Baking Frenzy! And other Manic Minded Monday topics...

I think I'm too covered in flour and chocolate and other baking odds and ends to successfully blog.

The girls and I are walking this weekend at a Great Strides event to benefit Cystic Fibrosis, in honor of their little friend who was recently diagnosed with the disease. Well, I'm walking, they're riding, but they'll be there!

So this week at work I'm holding a mini-bake sale to raise money for our team. I had fun planning what I wanted to make each day, and fun organizing my supplies, and day one was delightfully successful, but I can see that the execution of this plan might be a little tiring. Still, I just made Raspberry bars and Chocolate Walnut Pretzel Clusters in under 45 minutes, which is great! I just wish I had remembered I was baking tonight, before I had settled into bed with a book and the plan to fall asleep early tonight. I'm not sure how it slipped my mind.

I had to get back up.

In other news, we build the planter boxes for our little garden tomorrow night. I'm very excited to get some things growing! We see sprouts among the seeds we started already. We've got corn (Elizabeth picked that), Sunflowers (Lilli's pick), red tomatoes, yellow tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers. Not a diverse selection, but if those things grow they won't go to waste. Squash and string beans and their friends might be easy to grow, but they'd probably rot on the vines. If I get inspired, I might even hunt up another variety or two of seeds that intrigue me before they actually go in the ground. We'll see.

Ah, so guess what? We thought the DVD player out in the living room was broken, right? About half the time it would play a disc, and the other half it would stutter and refuse to load. So this weekend we went out to get a new one, and came home with a Blu-ray player instead. Hmmm. I'm not sure if that is supposed to be hyphenated. This is new technology to me. Anyway, despite not owning a single blu-ray (?) disc, we now own a player. Which is fine and all, but my dad called me tonight to tell me that he had rescued our old machine from the trash (as is his way) and not only determined that it works great, but solved a mystery. We haven't been able to find a missing library DVD. We had the case, but not the DVD. Can you guess where my dad found Diego's Moonlight Rescue? Yep. I assume I have my children to blame for that. With one DVD jammed up in its works, I'm amazed that the player was able to read any additional discs at all. But it did. This is a story without a conclusion, because I am not sure the fate of the DVD player. Clearly we aren't returning the blu-ray (??) player, as we are already addicted to its ability to upgrade the veiwability of DVDs. But the DVD player is perfectly good. I suspect my dad will claim it as his fee for saving me continued library fines. I guess that's fair.

The young ladies are doing fine, although lately their make believe is so complicated that I don't know how they can keep track of what they're doing. Their favorite adventure at the moment is a mix of "Tinkerbell and the Lost Treasure" and "Barbie-the Magic of the Rainbow", with bits and pieces of almost every other fandom that they have thrown in. And thanks to being madly in love with "Barbie and the Nutcracker", Lilli calls all animated Barbies (no matter which movie she's in) "Clara", which confuses and frustrates Elizabeth who puts a lot of importance on correctly identifying who Barbie is playing in which film, and just how she figures into their made up adventures. Today I just shook my head when Elizabeth dissolved into tears because "Terrence hurt my feelings! He says he isn't my friend any more!", and when I went to confront "Terrence", I was given a long and convoluted explanation of how "Clara" had taken her moonstone and given it to Blaze and the Dancing Princesses. I can't keep up. I'm glad they have each other for this stuff and just want me to read with them or have tea parties. That is more my speed. I can also do general silly stuff, but I'm not so good with a plot. At least not one you have to act out. I tell a mean Princess Lilli and the My Little Ponies story.


I think the sugar exposure has gone to my head, because I'm all over the place tonight.

Regardless, my second wind is gone, so I'm off to bed for real now!

Yay for Lilli!

This is Lilli not being scared to ride the rides at the fair last night.


Woohoo!

She rode everything she was tall enough to go on, and loved every second. Apparently all the practice at Disney World did her some good. Just another reason why we should live there, if you ask me. Yes, in the Parks. They have that suite in the castle that we could move right into.

Anyway.

While Elizabeth loves any ride she is allowed to go on, and was joyful the whole evening, she was not quite ready for me to take a picture of her and her sister on the Wiggly Worm. Clearly. Poor little girl. When your mother takes pictures of practically your every breath, plenty of them are bound to be less attractive than others.

Well, on the one hand it means that they're normal...

This afternoon's events can be best illustrated in these three pictures of Lilli:

Lilli: Why are you looking so mad mama?

What? You think that I'm also responsible for the fact that Elizabeth's entire floor is covered with crayoned and markered scribbles and letters, all the crayons are broken in half, and that she and I are decorated in marker from head to toe, all because Papa got on the computer and let us play unsupervised for 45 minutes thinking that the quiet coming from her room was a good thing?

It was all Elizabeth, I swear! I had nothing to do with it, and I am totally innocent! How dare you accuse me of such terrible behavior?

What? You don't buy that? You're still mad? What if I look at you like this?

Still mad?

Spin Cycle: I'm sure I'm missing stuff...

Do you know that I haven't watched any of the Olympics yet?

I'm not really into "sports" per say. But I used to enjoy watching ice dancing. Somehow though, I just haven't turned on the Olympics. I'm sure it is because, except for the commercials on Super Bowl Sunday, I have not watched any TV for months, which makes it real easy to let the apathy take over (Should I hang out on the couch for a while? Eh.). But I do feel like I shouldn't be missing out on this no doubt historical event.

When people at work are gathered in little groups discussing Lindsay something-or-another and her successes and failures at whatever events she's entered in, I just nod and smile and try to look appropriately delighted or distressed as the conversation calls for. But I don't have a clue what is going on.

I could go out to the living room and watch something right now, but I still appear to be sitting in this chair. The lure of the warm blue glow of the television is apparently not enough to tear me away from the cold white glare of my computer screen.

However, it requires no effort at all to head over to Sprite's Keeper and check out this week's Spin Cycle entries. That's where I'm going. The topic this week was "Confessions", and I'm expecting there to be some juicy stuff!

Bear Hunt

At Elizabeth's dance class they sometime act out the motions to a song called "Going on a Bear Hunt." She is scared, delighted and intrigued by this song, all at the same time. And she's had bears on the brain lately.

So when I got home from work yesterday and she showed me this:

I was not surprised.

Yeeeouch....

I have decided that anyone with a headache as bad as this one, even a re-committed blogger, is allowed to take a pass on posting anything of substance.

Especially when they are also supposed to be creating a birthday DVD for their almost 96 year old grandfather, planning for some fund-raising they're doing, and have a house that looks like a hurricane went through it, and won't be taking care of any of that either.

The only thing I really have to report is that I bought a new hot glue gun this afternoon, and I am delighted with it. Even though I won't be using it tonight after all.

Maybe tomorrow I'll show you the bear picture that Elizabeth drew today, in hopes that will make up for my neglect.

It depends on if I still have this headache.

Or my head. I'm tempted to start banging my head on the wall to see if that has more of an effect than the ibuprofen I have been unsuccessfully popping. I bet I could do it some damage.

Blech.

Well, we tried...

My girls and I have done many a project in our few short years together. So when we tried to make petit fours tonight, after reading about them in a My Little Pony book, I wasn't nervous about taking them on. The directions we had were simply to frost pieces of pound cake that you cut into whatever shapes you want. What could be difficult about that?

I did the cutting, although I had hovering helpers. We stuck with squares and rectangles and triangles. I was tempted to break out the cookie cutters so the girls could help me, but decided against it, since we did this right after I got home from work, and I still needed to make dinner.

Right away I realized that if we tried to frost the these little babies the way we frost cupcakes that it was going to be a huge mess. Since these were supposed to be child sized tea cakes, I had cut them pretty small. My girls are pretty good with these things, but I couldn't see them holding tiny cakes and frosting them at the same time, and if you tried to frost them on the cookie rack they were small enough to stick to the knife and not stay put.

So I went with the alternate plan I had considered, which was to melt the icing enough that we could spoon it over the cakes. Of course we tried to do it before I tested the icing consistency. The girls kept at it, but you can see that the icing was not cooperating.


Back into the microwave the icing went, and results were much more successful so we repeated it with the vanilla and chocolate icing. Then we got to into it, and I forgot to document the process, but we ended up with some cute little cakes:

See?

Of course, these wouldn't win any beauty contests, but they are delicious, and many were eaten at all stages of the process.

If you want to make them yourself, here are some tips:

If you use a frozen pound cake like I did, it worked just fine to slice it up while still frozen. In fact, I think I got sharper edges because I did that, so the cookie cutters would have worked well.

If you heat up your icing, do it slowly so it doesn't separate.

Put any sprinkles on right away so they stick, and

Refrigerate these little guys so the icing sets up quicker.

My girls are into icing on their treats these days, and almost always leave the cake or cupcake behind, but they ate their weight in these things (well, more or less, we only used one small pound cake), and I sent them to bed high on sugar.

So, yes. They didn't turn out so beautiful to look at, but they were pretty beautiful to eat, and doing projects with my girls is the most beautiful thing of all.