Thoughts on love . . .

"Love is a fruit in season at all times, and within the reach of every hand."
~Mother Teresa

All acts of love that are sent towards us directly, help to enhance our lives, and are very important to our own well being. I like to take whatever love gets sent my way, and hang on to it. I'm not really all that particular about how much of it there is, in fact, the more . . . the better!

The wonderful thing about love is that it cloaks itself in the most surprising and spontaneous encounters. Encounters such as a stranger who might stop to help us pick up some packages we have dropped, or the cashier at the grocery store that takes the time to be pleasant and attentive when you go through her station. Genuine and honest gestures like this are always welcomed with open arms, mainly for the simple reason that they are offered with a selfless motivation, and with no expectation of anything in return.



It's very human to want the love that enriches a life through a special relationship. In fact we are born craving love. Experiments have been done in which babies have been denied that very thing (I cannot imagine such cruelty, but there you go) and the result was found to be that the babies that were denied love failed to thrive, whilst the babies that were nurtured and loved did a whole lot better!

A wonderful thing about love is that we never need be particular where it comes from. The important thing is that we take the time to acknowledge when another human being momentarily enriches our life with the touch of love . . . a simple thank you in return, a warm smile . . . a prayer offered up above for His watching over even our most basic of needs . . .

Little things mean a lot!



I participated in Susan's baking challenge again this week. This week we had the choice between two recipes . . . a lovely looking Brioche bread, and Cream Puffs. (Or profiteroles as they are called over here) I chose to do the Brioche, and because I was running rather short on time, I decided to do it in my Bread Machine. I wasn't sure how much a package of yeast contained and so I just added 2 tsp. with disastrous results. I think it's good to show you that I am not always successful when it comes to cooking! Here is my failure in all it's glory!!!



UGH!!! The birds have really been enjoying it!

I don't like failing though, and so I worked with the recipe and made a few adaptions. I finally came up with one that actually made a beautiful loaf of Brioche in my Bread Maker. If you would like the original recipe and don't mind making bread by hand, hop on over to Susan's page to check it out and see her beautiful loaf.

If you are lazy like me, take a gander below!



*Breadmaker Brioche*
Makes one large loaf
Printable Recipe

This makes a beautifully light and rich bread with a tender crumb and a delightfully crisp crust. We absolutely loved it.

1 1/2 tsp quick yeast (meant for use in the breadmaker)
3 cups of strong flour (bread flour)
2 TBS sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup softened butter
1/3 cup of warm milk beaten together with 2 TBS warm water and 3 large eggs



Place all the ingredients into your bread machine in the order given, or the order required by your particular model. Process on the basic or sweet bread cycle, using a light or medium crust preference. When done, remove from the breadmaker and the pan to a wire rack to cool completely.



If you'd like to see what I did with it next . . . pop on over to The English Kitchen.

Note - It seems that people are having problems accessing my page for some odd reason. I think it is an issue between Blogger and the Internet Explorer browser. Here is the latest update from Blogger that I read this morning.

Some users are seeing an 'Operation Aborted' error message when trying to load their blogs from Internet Explorer. We're looking into this and will update this message when we have a fix.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Update (May 26): We are still working on resolving this bug. This only affects viewers using IE to view the blog; for right now, blog owners can either move the Followers gadget lower in their sidebar, or remove it altogether. Either action will eliminate the pop-up dialog box in IE.

We will update this post when a fix has been made.

Note, I have completely switched to the Mozilla Firefox browser and have not experienced this since. Not only is it quicker than Internet Explorer but it doesn't seem to have a lot of the problems that IE has.