KRINGLA, OR: NOT REALLY KRINGLA BUT THAT'S WHAT WE CALL IT

Kringla usually means a pretzel-shaped soft cookie usually reserved for Christmas time, but growing up in my family it meant something much different.  Well, we still had Kringla at Christmas, but on regular Saturdays or Sunday mornings, we had the other "Kringla".  It's an amazing hybrid of choux pastry puffs, french crullers, and something else I'm not sure of.  Crisp brown peaks of choux pastry give way to valleys flowing with little rivers of chocolate or vanilla glaze with an airy, eggy base to hold it all up.  This is the breakfast of champions.  And people who don't have a lot of time but want to make something impressive.  You can make all sorts of twists and variations of this, too.  Make it savory if you want- that's something I've never tried.  Hmm, maybe another post on that experiment will be coming soon.

In the meantime, give this recipe a try.  It's also a good place to start if you're intimidated by choux pastry and it's airy puffs- this one is foolproof.

Breakfast, brunch, brinner, or dessert- it's easy, fast, and flexible.

BEDROOM BEFORE AND AFTER

We've been pretty slow-moving on renovating and redecorating this house.  We're going on three years at this place and all I've done is remove wallpaper, add wallpaper, and paint.  I'm still in the painting stage for most of our rooms, but we've just torn into our upstairs bath- I'll post that update when we get to it (and how we did it for so little money!).

My amazing sister over at Young Branch puts our podunk painting jobs to shame with the whole-house renovation that they've done.  If you need a little kick in the pants inspiration for starting in on your own home renovation projects, hop on over to her blog and check out their amazing house transformation.

In the meantime, I have a little before and after eye candy for you.  Because it's Friday and because before and after pictures are my favorite kind of feature.  I present to you the old pictures of our guest bedroom.  Don't let that lovely light fool you, those walls are green, baby.  Sage-y nineties green.  Ugh.  I always forget to take "before" shots, so I had to use the ones from our walk-through.  It's kind of nice to see how differently a room can be decorated and used, though.

Dover White walls, white bed, white bedspread...getting a theme, here?  Living with an architect means there are two acceptable colors: white and gray.  I'm not complaining, though- those colors are workhorses and make everything look better.  And here is the "After":