oh hai

So I did make those cupcakes for the company party, by the way. Only about sixty of them. They were gone within an hour, and I was a little too busy at the "special" eggnog table to take a picture of them. But! My peppermint vanilla cupcakes were a hit, despite being my own invention, and everyone was demanding the recipe I used for the chocolate buttercream frosting. Cause damn, son, it was some good frosting. (You can find the recipe on America's Test Kitchen's web site. Really, all of their recipes are amazingly delicious.) Two of my coworkers have gluten allergies, so they were very grateful for my gluten-free cupcakes. :)

Now I'm doing some secret crafting for Christmas (yes, last minute, whatever). Other homemade Christmas presents that I have already made include: Irish creme from scratch, home-brewed raspberry cordial, and delicious delicious fudge. And I'm supposed to make cookies and brownies, too. Mmm. Brownies. I'm not really worried about posting presents here cause the people they're for never read this blog, anyways. Heh.

Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukkah, Happy Festivus, Happy Yule/Solstice/Dong Zhi, have a wonderful Makar Sankranti and may the Flying Spaghetti Monster touch you with His Noodly Appendage this Holiday.

I are wizard?

I don't know what sort of voodoo magic I used, but somehow I managed to get my word count up near 60,000 by the 28th of November. Impressive, right? What's more impressive is that I somehow managed to convince myself that I still had only about 30k words written, and I gave up. That's right, my friends, that last weekend when I should have been rejoicing, I gave up. I knew I couldn't handle writing 20k words in two days without going crazy. And then, on December 1st, I checked my real word count. Head? Meet desk. You're going to be friends for a while.
I don't really feel like I won, though, because my story still isn't finished. So I'm trying to get it done by the end of December. I'm pretty close, I just need to get my lazy tush around to doing it.
And, in my writing spree in that last week, I managed to scrounge up the time to bake a pretty cake for Thanksgiving. I've already eaten most of it, but you can still see two of the three pretty roses. My brother ate the yellow one. Pic will be posted when I get home. It's vanilla cake with raspberry filling and lemon buttercream frosting, and it is freaking delicious. I've got a slice in my lunch box right now, and it's killing me to have to resist eating it until afternoon snacktime. Yes, I know it's old, but I have a magical cake storage device that, despite looking cheap and lame, does a really good job of keeping my cakes fresh!

Right?

I said I would update on Sundays, right? Right? No. =/

So my word count is a pretty pitiful 28, 546. So, yeah, I don't really think that I'm going to have this finished by November 30th. But I'm going to try!

I spent too much time last week making cupcakes for the Thanksgiving party. But hell, they were delicious, adorable, amazing cupcakes. And guess what? I forgot to take pictures. They were pretty amazing, too. Damn. One of my friends, after tasting one, hid one of the containers of 15 cupcakes so that she could take it home. Haha.

Lies and the Lying Liars who tell them

So remember that time when I said that I would be posting my word count every Saturday? Yeah, I lied. You see, it was my birthday weekend. I wish I could pretend that it took me this long to recover from the intense partying, but that would be a lie, too. I had like two glasses of wine. Oh, and I got a zombie (the drink, not the walking dead) on Monday at a Chinese food restaurant for $5. Which was awesome.

Oh yeah, by the way, my word count is 17, 232. Not bad, eh?

I made the gimbap, and it was an epic disaster, so I am not posting the pictures of my shame. Note to self: it really doesn't freeze well.

I told my friends I would make them cupcakes for a Thanksgiving party. Probably 36 cupcakes. That's November 21. I told my family that I would make cupcakes for Thanksgiving. Only like 12-24 of em. That's November 27. I told my coworkers that I would make cupcakes for our holiday party. That's probably going to end up being 144 cupcakes because I'm an overachiever. On December 12. So hopefully, I don't die doing NaNoWriMo. Or die of too many cupcakes. I think that's possible.

Word count update

So, I figure that every Saturday until November 30, I'll sneak in a word count update for NaNoWriMo before bed. Hopefully I will actually do this. >_> Also, at some point I will be posting the awesome cupcakes that I am going to make at some point when I'm trying to avoid writing. I just bought a new digital camera, so you won't have to put up with any more of my whining. Oh, and I'm going to try to make sushi/gimbap this week. I'll try to take pictures.
My word count goal for this week (really, just today) was 1725 words. The churn-out for today? 3205 words. That's almost double! I know, I know. I rule. It's ok. You can tell me about it later. :3
Maybe I'll post an excerpt if I find a good one. Right before I quit for the night, I was writing a description of a dress. One sentence long, but I considered going all Robert Jordan on it. "She smoothed her skirts while pulling her braid at the same time. Her dress was a fine olive green velvet from France, made by little fairies, and embroidered with the world's finest............."
You know what? I can't even fake it. I guess I should be happy about that. Although I did already describe the contents of a trunk, so I guess I've been influenced too much. Ok, I seriously need to sleep.

NaNoWriMo

So, I'm going to do it. I say this every year, but this year, I totally mean it! I even signed up this time! I'm going to take part in NaNoWriMo. I feel nervous and excited, but I already have an awesome idea of what to write. :D Ooh, and if anyone else is doing this, let's be writing buddies!

So... I have to write a 50,000 word novel. There's 30 days in November. Subtract one night (for my birthday, cause no way am I writing on my birthday!) and that translates to about 1725 words per day. Ok... that's like, what? 3, 4 pages? I've written 5 page papers in one night before! Loads of times! OMG I CAN'T DO THIS I'M GOING TO DIE.

This is pretty much my shout out for someone to please check my apartment for my corpse on November 30th. kplzthxbye

(xposted to my eljay)

zomg

I just had an excellent idea, and I wanted to share it because I can't find any documentation of it anywhere else on the internets. I've been trying to think of more things I can make with the unnecessary amount of rice flour I have when I thought of it. What if one were to make ochazuke, but instead of using rice, to use rice flour cupcakes?
I imagine it being soaked in a tres leches cake kind of way, perhaps with a whipped cream frosting that is flavored with myoga or crystallized ginger. Hot damn, that would be awesome.
I know that ochazuke is supposed to be savory, but I don't see why it can't be sweet and cupcake-y, instead! This is now, officially, on my to-do list. And if you make this, you are officially required to let me know and/or taste. :D

ETA: I'm not referring to green tea cake, by the way, the kind where you include matcha in the recipe. Oh no no. I'm talking about pouring a hefty amount of strong green tea on top of a cake, and letting it slowly soak in. Yum.

So hey....

Remember that time when I didn't post for, like, ever? Yeah man, me too! Totally weird.

I haven't really been creating much other than poetry, which I no longer will post on the interwebs (for publishing reasons). I also invented some recipes, which are definitely delicious.

Speaking of delicious, I have made some delicious, adorable cupcakes. Yesterday I tried making gum paste flowers for the first time. (Yes, I spent my Saturday night home alone with two cats and a lot of sugar.) My main successes involved getting gum paste all over my hands (and hair!) and getting powdered sugar all over the floor. I had forgotten my book on making gum paste flowers somewhere, so they are mostly magical flowers of my imagination. Very cute and girly magical flowers.

Today I decided to make cupcakes to show off my pretty flowers, not to mention, I'd been meaning to make gluten-free lavender cupcakes for ages. I made lemon buttercream frosting like two weeks ago for these cupcakes I intended to make, but alas, I am lazy. But the frosting has been a great midnight snack until now. (Don't worry, the recipe I use takes seriously forever for the frosting to go bad. As in, I have never, ever had my frosting go bad.)

So, here we have my adorable rice flour cupcakes, soaked in lavender syrup, frosted with lemon buttercream, topped with cute flowers:
Those little yellow bits are lemon "zest." I fail at zesting, so they are big chunks. And here is the front, so that you can see my pretty rose:
And a close-up of the rose that is positively soaked with vanilla vodka because I don't have any edible glue:
I am going to be getting a new digital camera, because I'm sick of my phone's subpar photo-taking abilities. And my old digital camera wasn't close to being the best, either, and I really don't feel like sifting through ten metric tons of crap to find it.

(Hey, does the excessive length of this entry make up for the fact that I haven't posted in like 18 years?)

Ugh.

Moved recently, so I haven't been able to do much. I'm actually still in the process of moving–all of my craft/sewing/nerd stuff is still at my parent's house. I'm working on it!

Posted a new old poem on fictionpress. I've been writing, but everything I write recently is angsty crap. And you know that when I say it's angsty, hot damn, it's angsty. And it's all way to personal to share on the internets, anyway.

So I'll try to get back to work.

Hm.

So I don't seem to be very skilled at sticking to doing something, like, say, posting regularly on a blog I made. Whatever.
I haven't been making any of the things I said I would (sorry Emily!) but I have been baking! Oh yes.
Last weekend (or was it three weekends ago? I don't know) I went to New Hampshire. During a thunderstorm, I decided it was an excellent time to go berry-picking, and I picked a boatload of wild blueberries and raspberries. And then I made some delicious turnovers! (Raspberry, blueberry, and mixed berry; yum!)
You can get a little preview of the operation I had going:


I made 3 dozen turnovers in a teeny leetle countertop oven. (The only pans that could fit into it are the ones on the table there on the left, with the turnovers on them.) They didn't even last a week. A close up of the raspberry ones:


Tonight I'm making chocolate chip cookies. I'm using my secret trick of throwing in some cinnamon, and I put a dash of allspice in too. The dough is resting right now, because the cookies taste so much better when you let it rest for a while. (I've heard that the optimal time is 36 hours. I'm too impatient.)
The cookies will probably be eaten before I can take a picture of them. Not that you need a picture. You know what cookies look like, right??