I’m sure that, like me, most of you probably love kitchen gadgets. My new favorite gadget is the Wilton Dessert Decorator.

It is a completely unnecessary, but completely fun tool. As I see it, the benefits of this gadget are two-fold:

1) There is no need to worry about the icing melting inside the decorating bag from the heat of your hand while piping decorations

and

2) It is environmentally friendly because all parts are completely cleanable and reusable, meaning there are no plastic piping bags to throw in the trash.

The canister, if filled to the top, will hold enough icing to modestly decorate a batch of cupcakes. I really like icing, so I usually refill the canister once during decorating.

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I usually try to resist buying cookbooks and instead check them out from the library, but sometimes I just can’t help myself because the book is either so good I want it for myself (as was the case with My Sweet Vegan) or the price is so right I’d be a fool to pass it up. This past weekend, I managed to score a great deal on two used cookbooks at Half Price Books.
I picked up copies of the Millennium Cookbook

and Mollie Katzen’s Still Life With Menu for a total of $16 (I also had a 15% off coupon (hooray for coupons!)). If anyone has favorite recipes from either of these books, I’d love recommendations. I find the Millennium Cookbook somewhat intimidating, so a recommendation would help me figure out where to start. :-)