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Excerpted from our Maple cookbook by Katie Price Webster.

Makes 3 cups | Active time: 10 minutes | Total time: 10 minutes

Ingredients

1/3 cup best-quality cocoa powder
1/3 cup dark maple syrup
21⁄2 cups low-fat milk
1⁄2 teaspoon vanilla extract
Marshmallows (optional)

Directions

In a medium bowl, whisk cocoa and syrup. In a medium, heavy-bottomed saucepan over medium-low heat, heat milk, stirring often, for about 8 minutes, or until steaming. Pour hot milk into cocoa mixture, whisking constantly. Transfer cocoa mixture to the saucepan and return to medium-low heat, stirring often, until completely smooth and steaming hot. Stir in vanilla and drop in marshmallows (if desired) before serving. 

Excerpted from our Maple cookbook by Katie Price Webster.

Makes 4 2-cup servings | Active time: 30 minutes | Total time: 40 minutes

Like breakfast foods for dinner, some things may sound wrong but are just so right. The same can be said for maple syrup in savory dishes. Working on Maple has had Quirk HQ slathering the sweet stuff on tons of dishes we never thought to maple-fy before. And thanks to author Katie Webster's recipes, the results were as one might put it, suh-weeet! So in honor of the book's on-sale day, here’s what Katie’s recipes has taught us about having maple syrup for dinner! (As regaled by publicist extraordinaire Val Howlett.) 

What a long, strange trip it’s been.

Normally I’d turn that lyric into a line of iambic pentameter. Today, I think it’s fine the way it is. With a few short words, the Grateful Dead pretty much summed up my last two years or so — from the first moments of rewriting a Carly Rae Jepsen song as Shakespeare to putting the finishing touches on the book. The entire process has been extraordinary in both senses of the word: wonderful and kinda far out, man.  It’s also been educational. At the outset, I didn’t know “thee” from “thou,” or when a word like “make” should become “makest.” But there are less obvious things I’ve picked up while translating pop songs into sonnets — things I can’t pass on in the sonnets themselves. Here are some of the more entertaining ones:

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2015/10/suzan-drummen-installations/

The bad news is that it’s Monday again. The good news is that we’ve rounded up some of the best bookish, geeky, and crafty links of the last week to help get you through your day. Whether you are looking for some sweet Harry Potter artwork, or obsessing over predictions for the new season of The Walking Dead, there’s sure to be something here to make your Monday a little brighter.

Hermione reads, a lot. At Hogwarts, she devours magical books on the daily. We have to wonder, though, what Hermione read before she discovered she was a witch. More importantly, did she continue reading the works of Muggle authors after she became a student at Hogwarts? If so, we have to believe she opened the eyes of her fellow students—to some extracurricular reading material.

Here are some of Hermione’s book recommendations to the purest of Hogwarts’ students.