Happy Mother's Day

Happy Mother's Day to my wonderful mom!  And my wonderful grandmothers!

This picture actually has both my mom and her mom in it.  This is the present Grandma sent Mom for her birthday and Mom loved it and wanted to show Grandma how beautifully it was wrapped (because Grandma wasn't all that sure Williams Sonoma could adequately wrap a present to meet with her high standards).  I mean it even came with a baby whisk!  How cute is that?!  So here you go Grandma, mom loved her present and it was wrapped very nicely :)  Happy Mother's Day!

My Sweet Tooth

Look at these gorgeous little pastel parcels of loveliness!  Look at them all nestled in their soft bed of colored Easter grass just waiting for me to stop by and marvel at their delicate perfection, ponder their lusciousness, and reminisce about their deliciousness.

And then stuff a handful in my mouth and swoon in bliss while breaking the scale at the same time.  Don't ask me how it happens, call it my intuition, but you can just hear the scale cracking and groaning from the bathroom when eating these little buggers.  Not that this stops me.  I've just taken to avoiding the scale.  Our breakup wasn't him, it was me.


 

This is what my parents do to me!!!  Situated right next to the fruit bowl is the ever present Cadbury egg and white chocolate M&M bowl, and it never ends!  Seriously, when this thing gets low it just get refilled.  Magically.  By the fairies who hate bathroom scales and my jeans.

You see my parents have this thing called "self control" when it comes to these delightful delicacies.  I don't.  None.  Not at all.  It must be a gene I'm missing.  Or maybe I have the "it's delicious, I'm going to eat more of it" gene.  So, for them, having this bowl of tempting lusciousness out all day, every day is no problem.  For me it's a nightmare.  A wonderful nightmare filled with longing, satisfaction, and guilt.  Lots of guilt.  I think bowls of cadbury eggs are why confession was invented.

When faced with situations like this, I normally choose avoidance.  I would physically remove myself from the temptation by not purchasing any sweets.  Lent was also a time when I was spectacular in self restraint (New year's resolution, not so successful.  Lent, very successful.  Again with the guilt thing).  Sadly I can't say to my family "I have to fit into a bikini and look presentable in less than two months so I'm flushing your entire devilish stash of cadbury eggs and white chocolate m&ms down the toilet." I'm pretty sure I would be disowned.  And I can't even eat them faster to make them all go away.

   

This is what our pantry looks like right now.   You see, we absolutely love, cherish, and adore these little chocolate lovelys and they're only available for a limited time every year.  So we stock up.  Which means we should be set to last the summer and only suffer a few months of deprivation before Christmas rolls around and we can get our fix again.  Why do we have so many bags of these candies?  Because I made them buy them all.  They were pretty embarrassed going to the store and purchasing 8 bags at a time, let me tell you.  And why was I making them buy all this candy when I've just spent the first part of the blog post complaining about my squishy, non-bikini-ready stomach?  Because we didn't buy as many bags last year and we ate them up faster and I had to spend a good 7 months listening to "I miss white chocolate m&ms," "I wish we still had white chocolate m&ms," "weren't those white chocolate m&ms good?"  So to save my sanity I made them buy enough to last the summer, subsequently sabotaging my goal of meeting a future husband or boyfriend and wowing him with my toned physique.


  

But it's worth it, I guess, because these little things are delectable.  Truly they are really, really good.  I confess to having a soft spot for white chocolate.  I have loved it all my life.  As a young kid I only liked milk chocolate and white chocolate.  Becca and Sarah got the chocolate Easter candy and I got the white chocolate Easter candy.  This was just a fact of life.

(Oh, P.S., for my birthday my mom and Sarah found white chocolate cake batter bark from Godiva.  Um heaven!)

Where was I?  Oh yes.  I was first introduced to white chocolate m&ms back when the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie came out.  They came out with a special edition version for the movie and omg it was amazing!  My mom and I fell in love.  Sadly this special edition never gained enough popularity to become a mainstay on the shelves and all we were left with was a vague memory of blissful scrumptiousness (and anger at the coconut m&ms they decided to introduce instead.  Honeslty have you ever heard anyone say they actually like the coconut m&ms?  Ever?).  That was until last year when, by some miracle, we found white chocolate m&ms special for Easter!!!  Words cannot describe how excited we were (because our mouths were full, duh!).  But we misjudged our voracious appetites, hence the wailing and the moaning and why I didn't make the same mistake this year.

I did have a minor scare this year when the Cadbury eggs were out at our grocery store for weeks and I looked and looked for white chocolate m&ms and couldn't find them.  I had almost resigned myself to the fact that they weren't popular enough the year before and wouldn't be sold this year when we randomly saw them at Target.  Apparently white chocolate m&ms are a special Target only product.  Who knew.  Anyway, crisis and melt down averted.


     

White chocolate m&ms joined our mainstays of Cadbury eggs for Easter.  I can't remember when we first had cadbury eggs.  I mean we knew about the cadbury cream eggs for years.  Those were synonymous with Easter candy, but I think mom and dad got the mini eggs randomly one year and they became a given in our Easter baskets.  I have no idea what makes them so addictive but they are so good it's ridiculous!  Thankfully they now sell them at Christmas time too (although they're just balls, not eggs.  I've never heard of Christmas eggs.)

We also found the dark chocolate version a few years ago and dad has been loving them.  I think they taste fine, but I prefer the milk chocolate and so does everyone else so dad gets these all to himself.

So that is the story of our stash.  My wasitline will get bigger as our stash gets slowly smaller.  I might hide a few bags and bring them out in August when morale gets low.  But I'll only have to do this with the Cadbury eggs because . . . they now sell the white chocolate m&ms at Target and not just for Easter!!!  I was almost disappointed, all those embarrassing shopping trips looking like a hoarder of candy for nothing!  We can now indulge our passion for white chocolate whenever we want!  Forget the ten bags we still have in the cabinet.  Sigh.   Oh well, at least now you all can go and try them and experience them and then maybe you won't think I'm as crazy for writing a blog post about how much I love white chocolate and the angst I've gone through for years over these things :)

If You Give a Girl a Baking Sheet

So I cookie.  That's what it's called, "cookie-ing." Trust me, I've read enough cookie blogs to know that because I "cookie" I am a "cookier"and what I do is called "cookie-ing."  Apparently people who "cookie" are smart enough that they can make up their own words . . . lol, oh well, at least it makes sense.
Btw, I think I'm addicted to reading cookie blogs.  Pinterest and cookie blogs.

I like to cookie a lot and since my family is pretty much sick of sugar cookies by now (they haven't said anything to me, but I can infer) I keep having to invent new reasons to justify making cookies and decorating them.  "Hey mom and dad, you now have two dozen cookies just because I wanted to try out this new piping technique.  Surprise!" doesn't sit too well.  But it's getting to be a bit of an obsession.  If I go more than two weeks without making cookies it feels weird.  Thankfully there are enough events and holidays (first volleyball game of the season anyone?) that I can make cookies pretty often.

So since I make so many cookies and post the designs ad nauseum I figured I should show the process of how I make the cookies and not just the finished product!

First, make any cookie dough you want.  I make the cookie dough from the blog Bake at 350.  I had a blind taste test between our traditional cookie dough, the cookie dough I used during college, and this cookie dough this past Christmas with the family and the Bake at 350 cookie dough won!  It also stands up pretty well to baking and shipping.  This is what works for me, but you can use your favorite recipe for cookie dough.

Take the dough and plop it down on a lightly floured surface.  The dough that I use doesn't use softened butter, instead it takes cold butter, cut into cubes, and mixes it with the sugar.  This means that you don't have to refrigerate your cookie dough before you roll it out.  It saves A LOT of time.  It's awesome.

I also like to take a piece of freezer paper and tape it to the counter and roll my cookie dough out on that.  You don't have to do this if you don't want to, I just like being able to untape the paper and put the whole mess into the trash can instead of having to scrub the counter for ages after rolling out the dough.

 

This is the rolling pin I use.  I got it for Christmas and it's really nice because the plastic disk on the side keeps the entire dough the same thickness.  I use the 1/4" thickness.  I've heard that people do it thicker at 3/8" but that is a thick cookie!  Who knows, I might switch to a 3/8" thick cookie in the future but for now I make a 1/4" thick cookie.

Having the cookies all one thickness and never having to guess at how thick to roll the dough makes sure that all the cookies bake at the same rate.

When the dough is all rolled out and the cookie shapes are cut out, arrange the cookies on a silpat.  This lovely invention makes sure that the bottoms of the cookies never burn and that the cookies never stick to the pan.  And it's pretty inexpensive, just $25.  If you make a lot of sugar cookies I really suggest it.  Chocolate chip cookies don't work as well on it, they spread out.  So if you like flat chocolate ship cookies this will also work for you (but we like our chocolate chip cookies mounded.  Personal preference and all that).

Isn't it funny how something as simple as cookies can have so many different "right" ways of being made?


 

Ok, here are the cookies arranged on the cookie sheet.  You don't need them to be spaced very far apart because . . . . 

You freeze them before you bake them!  Seriously.  Put the cookies in the freezer for at least five minutes before you cook them.  This will ensure that the cookies keep their shape.  Ever had those Christmases where the snowman migrated into the santa and morphed into a reindeer?  Yeah, that's because the cookies weren't frozen beforehand.  Trust me on this, it will change your life and save you a lot of tears!

Bake them for 10-12 minutes.  I know that at 12 minutes the cookies will be perfect, but that's for my oven and all ovens are different, so finding the exact time will take some trial and error.

Five minutes is the minimum, but I normally freeze them for 10-12 minutes.  I work on two cookie sheets so while one sheet is in the oven, I have the other cookie sheet in the freezer (and it takes 12 minutes to bake a pan of cookies, hence the 12 minute freezing time lol).

See?  Pretty cookies, no spreadage (making up words again).  You can take them off the pan to cook on a cookie rack, but leave them on the pan to cook down a bit and firm up first.  There is nothing worse than lifting a freshly baked cookie off the cookie sheet and having it break in half because it hadn't hardened enough.  Leaving them on the sheet won't harm them at all.

Ah, the most important (and yummiest) part of the cookie baking process . . . tasting!  Now before you go poo-pooing taste testing as just an excuse to eat a cookie (which is partly is), it's also important if you're giving cookies to other people to eat, like your office or your friends.  Case in point:  I use salted butter to make the cookie dough.  It's pretty much the only thing I ever use salted butter for, so I ran out one day and didn't want to go to the store just to get salted butter when I had butter in the fridge and salt in the cabinet.  So made the dough as normal and I just added a teaspoon of salt to the butter in the beginning.  BIG mistake!  I later learned that each stick of butter only has 1/8th of a teaspoon of salt in it, so by adding 1 teaspoon of salt I had added four times the salt needed to the dough!  Those cookies were for my mom's birthday so it's a good thing I tasted them before I had decorated them and sent them out the door.

Moral of the story (or blog post), taste your finished cookies, freeze you cookies before baking, and use cold butter to make the dough.  Voila!  You will have perfect cookies every time :)

Frosting how-to coming soon . . .

Leaves, and How They Fall

This was the backyard last year in the Fall.  The colors were really pretty but at this point most of the leaves had already fallen.  For some reason the tree closest to the porch didn't get the memo that it was time for the leaves to turn colors . . . I bet he was texting . . .

See?  All the leaves are on the ground.  Mom gets so sad when this happens.  One of her favorite pass times is to sit on the deck and just look at the trees so when the leaves all fall . . . well let's just say if there was a seasonal leaf-fallage disorder my Mom would have it!

Ah the bird feeder.  We have the special weight sensing bird feeders so that no squirrels can eat the bird feed.  Birds are light enough that when they sit on the feeder they can eat, but when the squirrels try to sit on them, they're too heavy and it closes the holes where the bird feed is. 

Btw, those birds eat like you wouldn't believe!  Dad will fill it up on Sunday and it will be gone by Tuesday morning.  High maintenance little buggars.

Here's the magnolia out front.  I actually took those photos right before Hurricane Sandy was going to hit because I knew once all the wind and the rain was finished we'd have no more leaves left at all.

Here's a little birdie taking a bath during Sandy.  It was just the cutest thing bouncing around on our front steps!

 

And this is our backyard in the Winter.

HA!  Just kidding!  This is our backyard in the SPRING!  Yep folks this picture was taken in April.  Go figure.  Since we didn't get any measurable snow during the winter, though, I was ok with getting snow in the spring.

Ahhh back to leaves again.  Once the snow and the cold went away the leaves just popped out.  It's like they were waiting until the cold weather completely left and once they knew it was safe they made up for lost time.  I barely noticed buds before all the leaves were suddenly there.  Now we just have to wait for summer and everything will be covered and shaded by leaves!

Gardening Start

Alright, it has taken me forever to get a new blog post up, but I have a lot of posts back logged so I'll have lots up this weekend (hopefully).  Here's a quick one to tide everything over to the weekend.

Over the winter we've had a couple new additions to the family of plants that dad doesn't water.  I swear, he buys plants constantly and 80% of them would die if I didn't water them!  I can't tell you how many times I've heard "when was the last time we watered the plants?"  (sigh) I deal with so much. 

First off this is a lovely avocado plant!  I think Dad got this for mom for Christmas?  Or he randomly bought it on a whim?  Who knows, but it's been growing like a weed which is awesome!  I'm not sure if it will grow fruit any time soon (there are no flowers or buds, just leaves) but it's nice to have it growing.  It's a nice change to have plants in the house that aren't those stupid house plants that sit on the top of peoples' shelves and grow more dust than leaves!  But by golly they grow even if you don't water them. 

This little lovely is a lemon tree.  Dad got it for mom for her birthday.  It has been growing really fast as well and has a ton of flowers.  None of us know if it's self-pollinating or if it needs bees to pollinate it, so I've been dragging it out to the porch to hopefully entice the bees to it.  Sadly it's been chilly these past few weekends so I put the little lemon tree out on the back porch and the poor thing got all droopy because it was too cold.  Come on weather, it's MAY!  It's supposed to be WARM!  Sheesh.  I'm not sure if this one is going to produce fruit either (they say it takes three years) but the flowers sure smell nice!
 

And lastly, this is our garden!  Well it's what will be our garden.  Nothing is sprouting yet but these are what I've started the seeds in that we will transplant to the garden.  I've planted zucchini and squash and beans and pumpkins and herbs.  They need to sprout soon or I will be depressed.  Side note:  I'm totally installing a permanent perforated hose in the garden before we put plants in so all I have to do to water is hook the hose up and turn on the water and walk away.  It will get the water right at the base of the plants where it's needed and it will mean that I won't have to stand there for over an hour getting the whole garden!  

Holy Week Cookies!

It has been a busy few weeks!  First Sarah came home for spring break, and we celebrated Mom and my birthdays, and then Rebecca had her spring break, and then it was Palm Sunday and Holy Week and Easter!  Now, for normal people, Holy Week wouldn't entail much other than going to church and fasting a bit, but for people in choirs is entails a lot of singing and piano playing.  A LOT of singing!  Let's see, Mom and Dad were doing Palm Sunday mass on Saturday night so Mom played piano constantly and practiced with Dad who was doing a solo/meditation piece along with all the regular songs.  Then they had a bass practice at the house for all the basses in the choir (and some of their alto wives who tagged along) to practice their parts for Holy Week and Easter.  Then there was the practicing and going to mass to sing the songs.  So there has been a lot of music generated in the house these past two weeks.  Which is just fine I guess.  I do miss singing in a choir.  I'm sitting there listening to all this music (btw Good Friday music is my favorite music of all time) and I miss college when I belonged to a choir and would go to all the Monday night practices for Holy week starting pretty much a month before Easter along with the regular week practices (then there was that one year where we had Holy Week practice, regular practice, AND trip choir practice!).  I haven't found a choir I want to join yet here.  All the choirs I've heard sing boring, unenlightened songs and they're full of old people.  Siiiiiiigh.  Oh well.  I did find myself pulling out the music I used to sing and belting out the soprano parts this week while plunking out the notes on the piano and trying to figure out the flats (seriously there must be a rule where all Holy Week songs are in keys will a million flats!).
So this brings me to the point of my post!  Since I miss singing with my college choir so much, and since I can't justify buying a plane ticket to fly to Manhattan for one Friday and then fly home in time for Easter, I decided to send cookies to the choir instead!
I had to plan the cookies out and figure out what I wanted to make and get the cookie cutters ordered from Amazon (which worked out nicely since I ordered them at the same time as Mom's birthday presents.  What didn't work out so nicely was that packages would come in the mail and I would open them thinking they were cookie cutters and they were actually presents for me!  I closed the box up and told Sarah to tell mom she opened it . . . ).  I mean what type of cookies say "Holy Week"?  It took some brainstorming but I finally came up with what I thought were some good ideas!

First thing I thought of was a cross, but I knew that there was ABSOLUTELY NO WAY I would be able to draw a recognizable Jesus using frosting.  I wouldn't even be able to draw a decent Jesus unless it involved three erasers and many, many sheets of paper.  So I went with a less literal translation but I thought it was still pretty meaningful.  I liked the idea of turning the nail holes into roses because what the nail holes signified was so beautiful.

I'd never piped roses before and after running to Michaels for new frosting tips and trying for an hour to figure out how to pipe roses small enough to fit on the cookies, I wound up just using a star tip and making a swirl and adding a dash of green for a leaf (to make people go "Oh!  It's a flower not just a red swirl!).  I think they looked enough like roses to convey the point though :)

Now, since I was sending these cookies to my old choir I HAD to include a music note cookie (we already had a music note cookie cutter, go figure).  I didn't really want to send just a cookie with black frosting.  Woo Hoo Beth is so talented she can ice a cookie!  Lol so I added a red flower to match the cross cookies.

Now I was excited because I got to try a new technique for these cookies!  I think it's called brushed embroidery?  Anyway, it's where you draw a line of frosting, then take a small brush dipped in water and blotted on a paper towel and brush the frosting down.  It's kinda hard to explain but I'll post pictures of the process so it will make it clearer!


  

But I liked how they turned out.

The final cookie I did was a lily.  When you think Easter you think white lilies but it wasn't Easter just yet so I went with somber colors and still made a lily.

This is a starfish cookie cutter btw.  In case you ever have to make a lily cookie you can use a star fish cookie cutter and it works just as well!

Oh and all this dark icing to match the somber mood of Holy Week?  Yeah it can color your teeth!  I suggest chewing with your molars and brushing your teeth!  (no worries it won't stain your teeth, it will just turn them pretty colors and cause the people around you to amuse themselves at your expense).  I included gum and Wisps in the box to clean off peoples' teeth in case they were worried.

Here are all the cookies together!  Not a bad group of cookies if I do say so myself :)
So I mailed the cookies last Monday and the post office promised me that they would get there on Wednesday so I didn't have to pay for next day shipping.  Well it turns out they didn't get there till FRIDAY when of course everyone was fasting and couldn't eat them.  So I hope they ended up tasting ok and I hope none of them got broken.  It's stressful sending cookies!
Word of advice, the Manhattan post office is pathetic and always send cookies way in advance.  Sigh.  But in case they were a total bust this is what they were supposed to look li

Olive Oil Trails and Travails

Ahhhhh, every time I look at this olive oil topper, I smile :)  First of all it's gorgeous.  Second of all, I got it in Italy.  Specifically in Assisi.  And I LOVED Assisi.  Out of all the towns I visited in Italy Assisi spoke to me.  It was a beautiful, historic, peaceful city and just a really special place.  I recommend going there for anyone who travels to Italy.  So I guess I'm a bit biased about this olive oil topper, but it elicits such good memories! (If I went back I could literally show you the exact place I purchased the topper).

The problem is that I only purchased the topper. They didn't sell empty olive oil bottle to go with the toppers.  So once I got back to the US I had to find a bottle to fit the topper.  But see that cork down at the bottom?  Yeah apparently it doesn't fit every bottle!

And apparently they don't sell that many plain olive oil bottles either.  Actually they don't really sell ANY olive oil bottles, lain or not.  This is one of the bottles we tried (we tried a few others but mom knocked those off the counter and they broke . . . ).  Isn't it gorgeous!?  I'll answer that for you.  No, it's NOT gorgeous.  It's pretty hideous actually.  But at least it worked.


 

This is actually the topper that came with the bottle.  I think my first thought when I saw this topper was "Seriously?!  What were they THINKING?! Whose kitchen does that even MATCH?!" Can you even guess what that is?

It's a peach.  A weird, cumbersome peach.  Because every time I see a peach I immediately think olive oil . . . not.

These were some of the other oil toppers from the broken bottles.  They weren't the same size as the cork one that's for sure.

Medium Well had the idea to use a balsamic vinegar bottle and that worked for a while, but the topper kept falling out.  Then I had the idea, a wine bottle!  Wine bottles use corks so the cork should fit.  Wine bottles are dark so they don't let as much sunlight in (you're supposed to keep your olive oil in a dark container but I don't think that matters for me since the quality of my olive oil isn't that spectacular . . . I mean come on I get it from the grocery store!).  And wine bottles are big and hold a lot of olive oil so I don't have to refill the bottle that often.  It pretty much was a match made in heaven and has worked perfectly :)
So if you ever find yourself with an olive oil topper from Italy and no bottle to go with it, take one for the team and drink a bottle of wine, wash the bottle out (preferably after the effects of consuming the bottle of wine have worn off), let it dry, and then fill it with olive oil, add the topper, and voila!  Perfection!