Errands Make Me Batty

So in my effort to watch my spending I choose to shop at Wal-Mart today rather than Target. I know Wal-Mart has better prices on some of the household staples I use and I don't caught up in all the "cuteness" like I do when I shop at Target. However, every flippin' time I go (okay maybe 7 out of 10) I manage to come home without at least one of the items I purchased. So regardless of what I saved by shopping there (and supporting China) and using coupons I've been screwed because now I either have to just cut my losses (a bag of snickers) or I have to waste my time and gas and energy to go back up there to get my stuff. This just pisses me off. I don't know how ya'lls Wal-Marts work but in less I stand there and bag my own stuff something always gets left behind. I blame it on the dumb turnstile bagging mechanism they use. They just bag then turn, bag then turn and one of my bags always gets stuck on the backside next to the cashier who is never paying attention. Let me give you an example...I was purchasing a big ass bag of cat food today that I loaded into the cart rather then on the bottom so that the cashier would see it and would be able to reach her little scanner thing over the counter and ring it up, rather than one of us having to lug the thing onto the counter to be scanned...do you think she noticed it in my cart? NOPE, I could have walked right out with it, but I'm not that lady so I was honest and told her she forgot to ring it...how do they thank me for my honesty...by keeping my bag of snickers...which happened to be the best bag of Halloween candy I bought and due to my angered state could really be helpful at this moment.

Wait it gets better. After leaving Wal-Mart I went across the street to get a shirt I saw in their Sunday flyer. I made it past the dollar spot (should be called the $20 spot) easily found the shirt, grabbed it in two sizes so my hubby could decide which one fit best (it's for him, I don't depend on him to tell me if my cloths fit...). I quickly headed to the checkouts managing to divert my daughter's attention away from the toy aisle (I told her our cart didn't have any breaks!) checked out and headed home. I pulled the shirts out of the bag to show my husband and not one but both of the white button down shirts have black grease stains on them! AHHHHH, I so do not have time for this. I've been trying to buy all three of us white button down shirts to wear for our upcoming family pics. You'd think that was an easy task...and for some of you perhaps it would be, but not for me, not this time. I tried Old Navy...apparently to fit into a small you must be invisible...I'm 5'3", 112 lbs. and I couldn't even button the shirt...not to mention that it was barely long enough to cover the top of my jeans and we all know the style for shirts these days is to the hips. So now, I have to go back to Target, which I was gonna have to do regardless of the stains since I bought two shirts, but now I have to hope they have an un-stained one in the correct size, I'm calling it a lose on the snickers, I have to take everything I bought from Old Navy back, and I also have a bag of stuff to go back to Steinmart because the white shirt I bought for my hubby there wasn't one he liked...sigh...I ran all these errands and in the process created a whole new list of them to run. I suppose I should just be thankful that I don't work outside the home and am able to run these errands during the week when the stores are a little less crowded...and maybe if I had a snickers bar to eat I wouldn't be so bent out of shape...you just don't mess with sugar addicts candy I tell you. I'm going to lay in bed and watch Oprah..ohhh, or maybe Maury...his pathetic guests always make me feel like I'm livin' a dream (LOL)!


NOTE: After I sat here and typed this rant I got up to go watch Oprah, I headed to the kitchen to get a snack...I opened the freezer and there was the missing bag of snickers. Now I happen to think this is hilarious...my 3 year old put them there because in her words "snickers need to be cold". Ahhh, my crazy life...you still should not mess with my candy! But apologies to the cashier I blamed my lost bag of snickers on...today my cashier actually did her job correctly. If only I could go look at my white shirts and see that the grease stains were just spots I was seeing from low blood sugar brought on by my "missing" bag of snickers...I desearve a snickers so I'm off to get one before they go missing again. Is it a full moon?? I'm batty I tell you...batty

Friday Fun

On Friday I hosted a play date at my house for my daughter and 10 of her friends. Since she didn't get to help me with the cookies I did for the baby shower I decided to host her very own cookie decorating party. I made the cookies and had the icing in little zip locks for the kids to use. I'm not sure what I did wrong but my cookies didn't come out quite right. They spread (just a little) which is not supposed to happen. I'm thinking it was caused by one of three things...

1. I didn't let the eggs come to room temp.
2. I beat to much air into the dough.
3. I didn't let the dough chill enough.



Whatever the reason, it didn't really matter, the cookies were fine for a party for 3 year olds! I also decided to try out a different icing recipe (Wilton's poured cookie icing) that didn't call for meringue powder so I used the kids cookies as Ginny pigs so to say. I did not like the icing as much as the recipe I generally use. It was fine for piping edges and filling in but you could not do any detail work with it. Here are the cookies I decorated after the kids were gone. I like the shininess of the icing but like I said you can't do any detail work with it.





Since play dates are as much about the mama's as they are about the kids I wanted to make something for us to enjoy. Being fall (even if it was like 85 degrees today with 200% humidity) I choose a cranberry-pumpkin bread with a cranberry-pecan streusel on top. The recipe calls for you to drizzle a simple icing on top after they've baked but I never got around to doing it and IMO they didn't need it. I decided to make the recipe as muffins rather than as a loaf..easier to serve and prettier presentation wise (again IMO).



Cranberry-Pumpkin Mini Loaves
By Publix (my local grocery store)


2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
2 1/2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
1 tsp. finely shredded orange peel
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. ground ginger
1 cup canned pumpkin
1/3 cup cooking oil
1/3 cup milk
2 eggs, beaten
1/2 cup chopped pecans
1/2 cup cranberries, coarsely chopped
1 recipe Cranberry Streusel Topping
1 cup powdered sugar
1 to 2 Tbsp. milk



Cranberry-Pecan Streusel


3/4 cup coarsely chopped cranberries
1/2 cup coarsely chopped pecans
1/4 cup packed brown sugar
1/4 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp. ground ginger



Stir well to combine.

Prepare your muffin pan (or 6 mini loaf pans as the recipe calls for) and set aside. In a large bowl combine flour, sugars, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, orange peel, salt and ginger. make a well in the center and set aside.

In a medium bowl combine pumpkin, oil, milk and eggs. Add all at once to the dry ingredients. Stir just until moistened. Fold in the cranberries and pecans. Using an ice-cream scoop, spoon the batter into the muffin pan (or spoon evenly into loaf pans). Sprinkle streusel over batter.

Bake at 350 degrees for 15-18 minutes (35-40 minutes for loaf pans) or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean. Cool in pans on wire rack for 10 minutes. Remove from pans and cool completely. Just before serving combine the 1 cup of powdered sugar and milk, then drizzle over the tops.

Notes: As you can probably see in the picture I didn't use very many cranberries in the streusel. I didn't measure what I did use but it was probably only about 1/4 - 1/3 cup. And I used Sun Maid Cranberries (the kind you find by the raisins) NOT fresh or frozen cranberries. And as mentioned before I didn't put the icing on top.

No Fail Sugar Cookies

By Fancy Flours

6 cups flour

3 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. salt

2 cups sugar

2 tsp. vanilla

2 cups butter

2 eggs

Make sure all ingredients are at room temperature. Cream butter and sugar until fluffy (about 5 minutes). Add eggs, and flavoring (you can also use almond). Mix dry ingredients in separate bowl and add a little at a time to butter mixture. Mix well.

Put a handful of the dough between two pieces of parchment paper (or wax paper) and roll to desired thickness. Repeat with the remaining dough. Put the rolled dough, including the parchment paper, on a cookie sheet and refrigerate for 10 minutes or longer. Your dough will be ready to cut and bake with no added flour! Repeat with scraps after cutting cookies.

NOTES: If you have not yet discovered Fancy Flours, I highly recommend you check them out. They have the most wonderful products, they even have a catalog you can receive for FREE, that is filled with ideas. I just love it!

Poured Cookie Icing

By Wilton

1 cup powdered sugar

2 tsp. milk

2 tsp. light corn syrup

Place sugar and milk in bowl. Stir until mixed thoroughly. Add corn syrup and mix well. For filling in areas use thinned icing (add small amounts of corn syrup until desired consistency is reached).

How to Build a Cupcake Tower

I promised I would explain how I built the cupcake tower I did for my step-dad's 50th suprise party (just in case the 4 of you read this blog are curious :)) As I've previously disclosed, I don't do math, so building this thing to accommodate the correct number of cupcakes was a bit of a challenge. I actually never figured it out, my lovely husband stepped in and rescued me and thank goodness or I'd probably still be sitting around trying to draw it out on graph paper (that or I'd be sitting in the corner beating my head against the wall). So here it goes.

1) I started with 4 inch thick floral foam, found at Michael's or JoAnn's or whatever craft store you have in your neck of the woods. I bought two 36x12x4 inch pieces. Each of those was cut to be 24 inches long (save the extra pieces for the next two levels).

2) Next, the two 24 inch long pieces were tapped together, both down the middle and around the edges so that when I picked it up it didn't fold in half.

3) One of the extra pieces from step-one was used as the second tier, which was 12x12. And the last extra piece was cut down to be 7x7. We cut it as small as we could leaving it big enough to accommodate a 6 inch cake.

4) Next, we wrapped each tier. I used Wilton's Fanci Foil wrap. I was going for a black and silver look so this worked perfectly. I wrapped each tier just like I would a present.

5) After they were wrapped, we glued the black ribbon all the way around.

6) Stack the tiers and TaDa you now have a cupcake tower.

I needed it to accommodate 60 cupcakes and the little cake on top. Since the tower was placed up against a wall I wasn't able to place many cupcakes on the backside so I simply placed them on the table, essentially creating a 4 tier tower. If your building a tower that is to accommodate a cake on the top then I would start with how big the top tier must be and then work down ( I first tried to do it the other way and it wasn't working out)

Cookies, Cookies and more Cookies

This past weekend I had my first paying baking job!! I was enlisted to make sugar cookies for a baby shower; 100 cookies to be placed in bags as favors and another 30 in the baby's name to be displayed on a tray. The shower was on Sunday, I started baking on Thursday morning and in true Nicole fashion there were some speed bumps along the way...

First Speed Bump: On Wednesday night I decided I would measure out my flour and other ingredients to save me a few steps in the morning. Upon pulling out my bucket of flour I came to the realization that I had been so excited about the fantastic sale on butter at Publix that I totally forgot to check how much flour I had (it was $2 per lb!!!) and from the looks of it I didn't think I'd have enough. This time I lucked out and had almost exactly the 18 cups I needed. Breathing a sigh of relief I headed to bed to get a good nights sleep since the next day was to be a busy baking day!

Second Speed Bump - So much for that good night's sleep. I woke up at 3 AM not because I was anxious to get started but because I had to puke! Great I'm thinking, now I have the flu and I'm supposed to make 12 dozen cookies AND hand decorate them. Thankfully I was only sick once, however, after that one time I lay in bed for the remainder of the night panicking about whether I would feel well enough in the morning to bake and worried about contaminating the cookies.

Third Speed Bump - Thursday morning comes quicker then I wanted. Tired and starving but to afraid to eat in case I really do have the flu I help my little one get ready for pre-school and get her dropped off. I race back home, sterilize my kitchen (in case of the flu) and get baking. I started by preparing the dough, rolling it and then placing it in the fridge to chill. At 11:45 I raced back to pick the little one up and then made a quick stop at Publix for more flour and sugar just in case I needed it ( I also got Sprite to help settle my tummy). As soon as I get home I start baking the cookies...it is at this point I realize I'm in for a really looooooong day. You see I only have 2 cookie pans and these are big cookies I'm making so I could only fit 8 on a pan. Do the math 12 dozen divided by 8 is 18...18 times 10 minutes of baking is 3 hours. Now three hours doesn't sound so bad except I had to wait for the pans to cool before I could place the next batch on them and then there was the cutting of the dough, re-rolling the scraps, re-chilling and cutting again, and again, and again. This combined with the constant interruptions from my 3 1/2 year old made for a very inefficient day. Thankfully my mom stopped by and offered to take the nugget home for the evening. At 10 pm I had all the cookies baked, cooled and put away for the night. I headed to bed and crashed as soon as I my head hit the pillow. Here are most of the cookies waiting to be put away (they're stacked so you can't see all 144)

Friday morning, I popped out of bed, headed straight for the coffee pot and got right down to making icing for the cookies. And here is the next dumb thing I did. I knew I was going to need several batches of icing and I also knew I was going to need 4 colors. Now, you'd think I'd just make a batch of each color...yeah, so not what I did. Instead, I made one batch, separated it into 4 bowls and then made my three colors (the 4th color was white). So once that was gone, I had to make another batch and then make the colors again. Well anyone, whose colored icing knows it's damned near impossible to match the colors (unless your super anal and count how much food coloring you use in each batch...which I don't do). So I caused myself some considerable delays by doing it this way. I did manage to get all of the cookies outlined and filled by the end of the day. So on Saturday I would just have the final decorating and bagging to do. (here's a pic of getting ready to outline)

Saturday morning I get up and again get right down to business. I get the cookies out of the fridge and discover I've made another error. I was up so late the night before icing the cookies, some didn't have enough time to dry completely and when I covered them, the foil stuck to the icing and ruined the lovely smooth finish you want in this sort of cookie. GREAT! It was only about 10 that needed to be fixed, so I simply smoothed the icing as best I could using my handy paintbrush ( a must have when doing decorated cookies of this nature) and then re-iced them to cover the flaws. Those few still didn't look as good as I would have liked but they were still nice enough to present and hey out of 12 dozen if only 10 got screwed up that's pretty good! I worked on the cookies until almost midnight; I had to get done by then so I could watch Sarah Palin on SNL!!

Sunday morning all I had left to do was bag them and put them in the basket for the party, which I was also attending. Me and the cookies were all ready to go by 12:30 leaving me just enough time to snap a few photos..

All in all this project was a success. I completed it on time, the customer was very happy with the finished product and I got paid!! There are of course things I would do differently (like perhaps trying to be a bit more organized) but there is always next time. And my hope is that the more I do this the less my nerves will get all twisted up. I felt such a huge weight lifted off me once I had finished; I put a lot of pressure on myself and worry constantly about whether what I do is good enough. I suppose this sort of pressure is good...it ensures that I always strive to do better than the last time.