Markers!

And a long weekend! Yay!

Also, I really need to clean off my desk. I'm sitting here with my elbows in trying not to lean on anything or bump anything over as I move about. It's been one of those weeks.
...After lunch. I'll start then.

Anyway, yesterday I woke up really early. That doesn't mean I actually got up that early, but I woke up then. And that's where the problem started. When I wake up early but don't get up, it does really funny things to me and I typically end up getting nothing done at all for the rest of the day. My surefire trick to breaking free of that funk, though, is sketching. Figure drawing is my favorite. Really fast gestures, no longer than thirty seconds, typically. On Fridays at my university there's an open draw session where they have live models come in and you can go sketch for free, but I'd already bummed around the apartment long enough to miss that (sad day) so I went to my favorite fallback, the figure and gesture drawing tool over at pixel lovely.
I spent a good long while making completely unintelligible scribbles all over my new sketchbook with my copic markers, which have hardly seen any use of late. I'd forgotten how great those things are.

Later that night, I was still kind of in the swing of things, so I decided I wanted to try my hand at something a little more finish. There's this model on deviantart, Devin Willow who does modeling and photography, and is just always inspiring to me, so I pulled up one of her latest portraits and did my best with it...

Not a terribly good likeness, but not a very bad drawing...

And there's my day. :)

I never knew I was doing it wrong...

...but THIS, my friends, is french toast.

And so I stand forever corrected. My life has been forever changed.

This is stuffed french toast, the stove-top version. It's all crispy and wonderful on the outside, and all full of warm, sweet and tangy gooey amazing ... stuff on the inside.

French toast has probably the least precise recipe of anything I've ever encountered, so I apologize to all of you out there who just cannot function without a recipe... Also, my husband (Yes, my husband, I got married over the holidays. I was going to make a special post about that, and it's still on the way. I'd been waiting on the photo CD back so I could actually get some pretty pictures up here ;) made this for me, so I didn't really catch anything more than what went into it, not how much. 

Good luck to you (it's worth it!)

Take nice, thick slices of french bread, and cut a pocket into them. Don't cut all the way through, but cut deep and wide enough you can kind of fold them open a bit. Also, don't worry about scooping a pocket into them or anything, the bread should be soft and you'll be able to smoosh the fillings in well enough :)

We filled them with previously frozen berries and a mixture we made of softened cream cheese, maple syrup and brown sugar. Heavenly.

The dipping stuff for the french toast was pretty classic, eggs, milk, sugar, cinnamon, and lots of vanilla (that was my contribution... I always get a little carried away)

So, you stuff the bread with as much of the cream cheese mixture and berries as you can (and it will be oozing out all over the place, that's how you know you've done it right apparently. And once I tasted it I couldn't find room to argue), dip both sides in the egg mixture (don't concern yourself too much with the sides, that'll leave room for it to toast a bit and then soak up syrup later), and toss it in a hot buttered pan and brown it on both sides.

Top it off with more berries and sweetened cream cheese and some maple syrup as desired and fall into the deepest and most blissful sugar-coma you've experienced in the past two-years.

Needless to say, I was highly impressed. I think I have found myself a good man.