happy Valentine's Day

My Valentine's Day was filled with:

1.) (a.) long conversations about sushi (b.) and plans for sushi outings
2.) a treasure hunt ending in malt, mint, & white chocolate
3.) Sunday afternoon plans, when it's only Tuesday
4.) a small group that puts the "small" in small group, but makes me look forward to Tuesday nights in a very big way

I may not have a "significant other," but I have a few people in my life who are pretty significant, and I love them deeply and am deeply grateful for their love.

raspberry espresso brownies - adapted from here

Happy Valentine's Day. :)

blame it on the buttercream

Everything was against me.

I didn't have any granulated sugar. (WHAT.)

Then I realized I forgot the bourbon at work. (I bet you don't hear a sentence like that every day.)

Then I was about to run out of gas, so I had to stop at Shell and I didn't even have any Kroger plus points on my card. (My life is terrible.)

Then I realized the recipe for the caramel frosting here needed 4 hours to 1 day to cool, and it was already 7:30 and that is just INSANE. So I had to find another recipe from another trusted source.

Then I burned my caramel and my smoke alarm went off and I gasped through the choking smog to open my windows, turn on my ceiling fans, and disconnect my deafening alarm. (What did we learn here? When the instructions say, "Keep a close eye on the caramel," they are not just being silly.)

Caramel: First batch, pre-"drowning in the swirling river of fog"

Then my feet got cold because it's 30 degrees outside and cold air sinks and my feet are the bottomest part of my body. Therefore: Toes turn to toe-sicles.

Then I realized that over the noise of my heater groaning because of the sudden rush of cold air and the fan on my oven that does nothing but blow hot air in my face, I couldn't hear "LOST," and now I think I've missed something important. Is Ben still the bad guy? I can't keep track.

Then, when frosting the cupcakes, I realized I wasn't going to have enough frosting for all 24 of them. (What did we learn here? When the recipe says, "Make a double batch of icing, because you won't have enough otherwise," they are not just being funny.) But I managed.

They're not this yellow in real life.

Then I started blogging and got tired and now I don't feel like cleaning up.

Scary, dark waters of burnt caramel. Who knows what's down there.

All in all: Chocolate bourbon cupcakes with caramel buttercream frosting = SUCCESS. Seriously so.

cuppycake day

This morning I woke up at 6:45. My alarm is called "Voices of Nature," which is a lovely mix of a soothing (as soothing as computerized music notes can be) melody and birds chirping in a rainforest. So if you're wondering what Nature's voice sounds like, LG has captured it and put it in my phone.

However, when I looked outside (my "I don't have Internet or cable so this is how I check the weather" technique) I saw that it was windy, rainy, and cold. Autumn is coming! Autumn is coming! But not the most inviting conditions imaginable for an early-morning jaunt.

So I decided to do Pilates instead. (Don't be too impressed. I do Pilates just often enough so that my muscles are sore for the next three days & make me feel like I've gotten a really good workout in ["Boy my arms hurt...I AM SO FIT RIGHT NOW"], but not often enough to be of any actual benefit for my body. ["If you did this more regularly, we wouldn't be screaming out in pain every three days. Sincerely, What Are Trying to be Your Abdominals."]) The thing about Pilates, though, is that sometimes I love it, and sometimes I hate it. Today I hated it.

Lara Hudson, sitting with legs splayed like a road-killed frog: "Slowly turn to your right, bend at the waist and lift your arms, flipping up your palms...."
Me, hugging my knees with 3-lb weights on the floor next to me: "I don't want to do this."

Then I remembered it's meeting day at VCC, and I decided to bake cupcakes.

They are possibly my new favorite thing in this world. That's not true, I like a lot of things more than these cupcakes. But if you like chai, you will love these little buttercream babies. Now to get an actual frosting piper so I can stop cutting holes in my Ziploc bags, and so that my frosting doesn't come out looking like those enormous grubs that Timon eats in The Lion King.

Frosting, anyone?

Happy almost-birthday & VCC Meeting Day.

that September in the rain

It’s almost my birthday.

The night before I turned eighteen, I lay on the bathroom floor listening to the first fifteen seconds of “I Saw Her Standing There” by the Beatles over and over again.

Well she was just seventeen, if you know what I mean….

Well she was just seventeen, if you know what I mean….

Well she was….

I did not want to turn eighteen. The idea of being legally able to sign my own important documents without my parents was pretty terrifying to me. Next you were going to tell me that I could call and set up my own dentist appointments. WHAT? Let’s not get crazy.

Now I’m getting ready to turn twenty-four. Isn’t that the age that Paul McCartney wrote “When I’m Sixty-Four”? My future ahead is so bright, it’s blinding.

To celebrate my birthday, I plan to bake these vanilla chai cupcakes. Then I plan to eat them. My plans do not extend further than that, except maybe a trip to Barnes & Noble, because, most of the time, if you want to bring me to pure delight, take me to Barnes & Noble, and let me just smell the books at my own leisure. When you have come to please me in this way, you have secured a place in my heart forever.

I'm at Panera Bread right now, and there is a woman sitting at the table beside me with another woman. I tuned into their conversation just in time for her to say that, when given lemons, “It’s an old adage: You can make lemon cookies, lemon bars, lemon meringue pie, lemon muffins….”

Wow, usually people just make lemonade. Obviously this woman has more culinary knowledge than the rest of the world.

Also, happy football season.

2 more weeks till Heather's birthday.

with love, from me to you

To celebrate the Beatles coming to America 47 years ago (and Valentine's Day), I baked these:

What you can't see in this picture are the outcast-cupcakes with frosting smeared on their little bald heads like comb-overs, 'cause I got tired of filling the little decorative bottle with an opening the size of a quarter. How do you neatly fit gobs of frosting in there without getting it all over your hands, clothes, and counter? You don't. Which leads to a lot of unofficial frosting-licking.

Oh Taste of Home, I want you so much to like me.

once a lonely catterpillar sat and cried

I used to not like Valentine's Day. As evidenced by this journal entry I wrote my freshman year of college:

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day. I don't know why it should bother me so much; it's just another day. I guess Valentine's Day is like a magnifying glass to enlargen what loneliness I have that I could otherwise overlook. I live every day single, and most of the time I'm happy with it. But Valentine's Day finds that itty bitty speck of "I want something more" and points at it, laughing. I hate the microscope of Valentine's Day, magnifying my imperfect and flawed emotions and relationships. I don't have a man. I don't have someone to send me flowers through CPO and tell me my hair smells good. There is no masculine arm around my shoulders and no one looks dreamily into my eyes across a plate of chicken nuggets in the cafeteria. I am single. And on Valentine's Day I feel like couples look on me with pity, as if I have the plague.
"Look at the leper," Brenda Sue says to Maurice.
"Don't touch," Maurice says, holding Brenda's hand. "She's one of them."
Then I can hear Brenda Sue distastefully click her tongue and mutter "poor thing" as they turn away to gorge themselves on candy hearts.
I'm single. Saying that on Valentine's Day carries the same ring to it as walking down the streets proclaiming, "Unclean!" What can I do to comfort myself on Valentine's Day?

Following this entry is a tiny candy heart drawn in the corner, with the words written in it, "YOU SUCK."

If Present Me were to visit Past Me (who, at the time would be Present Me and Present Me would be Future Me), Past/Present Me would think Present/Future Me was some sort of pastry-puff shell filled with fluffy cream filling, because I, Future Me then who is now Present Me, like Valentine's Day.

Some people, and with every right, think Valentine's Day is a bunch of hooey. They argue, why have a single day to celebrate love when every day should be an example of cherishing one another? I think this is true. We should live every day in appreciation of our loved ones, showing them how much we treasure them with little post-its on their mirrors and flower petals by their cereal bowls. Aw.

But there's a day to sit down and be thankful, when shouldn't we be thankful all year round? And there's a day to celebrate Jesus' birth and His resurrection, when shouldn't we be celebrating Immanuel, He's ALIVE, all year round?

We are, and we do, in fact. But these days let us do it with a little more pizazz, and a lot more food.

So I like Valentine's Day. Maybe because it's just another excuse to bake cupcakes and make pink frosting, like people use St. Patrick's Day as an excuse to get drunk on green beer. I like love. I like hearts. I like sugar.

Past Me is writhing on the floor clasping her throat in agony, as with every word I kill just a little bit more of her.

I don't have a significant other, and, actually, I never have over Valentine's Day. But I do have people I love, and I do have a heart, so why not put it on paper and send it off? Who says V-Day has to be specifically saved for romance?

(Actually I think "romance" is in the very definition of Valentine, but life's candy and the sun's a ball of butter, so don't bring around a cloud and rain on my parade.)

From now until Valentine's Day I plan to think of all the things and people I love, and why I love them and am grateful for them, and I will do it all while eating heart-shaped cookies. WITH SPRINKLES.

the war

forgotten baking powder + no non-stick spray + an oven that doesn't read correctly =

Cinnamon Mocha Coffee Cake, 2011

I call it "Blitzkrieg Bread."

See the resemblence?:

Weilun, Poland, 1939

Oh, Taste of Home, please don't be disappointed in me.

domesticity

"Then Noah built an altar to the LORD and...he sacrificed burnt offerings on it. The LORD smelled the pleasing aroma...." - Genesis 8:20-21a

The sacrifice:

The pleasing aroma:

And this is just the beginning.