cupcakes from scratch and faux weaving...

I love StumbleUpon set on just knitting. Because I stumble across wonderful little things like a tutorial on entrelac:

And of course I have to right then and there start a new project. Going to make a scarf. All the weaving is going to be of the same teal color, no alternating every other row here. Except there's going to be the occasional gray streak throughout. Just so I have a ridiculous amount of ends to weave in the end...

And after pining away to make cupcakes and cakes from scratch and never having baking powder as opposed to baking soda... we finally got baking powder and it took me about a month before I took advantage of it.

These here are peanut butter chocolate cupcakes. Which are delicious, but taste like neither chocolate or peanut butter, go figure. I experimented with melting some peanut butter into a typical confectioner's sugar/milk glaze mix, and that tastes more like peanut butter than the cupcakes.

And I've found that storing the cupcakes in the freezer makes them amazingly moist. I never knew cupcakes tasted so good cold.

And alas...

I still don't have any pictures of the finished Decimal Cardigan. It will even be featured in a student film, but it has not been still photographed. I will get on that... once I'm done:
- studying all weekend for a test for Egypt class
- forcing myself to attempt to learn Spanish not just pass the class this semester and be done with it
- memorizing the origins, details, and years of a dozen different specie of hominid
- and reading a repetitive ethnography (that really is redundant... aren't they all?) about transgendered Brazilian prostitutes.


I love college. At least it's interesting.

baking and bathtime

I've been messing around with cookie recipes lately. Let's be honest... making cookies from scratch is so much more satisfying than the open-package-pop-in-oven kind. Those are tasty, too, and great if you're a busy person with small children that need instant appeasing... but I'm a pretty devoted fan to sticking my hands in things and getting messy.

And if you ask my mother or Alex or, well, just about anyone that has baked or gardened or crafted with me, I am the queen of getting messy. At 19 years of age, I managed to paint something without getting anything on my clothes for the first time ever.

But the other night I made some damn good cookies from a recipe I made up.

Spiced Oatmeal Cookies

2 1/4 cups of flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 cup softened butter
1/2 cup of shortening
3/4 cup of sugar
3/4 cup of brown sugar
1 tsp. vanilla extract
2 eggs
1 - 2 cups of oats, depending on preference
1 tbsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. ginger
1/2 tsp. ground cloves

Mix together WITH YOUR HANDS. Glop on cookie sheets, bake in 375 degrees F oven for 12 - 13 minutes. Makes about 3 dozen cookies, but I've been told my cookies are big. Just remember... the bigger your cookies, the fewer cookies you have to admit you ate.

Variations: You could toss in some raisins or nuts... but why make such a delicious thing healthy-ish? The oatmeal should be enough to convince yourself you ate more than one food group today.

These'll be gone by the end of the night. They're pretty damn good, if I may toot my own horn. Definitely my most successful shooting-in-the-dark kitchen experiment.


In other news... Sakura had such a curiosity over the bathtub that she got her first bath the other night. I just pulled her off the edge of the tub and put her in. She wasn't too happy. I figured that would end her days of playing in the bathtub.

Nope. Just today she's back at it. I'm not sure cats learn cause and effect as well as dogs do... That or the bathtub is just that damn alluring.