Cat Sebastian | Comfort Food and Comfort Reading
December 13, 2017
My characters are always sharing food with one another. Food and love are tied
up in my brain in ways they probably shouldn't be, but that knot is never going
to get untangled, so my characters love one another and love their food.
Sometimes they show they care by making sure their love interest has enough to
eat; sometimes they give gifts of pastry and pie. In IT TAKES TWO TO TUMBLE, a
secondary character starts to fall in love with someone based on their cooking
skills. It's a summer book, with lots of picnics and fruit pies, but now it's
almost the holidays, which is prime food-sharing season for many of us. My family has quite a few food sensitivities, so when I figure out a recipe for
a favorite food that we all can eat, I'm pretty pleased with myself. These
cookies have never yet sent any of my family members running for the epi-pen,
they're easy enough for my kids to make on their own, and they taste exactly the
way sugar cookies ought to. Roll Out Sugar Cookies (gluten, dairy, and nut free)
Ingredients:
- 1 cup white sugar
- 1 cup butter substitute (I use earth balance brand)
- 2 egg yolks
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 2 1/3 cups gluten free flour mix (get a brand that's mainly rice flour with
added starch. Trader Joe's brand works really well)
- ¼ tsp salt
Directions: Cream not-butter and sugar until creamy. Add yolks and vanilla and beat until
fluffy. Add flour and salt and stir until well mixed. Refrigerate at least an hour. To roll out, I put a sheet of parchment on the counter, then put some of the
dough on top of the parchment, then another sheet of parchment on top of the
cookie dough. Then I use a rolling pin and my hands to get it uniformly ¼ inch
thick. Put it back in the fridge or freezer until it's very firm. Gently peel off the top layer of parchment. Cut out using cookie cutters, then
place on a cookie sheet that you've lined with parchment. Bake 8-12 minutes
(depending on the size of the cookies and whether your people demand cookies
that snap or prefer them to be a bit soft). Note: one thing that's nice about gluten-free baking is that you can't really
overwork the dough. This makes it a kid-friendly recipe, because they can
basically treat the stuff like play dough and it still makes tasty cookies.
Also, there's no baking powder or baking soda in this recipe; that's because you
don't need leavnening for these cookies.
Seducing the
Sedgwicks #1
Some of Ben Sedgwick's favorite things:
- Helping his poor parishioners
- Baby
animals
- Shamelessly flirting with the handsome Captain Phillip
Dacre
After an unconventional upbringing, Ben is perfectly content with the quiet,
predictable life of a country vicar, free of strife or turmoil. When he's asked
to look after an absent naval captain's three wild children, he reluctantly
agrees, but instantly falls for the hellions. And when their stern but
gloriously handsome father arrives, Ben is tempted in ways that make him doubt
everything.
Some of Phillip Dacre's favorite things:
- His ship
- People doing precisely as
they're told
- Touching the irresistible vicar at every
opportunity
Phillip can't wait to leave England's shores and be back on his ship, away from
the grief that haunts him. But his children have driven off a succession of
governesses and tutors and he must set things right. The unexpected presence of
the cheerful, adorable vicar sets his world on its head and now he can't seem to
live without Ben's winning smiles or devastating kisses. In the midst of runaway children, a plot to blackmail Ben's family, and
torturous nights of pleasure, Ben and Phillip must decide if a safe life is
worth losing the one thing that makes them come alive.
Romance Gay [Avon Impulse, On Sale: December 12, 2017, e-Book, ISBN:
9780062820501 / eISBN: 9780062820501]
Achingly beautiful, heartbreakingly realistic, magnificently written; simply
sublime!
Cat writes steamy, upbeat historical romances. They usually take place in the
Regency, generally have at least one LGBTQ+ main character, and always have
happy endings. Before writing, Cat was a lawyer and a teacher. She enjoys
crossword puzzles, geeking out over birds, gardening badly, and–of
course–reading. In high school, her parents went away for a week, and instead of
throwing raucous parties, Cat read Middlemarch. Even worse, Cat remembers little
of a trip through Europe because she was busy reading Mansfield Park. Her
proudest moment was when she realized her kids were shaping up to be hopeless
bookworms too. Currently, her favorite genres are romance, mystery and
fantasy. Cat lives with her husband, three kids, and dog in an improbably
small house. After growing up in the northeast, she now lives in a part of the
south where every body of water seems to contain alligators or sharks, and every
restaurant serves biscuits and gravy. She likes the biscuits, but not so much
the alligators.
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