and she writes great stories about their adventures, I travel vicariously through her letters and emails. I know we'd be great friends in person if we'd been neighbors because we both love to garden and hate to dust. We both also tend to have a wry sense of humor in our writing and love to write long letters and emails. So anyway; Daniela, here's a salute to you! Thanks for your friendship; it's meant much to me over the years! I haven't been much of a correspondent lately, but...

Dunno if there is such a thing in blog-land as a Saturday Salute, but it sounded good to me. At any rate I wanted to give credit where credit is due. When I left my job with MCSO in Portland they made me a cookbook of sorts. Everyone submitted a recipe, or several recipes, and they colated them into a binder. I have been working my way through them over the past few years (sorry it is taking so long) and finally have come to one I've wanted to try, but hadn't: Roger's Chocolate Torte Cake. I am sure this is not how it is supposed to look, but I get creative with my interpretations of recipes. Ha. It is laughably easy, though at first to me it sounded hard, and it's really good. I made one in early Dec to take to our annual church potluck. It looked just as good as this one. The funny thing is that I forgot to put the whipped topping into the filling. Husband says: "Well, I guess we are going with an empty plate then." I said: "Nonsense, they won...