Strawberries!

I've been pretty into strawberries recently. I don't know why. Ok, I know why. They are delicious and they wear their fruit-clothes inside out. And they were on sale at Trader Joe's.

It all started a couple weeks ago when I was thinking about college. In college, I was really poor, but still a bit of a foodie. (And I was really pretentious, but that's beside the fact) A frequent meal of mine would consist of (day-old) french baguettes with hunks of (store brand) cheese. Sometimes I'd drink wine (good ol' strawberry Arbor Mist) with it, and if I was really feeling fancy, I'd steal grab some strawberry slop from the resident's dining hall to eat with it. Iknow, I know, so classy!

The thing is, it was a really delicious combination. So I decided to try to recreate it, with good food.


I soaked strawberries in Cotes du Rhone wine with a bit of black pepper, then baked the (premade, I'm lazy) mini french baguette, and sliced it up. I topped the slices with TJ cheddar cheese (my favorite!) and baked it. I topped the melty-cheesy-bread with the wine-soaked strawberries. It was incredibly delicious, and not just because I had already finished off the bottle of wine. I even made it again for bf, and he agrees. I'll probably post the recipe on recipezaar, when I remember to.

Later, bf and I were talking about how making chocolate is my new thing. I made chocolates for my friend Heather's birthday (and forgot to take a picture >_>) and she really enjoyed them. Bf always has these ideas for Restaurants That He Should Open, and he said that it would be really interesting to open a chocolatier that only made fruit/chocolate combinations.

The idea piqued my interest, so for Valentines Day I made him a box of fruity chocolates.


Obviously, there were chocolate-covered strawberries, which were actually superfun to make. The little chocolates are filled with raspberries that were coated in chocolate and wine truffle. (Note: Chocolate wine truffle was a surprisingly bad idea. I'm going to have to work on it. Or use a recipe next time. It was fine with the raspberries, but not so great on its own.) I also made (no picture) wine-filled chocolates. It was really hard. :( Only four of the nine I tried to make actually worked out, and they leaked a bit. I'm not sure how to make it work next time, but I'll figure it out, cause it was really good.

This reminds me of some polymer clay charms I made. So cute.

Pretty in pink

Yesterday I craved cupcakes. I think you know where this is going:


I stopped at AC Moore on the way home from work (well, it's really quite out of the way, but nevermind that). I bought myself a mini cupcake pan, and a 1M tip. This tip is amazing!! I don't know how I survived without it before! I'm still a beginner with it, but I think I did all right. I had the green cupcake papers from when I made the truffles (I needed something to put them in!). They kind of clash, but I don't really care.

These are (gluten-free!) rice flour cupcakes with strawberry buttercream frosting. The frosting was a learning experience. I don't know what I was thinking last night, as I joyfully poured the (defrosted, sorry!) strawberries in with the butter, and then tried to mix in the sugar (I'm going to blame it on it being 10pm with only 5 hours of sleep the night before). It was a complete failure. An awful, terrible, disgusting-looking mess. I wish I had thought of taking a picture, because mere words cannot describe how gross it looked. I panicked, and scooped it out of my mixing bowl into another bowl. Then I mixed up some regular, no-flavoring-added buttercream, and slowly added the curdled, nasty blobs that were supposed to be strawberry frosting. The result, as you can see, had no nasty blobs, and had a good strawberry taste, despite only having half the amount of strawberries it was supposed to.


Actually, eating one of these cupcakes tastes a lot like eating strawberry ice cream in a cone. But sans the brain freeze. I have like 2468735789 of these in my fridge. Why did I make them last night!? I knew I wanted to bring them into work, and that I wasn't going to work today because of snow. I set myself up for eating-all-the-cupcakes failure!

Busy busy bunny

I've been busy with work and boyfriend and family and that kind of stuff... I also rearranged my room. I also have been gathering my craft stuff (and my new sewing machine!!!!) together in the basement so that I can set up a craft area down there. It should be excellent.

Anyway, on MLK day, my boyfriend was over, and I had the sudden urge to make truffles. I didn't really have a reason to make them, but I had the ingredients... so I made some! I covered half of them in cocoa powder that had a little cayenne in it, and (with bf's help) dunked the remaining truffles in chocolate and decorated them with white chocolate. I forgot to take a picture of the best-looking ones (which I gave to bf to eat and share with his family). I did take a picture of my less-than-stellar examples, though.


They were delicious, though, and I guess that's what really matters! It's gotten me on a huge chocolate spree, and I bought some chocolate molds. I think that some people are going to be getting handmade chocolates for Valentines Day! Mmm mm!

My dinner date with Heather

Oh yeah, and our menfolk came as well.
Heather and I spent wayyyy too much time making craploads of cupcakes. We made 12 Mars bar/rice crispies "no bake cupcakes" (you can see them in the tower picture), 12 carrot cake cupcakes with coconut cream cheese frosting, and 12 Victoria sponge cupcakes, half with chocolate buttercream, and the other half with raspberry filling and whipped cream. Delicious. A couple of pictures:
Heather really wanted to try out my snowflake fondant cutters, which I warned her were less-than-useful. It only took her about 18 million tries, but she got 5 snowflakes! Then we stuck the Cornish hens in the oven, later than planned. We made sangria which tasted like "raisin juice," but damn, did it look pretty! I was at the supermarket and I saw some starfruit, which has always interested and intrigued me. I smelled it, and I was SOLD. And, it's even as delicious as it smells. I want to go wherever these things are grown, when they're in season, and try some of those. It must be magnificent. (Yes, I am biased against produce in the supermarket, and for good reason.) But slices of the starfruit looked lovely as garnishes for our sangria. I'll have to try to think of more things to do with it!
The hens were kind of a failure, because Heather and I stuffed them with dates, and then I forgot to factor in that extra time, and we cooked 4 instead of 2, and I didn't factor that in, and we didn't cut them in half, either. So, you guessed it! They were seriously undercooked. It may be tacky to stick a little hen in the microwave during a dinner date, but we were too hungry to wait. Reviews said, however, that the recipe was delicious. I will make it again, but I won't stuff it, and I'll only make 2. And I'll use less olives, cause Josh doesn't like 'em, and who else would I cook it for!?

Should I be making a New Year's resolution to write here more? Nah.

So, for Christmas my parents gave me a sewing machine. Oh yes. You know how this is going to turn out. My plan is to set up a little craft area in my basement, because my room is really just too small for me to do crafts in. So hopefully, I will start churning out those angels and demons soon.
I did a lot of cooking for Christmas, and even took a couple of neat pictures. I love deviled eggs, and I got a new cookie-maker-pump-thingy device from my sister. It is my new best friend, and I used it to make swirly centers in the deviled eggs. :D

And (of course) I made cupcakes, too. I was lazy and used cake mix and premade frosting. My sister was happy. She loves the crap stuff. Eventually I will convert her to my delicious baked goods.
This weekend I have some grandiose plans with Heather to make an excessive amount of baked goods, all magnificently decorated. I'm not sure how well it will work out, but at the very least, I'm gonna make some more cupcakes. We're also making a fancy-pants cornish hen dinner for our double date. I'm crossing my fingers for success.

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.