SusieJ's Advent Calendar: December 4, 2008

The recipe: Lebkuchen bars

Lebkuchen are often compared to gingerbread, but are much richer, moister and spicier. This bar recipe is easier to make than the fiddly Elisenlebkuchen/

The surprise: Animating your lights

Geeks will want to control their lights with a programmable logic controller. Christmas brings out the kid in geeks!

Flour, flour everywhere

From moving out of my mother's house until buying my house, only one apartment had a dishwasher. This was never a problem, as I rarely used more than two pans while cooking and two plates when eating. Dishes stayed under control.

Then came Christmas, and baking, and I'd use every bowl in the kitchen, all the measuring cups and spoons, and baking sheets, night after night. After the cookies had cooled, I'd wash my baking tools and the dinner dishes by hand, night after night. In college I'd watch 1 a.m. re-runs of The Honeymooners; in West Virginia it was Anne of Green Gables and quite a lot of static.

However, it seems I never really got the bowls and cookie sheets clean enough. There were a lot of dishes, and not very large sinks. After a week of baking cookies, every dish in the house would have a film of flour paste on it.

Now I have a dishwasher.

Tell me about your own disaster!