Milestones

Chocolate Buttermilk Layer Cake from Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Chocolate Desserts. A soft, ethereal cake with an almost caramel-like finish.

A happy Mr Chocolate Lady’s birthday to all In Mol Araan. Speaking of birthdays, Friday (25 Tamez) was the one year anniversary of this site in the Hebrew calendar. August 1st will be the anniversary in the Gregorian calendar. The Hebrew calendar has twelve months of 29 or 30 days. Approximately once every three years (seven times every nineteen years), there is a thirteenth “leap month” to keep up with the solar calendar. The two calendars coincide every nineteen years, so your Hebrew and Gregorian birthdays will be on the same day when you are nineteen, thirty-eight, and so on in good health until 120.

We need to calculate different year-lengths even for an exclusively solar system; the length of the tropical year--the time it takes the earth to return to the same spot in its orbit of the sun-- is 365.242 days, and the sidereal year-- the time it takes the constellations to return to the same position viewed from the earth-- is 365.256 days--about twenty minutes longer. One of the cool things I learned in high school that still amazes me every day. Thank you, Ms Thomson!