4.03.2010

some stuff I've baked and crafted in the last few internet-less weeks

It has been a very interesting span of time for sure. Quite a variety of baked goods came out of the oven, it was coldish and it helped to heat the house, and fill tummies as well.
First there was a large batch of sandwich cookies, using a basic sugar cookie recipe, and both a strawberry jam filling and a chocolate moose filling.

They made quite a mess, flour all over the counters,

and in the end there were about a nice even gross of them (144 that would be, not including broken or burnt ones) and I had trouble finding tuppaware enough to take them into work.

I also made some rice crispy treats, which were very wonderfully retro and impossibly easy to make as well, almost seemed like a trick they were so simple. I liked them so much I decided to top half the batch with chocolate and that was very good as well.

Then, on Sunday, my roommate, exhausted from here successful finish of the Oakland half marathon, and still famished after a substansial lunch of mexican downtown, had some odd food cravings which I indulged, because why not. Dinner consisted of risotto, bacon, asparagus and some cheddar biscuits and while a very strange combination, it was none the less, delectable.

I also did a bit of crafting. I have a collection of colorful necklaces that are always stuck in boxes and I wanted some way of displaying them, and also something to fill an empty and boring looking wall in my room, so I decided to make a bulletin board. To do so I picked up some foam-core at Longs Drugs (there is a really really large one in Rockridge, which oddly enough, often has a better craft selection than Micheals, and better priced too) and cut it down into three tall slender sections
and covered them in some linen that I picked up from my roommates discarded fabric pile (piles) and used some small brads to nail them to the wall in a staggered pattern.
I then took some long twig-like branches I had sitting around (you never know when you might need such a thing) used straight pins to hold them onto onto the foam-core, and some longer brads spaced along the twigs to hang the necklaces up on.

At first it looked pretty bare.

But I kept finding little things to hang up, business cards, my collection of movie ticket stubs, old golden Mary prayer cards and other ephemera I found lying around. Combine that with all those colorful necklaces, and it was rather pretty. I have also found, interestingly enough, that I am more prone to wear my cool baubles now that I see them regularly. And no more empty wall.

There were other things that were baked, cooked, elaboratly crafted as well, some of which I may get to later, but lots of which, without the blog up and running to motivate me I didn't somehow remember to photograph. Also this is getting to be rather long and I feel the need to stop writing and get going with all these projects which have been building up as I've been occupied recently with job training, business travel, and the distracting cold front which has settled in the last few days. Better get doing than just talk about doing.
But I'll leave you with some fantastic mad-scientist lab brownies I concocted this week. I think there was actually some maniacal laughter to be heard wafting from the kitchen as I pulled them out of the oven.
The goal: to create a brownie that maintained it's gooey fresh-out-of-the-oven texture long into the following day (in the event that the brownies even last into the next day)
The method: add extra cream and some strawberry jam to the batter, and a layer chocolate chips in the middle.

The result: Amazing! Victory! sticky and with a hidden crunch in the middle from the chocolate chip layer. And I forcibly kept them from being consumed all at once, so that I could see how they hold up over time, and I can catagorically say, two days after their emergence from the oven that fateful day, they are still gooey as they were in the very beginning. Though perhaps desperately in need of a glass of milk to accompany their alarming richness.
And now to the craftmobile. Or rather my desk. There is much to be done.

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