Ramalamadingdong

This week is not going as planned, so far. But not all in a bad way.

Yesterday began not going to plan on Sunday night, when I realised that I was scheduled to co-op at nursery school the next morning. I had vaguely planned on going back to Target and finalizing some of the gift shopping - the gift shopping that I'd done a week earlier and that had been helpfully sitting on my bedroom floor for the next six days, waiting for me to do something else useful with it.

This problem was compounded on Monday afternoon when I discovered that that very day, not some vague date in the misty future, was the last day for posting by regular mail to Europe. Oops. Because of course 90% of the stuff in the bag on my bedroom floor was to be mailed to Europe, but I'd been waiting for this and that, for the perfect final present to present itself to me at the weekend's craft fair or some other opportune place, before wrapping it. I also subconsciously felt that B. should partake in the wrapping so that he had some input in all this shopping I'd done for members of his family, but since I didn't tell him that, and last week was busy with various meetings and whatnot, it hadn't happened.

Finally, last night, we sat down and had our gift-wrapping extravaganza, and happily we did have enough wrapping paper and tape and I had even bought a box at the post office that was the right size, all of which are no trivial matters.

So that was ready to be mailed first thing this morning, which would only be one day late and therefore practically in time, and would probably make it to Ireland before the big day anyway. Which would have been simple if this was a normal Tuesday, but then we got a snow day.
                                           
Monday had already been a delayed-start for the schools thanks to Sunday night's snow and ice storm, but then it snowed all morning here and they cancelled school entirely. It's only about an inch, and melting already, but I suppose the schools didn't want to deal with the potential mess of getting all the buses in during a snowstorm. We're not in Colorado, you know. Maryland is technically the South, and thus Not Great With Winter.

However, it was the good sort of snow day. The sort when B. has one too. Yes, yes, he was "working from home," but that also meant I could send him to the post office once the snow eased off, which it did at midday or so, and the roads had all been nicely treated so they were fine. So, BOOM, the parcel has been mailed and with a bit of luck everyone in Ireland will get their presents in time after all, and even if they don't, it's out of my hands now.

While he was doing that, I got off my arse and went through the recipes I've been meaning to try out and we made pretzels! BAM! Where's my snow-day baking award?

And Dash made a snowman all by himself for the first time. It's a little leafy, perhaps, but he's proud of it.

In the afternoon, B went out with Dash and got a Christmas tree, which we hadn't got around to doing yet, so that's something else we don't have to wait till next weekend for. DING!

It's beginning to look a lot like...

Accidental quiche

I remembered late in the day that I was supposed to bring some food to Monday night's board meeting - an appetizer or dessert, because it was at 6.30 and some people wouldn't have had time to eat. There wasn't much in the fridge, I didn't even have a lemon handy to make scones or muffins, and I knew someone else had already taken the chocolate option.

So my brain, as it sometimes does, lit upon probably the most complicated thing possible and decided that was the obvious choice. I would use that lone zucchini (courgette) in the salad drawer and the leftover cream from a cake at the weekend, and make mini quiches.

My brain also decided it was too good for recipes, or couldn't find anything just exactly right, and so thought it would wing it. This could have been disastrous, but by happy chance things came together deliciously and I ended up with some very nice mini quiches.

But then we had nothing for our own dinner, so I decided we should keep the quiches because there weren't enough for everyone at the meeting, and that I'd make some healthy blueberry muffins (frozen blueberries) instead. I ended up bringing seven quiches and some slightly odd-looking mini muffins (all the blueberries stuck to the pan), and I'm sure everyone thought I was a terrible overachiever.

Apologies for the approximate quantities, but I eyeballed the liquids.


Zucchini (and ham) mini-quiches

Pastry:
1 cup (200g) flour (I used white wholewheat flour)
Pinch salt
4oz (100g) butter (I used some spreadable Dairygold I had in the fridge, which might be what led to the very soft texture of this dough)
1 tablespoon cold water

Filling:
1 zucchini (or any vegetable, probably)
About half a small onion
A slice of deli ham (if you have it, or want it)
Some feta, if you had any, would be a delicious addition
Two eggs
A large splash of heavy cream (if you happen to have some hanging around)
As much milk as it takes to get what looks like the right amount of filling
A good grating of parmesan
A pinch of freshly grated nutmeg
Salt and pepper

Turn your oven to 400F.

I made the pastry in the food processor. Put the flour, salt, and butter in the bowl, and pulse until the mixture looks like fine breadcrumbs. Add the water through the tube, pouring slowly. You might need a little more - I was surprised that the dough came together after just one tablespoon. Remove from the processor, smush into a ball, and chill in the fridge for half an hour, if you can spare it.

Meanwhile, finely chop the onion and cut the zucchini into 1/4-1/2 inch cubes. Saute them in a little olive oil until soft but not mushy - maybe five minutes over medium-low heat. Cut your ham into little squares and mix it in with the vegetables. If you have some feta, put that in too.

Mix the eggs, cream, and parmesan in a measuring jug, and then add as much milk as you think will make enough filling. I had perhaps 16oz (500ml) in the end. Better to have too much than too little. Season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

Take the pastry out of the fridge and knead it a little on a floured surface, before rolling it out as thinly as you can. This dough seemed scarily soft to me as I rolled it out, but it stayed together and turned out deliciously. I don't know if it was the flour or the butter or the weather that did it, but I can't swear yours will be just this good.

Use a cookie cutter or a drinking glass to cut circles to fit your well-greased muffin tin or mini-pie pan (I used my mince-pie tin, imported at vast expense from Ireland, but they probably sell something similar here too). Put a circle of dough in each hole, pressing it out to fit the shape, and then prick the base all over with a fork.

(I was afraid at this juncture that I'd made a huge mistake because now my filling would run through the holes, but that didn't seem to happen.)

Bake the pastry cases blind (that just means with nothing in them) for 10-15 minutes at 400F. Take them out when they're still pale - don't wait for them to be golden brown. Take it out and (carefully - remember how hot the tin is) spoon an equal amount of the zucchini mixture into each piecrust. Then pour over the thick and creamy egg mixture to fill each one up.

Bake for about 20 minutes more, turning the oven down a bit to 375F or so, until the top is set and starting to turn brown. Cool before serving, but they're delicious still a little warm.

I had a bit more filling than pastry, so I made three muffin-sized crustless quiches with the rest.

If I'd known how well they were going to turn out, I'd have taken more photos

Four point five cake

Saturday was Mabel's four-and-a-halfth birthday. I like to make a bit of a thing about half birthdays, because a year is a long time to wait, and also Cake, any excuse for; and because sometimes I can make it into enough of a milestone in their minds that they'll do something, or start doing something, or stop doing something, just because now they're whatever-and-a-half.

So Mabel is no longer having boo(b) in the evening. At all. This is great.
Also, she is going to start trying to wipe herself after a poo. All I'm asking is that she tries, that she's willing to give it a go, which will be a lot better than the point-blank refusal I've had up to now. And she has been trying, since Saturday. So that's great too.

On the other hand, she had a fit of the screaming collywobbles at drop-off this morning, and I very much hope that's not indicative of how four point five is going to go. I know it's a tough age and I'm prepared for some backsliding in behaviour and/or willingness to try new things, but I would really like to be able to bring her to school without the clawing and the screaming and the tearing at my heart, because it's nice when that doesn't happen.

Oh well. Onwards to five, which everyone agrees is The Golden Age, rivalled only by eight.

More importantly, cake.

I made half a batch of Burnt Butter Brown Sugar cupcakes (Nigella, How to be a Domestic Goddess) topped with Dark Chocolate Icing (Darina Allen, Easy Entertaining), and they were, if I say it myself, rather gorgeous. I haven't done the brown butter thing before even though Smitten Kitchen and others have been raving about it for a while. It was really easy and I'm pretty sure that's what I have to thank for the fact that these buns are still moist and soft two days later.

(I know, why on earth do we still have any two days later? That will be remedied, don't worry.)

Yoda cake, or overachieving for dummies

At some point yesterday I had an existential crisis. "I don't even know who I am any more," I found myself thinking. "Where has the old me gone?"

The old me, who swore she only made round birthday cakes with icing in the middle and on top, and possibly a shake of sprinkles. The me who didn't do fancy themed parties. The me who scorned such things.

And yet, here I was carving out Yoda ears from a layer of sponge cake and writing names on Jedi training certificates and carefully placing sprinkles with a tweezers. I hang my head. Not only that, I was doing it all for the second year running. So I can't call last year a fluke any more. Apparently this is the person I have become. I'm sorry, everyone.

---------------

Dash will turn seven on Wednesday, and we had his party yesterday, because when you have a midweek birthday you get to choose which weekend you want, and any child worth his salt will obviously choose the prior one. He asked for another Star Wars party, just like last year, and in a fit of enthusiasm, I suppose because that meant I had everything else all figured out already, I said, "I can make a Yoda cake."

Right then. One Yoda cake. It turned out to be much less stressful than last year's light saber cake, mostly because I didn't bother looking for the organic food colouring and because pale green is much easier to pull off in buttercream than bright red. And just in case you want to make a home-baked, non-professional- style Yoda cake for your own six- or seven- or thirty-seven-year-old, this is what I did.

First I baked a regular birthday sponge in two 9-inch pans. The amount in my recipe would have been better in 8-inch ones, really, but 9-inch is what I have. I knew the kids would be more interested in the look than the taste, and with nine children at the table, there was plenty here. (I did this part the day before.)

Not quite enough batter

I used Nigella's birthday buttermilk sponge recipe (not online, but from How to be a Domestic Goddess), as I did last year, but you can use any one you like, or a box mix, or make it chocolate if you prefer.

 

Then I looked at some cartoon-y Yoda images online (like this one) and cut myself two circles of paper the size of my pans, to figure out how long I could make the ears out of one circle. (The first circle was going to be the head, obvs.) I used the paper ears as a template to cut the sponge, once it had cooled completely. I made a couple of moons/asteroids/distant DeathStars out of some of the rest.

Making ears

Then I realised I had no plate the right shape for this creation, and just like last year, I Blue-Peter-ed a used cereal box and some tinfoil into a nice long shiny platter. Here are the head and the ears in place.

Naked cake

I mixed up some buttercream icing - not quite enough, because of course I had stocked up on butter but forgotten to make sure we had plenty of confectioners' (icing) sugar - and used a tiny spoon to make sure I didn't drip too much food colouring in at one time. I think two drops was enough, and I still have a green fingernail this morning.

Then I plastered the buttercream all over the head and ears, covering up the joins and evening out the slight height differences.

Green cake

(I ran to the supermarket for more sugar and made up another little batch for the moons. It turned out I had no other working food colouring so I just kept them white.)

At this point I was quite pleased, but of course I still had the "artistic" part to go.

I used the tip of a butter knife to draw eyes, the indentations in Yoda's ears and the lines around his mouth and on his forehead. Then I dipped the knife tip in hot water and found that made a much cleaner line, so I went over the eyes and wrinkles again that way.

 

I used green sugar (find it in the cake decorating section of the baking aisle, with the sprinkles) for the ears and put chocolate sprinkles carefully - yes, with my tweezers - in the lines to make the eyes and mouth. (Laugh if you will, but I had an empty house and was blasting Pandora on the Duran Duran station. I know how to live it up.) I used a little bit of the uncoloured buttercream for the whites of his eyes and a chocolate chip for each pupil.

And I decided to leave it at that before I messed it up completely.

Mabel is eyeing up the moon she wants to eat

I put the candles in the moons, so they were good for something after all.

Oscars and others

So many disjointed thoughts to impose some sort of order on, as I sit here having third breakfast which just happens to be the same as last night's dessert minus the custard and plus some coffee. It's got apples and oatmeal in it, so the cake part can be disregarded (but enjoyed, of course). Also, I went for a walk/run, so I'm allowed.

Mabel gatecrashed my weekend, basically. Friday night and Sunday night were supposed to be kid-free zones, and somehow they ended up including a certain four-year-old. This morning I dragged her kicking and screaming to school and left her there, where she stopped screaming as soon as I left the room. When I came back at pickup time I was told she'd thwacked her best friend in the face with a shovel. So that went well.

Last night I packed the children off to bed early and tuned the TV in to one of its rarely watched non-kid channels and spent a happy hour or two making snarky comments about the Oscars on Twitter and Facebook, and even paying attention to the show now and then between frantic typing. Just when they were FINALLY getting to the interesting awards, Mabel woke up and wanted to come down and see what we were watching. Getting her back to sleep made me miss the rest of the show, which was probably just as well since it was after 11pm and I had a raging headache, but it was still a bit of an anticlimax.

Oscar thoughts, randomly:

• None of the dresses really stood out to me, but then I missed most of the red carpet. I liked Amy Adams's feathers, Jennifer Aniston's red, and Jennifer Garner's violet, even if the ruffle did make my husband think of seaweed.
• I prefer my men beardless, but George was still lovely. You can all keep Ben and Hugh and I'll have George, thank you.
• Adele's hair looked good. I like the song but I wish she'd stop singing about "Skyfoal" and how it "crumbowls." The husband was delighted with the Bond tribute but would have liked it to be a bit more in-depth. We may have to just view the whole ouvre again
• I laughed at the boobs song. Sorry, world. On the other hand, if you're so unsure of your content that you have to envelop it in a cloaking device of Shatner coming back from the future to tell you it's not much good, maybe you should just get some better content. Or a host people are well-disposed to from the outset. (Hint: Neil Patrick Harris, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler.)

Other thoughts:

• This is the third time I've tried to write a post, so this is what you're getting.
• I have Girl Scout cookies. The end.

Watching Tangled with the Rapunzels

Dilemma

I want to bake something, but I don't know what to bake.

It needs to be delicious, obviously.

But preferably quick to make and not requiring more than two bowls, max.

It should probably have chocolate in it, because if it doesn't I'll end up scouring the kitchen for something else that does.

It should have some sort of vaguely redeeming healthiness about it, so that I don't feel too bad about making it (and eating it).

But if it's too healthy, then it's not going to qualify as a) delicious or b) chocolatey.

If it's too healthy, or lacks chocolate, the children will not eat it.

But if it's too delicious the children will fight over it and I'll regret making it at all.

I could make it and hide it from them, but that requires tricky logistics.

And if I make it and hide it from them I'll end up eating it all, which won't be good for me.

It's going to be pumpkin muffins (with chocolate chips) again, isn't it?

I suppose there are worse things.

Ramblin'

Gah. I'm sitting here trying to remember the great idea I had for a blog post last night in bed, and I know it was about two things that were like each other but different and I could draw parallels and... uh...I don't even know if it was a real idea or one of those things that sounds perfectly practical when you're about to fall asleep but actually involves a minature elephant and twenty-five pints of purple rubber and won't work in real life because I don't live in Mongolia anyway.

I'm sure it would have been great. A literary gem. Instead, let us give thanks for bullet points:

• My new phone just arrived and I'm waiting impatiently for the battery to charge so I can play with it. It's sort of a smart phone - in that it has a touch screen and can use the internet and appy things - but I'm still pay-as-you-go so I'll only use the Internet at home and in places with free wi-fi. I know, this seems kinda stupid, but it made sense to me. I don't need a real smartphone because I'm mostly at home within five feet of my beloved laptop with an actual keyboard.
• The weather is ridiculously warm and I've hung the laundry outside again, which I only do when it's warm enough for my fingers not to go numb. Which usually means I use the dryer from October to March. 
• I spent this morning baking cookies for KeAnne, who bid for them in the Hurricane Sandy fundraiser. I hope she likes 'em crunchy, because they're crunchy. And sweet. And buttery. (We've sampled a few. Just to be sure.)
• I was delighted with myself for finally booking dental checkups for the kids and for myself. The reminder postcards had been floating around the sideboard for months. Then I found myself reading an old blog entry (what? it's like leafing through your own photo album, you know?) and discovered that they went to the dentist as recently as last August so they're not overdue at all. However, I suspect Dash has a cavity (on a brand-new adult molar! it must have come up that way) so I think we'll keep his appointment anyway.

Now I have to figure out how to package these cookies so that I can mail them tomorrow. (I'm told popcorn is the answer. I also have bubble wrap.) So if you'll excuse me, I'll be back tomorrow, maybe even with some purple rubber and an elephant.

A Half-Baked Auction

Bake sale! Buy baked goods for Christmas! Contribute to a good cause! Help victims of Hurricane Sandy!

Go to A Half-Baked Life today or tomorrow and bid on some delicious home-baked goodies to fill in that awkward gap between Thanksgiving and Christmas, to give to your loved ones, or to pass off as your own creations.

The white-chocolate-chip-cranberry cookies and the gingerbread muffins are my contributions, but I also highly recommend JeCaThRe's oatmeal cookies, and I bet everything else listed is just as good, if not better.

Sorry, no overseas shipping. If you're in Ireland, maybe we can do a deal over Christmas, though.

Many thanks to JHL for organizing this in aid of a great cause.

Feast report

Today we went to the zoo. Surprisingly, quite a lot of people seemed to think Black Friday would be a good zoo day, but the weather was perfect as it so rarely is for the zoo, and we did well. We saw a cheetah and the lions, some distant gorillas and a sad orang-utan (do they ever look otherwise), the reptiles and some indolent sea lions. The absolute highlight, however, was the naked mole rats.

Thanks to this book, which we have from the library, the children had heard of naked mole rats. But when I told Dash we could see them at the zoo, he reacted as if I'd just told him the unicorns would be coming up on the left.

"Ha ha."
"No, really. They're in the small mammal house."
"You're just being silly."
"I promise. They exist."
"Really?"
etc.

When we finally got to the small mammals we had to charge past all the (many and various) tamarins, pausing briefly at the two-toed sloth (who looked like nothing so much as a black labrador poking his nose out from under a comatose afghan hound), to get to the perspex tubes (to simulate tunnels) of naked mole rats. They weren't all that exciting in person, but the children were thrilled by their mere existence.

That's a lion in the distance. Left of the tree. See?

*******

But that's not why I'm here, and that's not why you're here either. You came for the food, didn't you? Well, the food is what you're getting. A report on yesterday, that is.

As we had no company for Thanksgiving, and we don't particularly like turkey, and we don't feel any weight of tradition on this culturally-not-ours day, I usually try to do something different. This year I saw a recipe for ribs, and the photo was so enticing that I decided to pull the slow-cooker out of the enforced retirement it's been in since its disastrous maiden voyage in 2004.

I'm here to tell you that it was a roaring success, and I might have to use the crockpot more often than once every eight years now that I've discovered this.

To accompany, we had baked potatoes and lemony green beans, and a nice shiraz which is probably the wrong thing to go with ribs, but we're not fussy.

Of course, I had to make a pie, even if I am anti-tradition. Apple, if you please. It was delish.

Pastry hearts. Because hearts symbolise Thanksgiving, right?

Then I was left with half an hour to spare and some extra pastry, so I took the half-can of pumpkin that was sitting in the fridge, looked up some recipes, and made mini pumpkin pies too. Mostly because Mabel had announced at her school feast on Tuesday that she loved pumpkin pie. She didn't like mine, of course.

Splats of pumpkin

The jury's still out on these, I admit.

Good deeds and pumpkin bread

Remember Hurricane Sandy? Way back when? Oh so long ago, before Halloween and Mabel's birthday and November started and all that stuff. We bunked in the basement and the wind blew and things got wet. Ancient history, right?

But not so much for people in New Jersey and New York who are still deep, deep in the throes of cleaning up, recalibrating their lives, starting over, and somehow at the same time getting through the day-to-day requirements of staying warm and fed and dry. Not to mention the fact that nature threw a snowstorm at them a week ago.

Justine lives in New Jersey, and she's going to use her lovely blog for even more good than usual - as if thoughtful posts, delicious food, and lovely pictures weren't enough - by hosting an online auction for bloggers' baked goods on November 26th. As I both blog and bake, I offered to take part. You can read more about it here, and I'll link again when it's happening. I predict there will be delicious things available for a really good cause, so you might want to bear it in mind.

I won't be making pumpkin bread for it, as a loaf would be pretty heavy to ship, but apparently there's a great outcry for this, perhaps by now my signature recipe. It's certainly one thing I bake that both children will eagerly eat.

I found it on the internet somewhere but I'm afraid I've no idea where at this point, and the addition of chocolate chips is my own, so it's almost original. Or else so ubiquitous that it can't belong to anyone.

Pumpkin Bread
(chocolate chips optional but recommended)

1.5 cups (200g) all-purpose flour (or you could probably use half white, half wholewheat)
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon allspice

1 cup (200g) white (granulated) sugar
1 cup (200g) pumpkin puree (half a 14oz tin)
1/2 cup (120ml) vegetable oil
2 eggs
1/4 cup (60ml) water

1/2 cup (85g) chocolate chips (I like semi-sweet)

Mix the flour, salt, baking soda, and spices together in a large bowl.
Mix the rest of the ingredients except the chocolate chips in a medium bowl.
Add the wet ingredients to the dry, mixing until just combined.
Mix in the chocolate chips.
Pour into a prepared loaf tin and bake at 350 F (180 C) for one hour or until a skewer comes out clean (without hitting a chocolate chip).


P.S. What do you think of the new banner? Seasonal, yes, but does it make the title hard to read or not? Feedback welcome.

Dessert diaries

Apparently I didn't get the memo. My own memo. The one about laying off the muffins. Or else I did, but perhaps I'm working to rule, since while I haven't baked any muffins recently, the house is certainly suffering from a surfeit of baked goods. I didn't mean to, honest guv, but somehow it was incumbent upon me and here they all are.

First there was a brownish banana that had to be used up, just when a friend had serendipitously posted a recipe for banana cookies. (They turned out very cakey, which made them oddly like individual blobs of banana bread, but today I put them in a warm oven for a while and they've crisped up quite nicely. Mabel likes them, anyway. Dash is anti-banana, even in cookies.)

Then on Friday Dash was off school so I took him to IKEA where he had chocolate milk and I bought things, enjoying the ability to look at stuff without fearing Mabel would be sending a display crashing to the ground. As we left, though, he was lobbying for a cinnamon bun, and I rashly said, "Let's go home and bake cookies instead." So then he got to choose what sort, and - a boy of excellent discernment - he picked chocolate chocolate chip.

It's nice to bake with just one, because if they're both home everyone fights over who got how many turns stirring and then one grabs a pen and scribbles on my shopping list and the other wants to spill sugar so he can "clean it up" and in no time at all I'm yelling at them both to just go away and watch tv and leave me alone. This was better, and we even did some math when scooping the cookie dough, to find that four rows of four make sixteen. Plus another four meant that he knew exactly how many cookies had been made, minus one each when they'd cooled down, and by the time Daddy came home the number was carefully recorded and yet mysteriously the next day there were fewer than 16 left in the tin, so SOMEBODY must have had more than one that evening.

Yesterday was Sunday, and since I was making a nice dinner (or at least, a dinner) I got carried away and bought some rhubarb, took some strawberries out of the freezer, and put together a crumble. We didn't have any cream, or ice cream, which would have been ideal with it, but we managed somehow. Half of it is still in the fridge.

And then today I had promised to bring a baked good of some kind to the "Meet your committee" night at the nursery school, so I made blueberry boy-bait. Except all my blueberries turned out to be blackberries. Nobody seemed to mind, and they all made appreciative noises, through the crumbs.

Of course, the mere fact that I baked these things doesn't mean I had to eat copious quantities of any or all of them.  On the other hand, I'm not made of stone, people. And quality control is important. And I did go for a run on Sunday morning, where I probably ran as much as an entire mile. And fruit is good for you.

Today I picked up some vanilla ice cream. The kids are in bed and I just folded a huge pile of laundry.

Draw your own conclusions.

Home free

It's seven forty and I'm home free.

That is, I'm home, and I'm free of children. The one is asleep, the other is on his way and doesn't need assistance, and there's a glass of red wine beside me. The payoff for early risers is early bedtimes like this, and even if they don't happen every night, it's great when they do. There's also a big basket of laundry to be folded, but I quite like laundry actually. It's one of the few housekeeping tasks I don't mind keeping up with. (I used to iron, even, but that was a long time ago.)

The weather has broken, and like flipping a switch, my brain has turned on and got busy. Or, maybe more accurately, my body. My will to do things other than flollop around complaining, at least.

We had a big storm on Saturday afternoon, and on Sunday all the oppressive heat and humidity had been scrubbed out of the air, leaving shining clear sunlight. It's almost (positively, even) chilly in the mornings, suddenly. I'm not pushing the bedcovers off my body any more. I might have to find some socks soon.

• I've baked two batches of baked goods (banana spice crumb bars and oatmeal muffins).
• I've gone running two mornings in a row. Only a mile, and I only ran half of it, and then maybe a bit more, but it's a start.
• I've started a star chart for the children, wherein they get stars for tidying up and also for using the bathroom more independently (Mabel) and practising some reading (Dash). So far they each have a lot more stars for the practising than the tidying, but I don't care. It's establishing an expectation, and I don't want to have to shell out at Target too soon.

Mabel has complained about going to school for the past two days. I've left her there anyway, stonehearted mother that I am, even though she was crying and telling me not to go. Yesterday it was all for show, and she was smiling as she played with all the dollhouse people when I looked in the window five minutes later. Today she was more tired and a little more upset, as she'd had a late night and two wakeups yesterday - not my fault if she refuses to fall asleep for her father; I was at a board meeting - but I still stood firm.

On the one hand, I don't want to set the precedent of letting her stay home, or - worse - relenting once we get there and taking her back with me. School is school, and we go unless we're sick. On the other hand, the child is three, and it's not like she's missing anything vital to the curriculum if I let her play hookie once in a blue moon. With Dash, once or twice he made a fuss and I let him off - because I know my kid, and he never did that; so when he did, I believed him and it didn't come back to bite me. But Mabel is a different child, and if you give her an inch she'll take a mile, and if I give her an inch she'll probably run off with the whole kit and kaboodle and never come back at all. So no, not doing that. School it is.

Still, I was relieved to come back from my too-short jaunt to Bethesda to see my friend's new baby (tiny! squishy! asleep on me!) to find Mabel's classmates all happily unbitten and her teachers still looking me in the eye. She'd had a bit of an episode when they wiped her nose, but she told me that she felt better after snack, and I agreed that that was often the way.

In fact, might be time for a post-prandial, laundry-folding snack over here right now.

A cooking sort of day

I was just congratulating myself on finally having children old enough to play nicely together while I whipped up a batch of olive-oil and lime muffins (this recipe, but we were too impatient to wait for a whole cake to bake, hence muffins; mini, even), when things in the next room degenerated into shrieks and I looked in to find the three-year-old naked and the six-year-old throwing small pieces of toys across the floor. Maybe another couple of years, then.

But still. Underpants may come and go, all the pieces will be picked up eventually, and now there's a bag of tangy muffins in the freezer. It was worth it.

Later on, while the children were eating their rudimentary offerings (don't judge me; my husband's away), I accidentally made myself a delicious dinner instead of just heating up the leftovers I'd intended to have. I got carried away and turned the plain broccoli I had been planning into these amazing broccoli fritters (from my favourite food blogger, of course). Mabel had some trees pre-battering, and I was the only person who profited from the fritters - but profit I did, because they were totally worth the extra washing up. I dipped them in Greek yogurt left over from making the muffins, thus making the day's baking and cooking mesh into one delightfully symbiotic relationship. Or whatever you're having yourself, as they say.

So now I am redolent of garlic, because I think a speck flew off when I splatted it in the garlic press, and I hope it's on my t-shirt, which I can take off, rather than my hair, which I was not planning to wash tomorrow. Does garlic brush out?

Speaking of brushing, Mabel let me put her hair in pigtails today for the first time in about two years. Maybe we have a summer of extra cuteness ahead. It might make up for the wanton nakedness and the post-four-pm general awfulness.

Ashes

Yesterday, I was on fire, domestically speaking. I had felt the urge to do some housework creeping up on me, and yesterday it burst forth in a glorious bevy of industry. While Mabel was at school, I did two loads of laundry, hung one on the line and put one in the dryer, swept the downstairs floors, cleaned the bathrooms (oh so horribly overdue), cleaned the mirrors, and started on some yeast bread. By pre-dinnertime, I was juggling the two loaves of bread, a batch of chocolate chip cookies, and some quite delicious from-scratch pseudo-Indian stuff that would do two nights' worth of grown-up dinners, as well as a corn on the cob in the microwave for Mabel.

So today, I'd probably have been all tapped out anyway, but the fact that then it turned out one ear of corn (is it an ear? a cob?) and a cookie do not a sufficient dinner make for my daughter, so that she was awake half the night gnawing on me, meant that this morning I was pretty much toast. Fried toast. Toast that is also fried, and burnt, and has had the burnt bits scraped off. The sort of toast you should probably just toss and make anew.

Then, in spite of a morning spent jumping on trampolines and playing with other people's toys, followed by a total needle-stuck-on-record meltdown on the way home ("I don't want to take the short cut, I don't waaaant to taaaake the short cut, I don't... I didn't waaaant to taaaake the short cut," etc), Mabel did not nap. So we got up again and made banana pancakes, she ate five, and the afternoon progressed. She had to be shepherded gently through the hazardous waters of four to six pm, and probably didn't eat enough dinner again, but the upside was that she was fast asleep at five minutes past seven.

I'm going to bed early.

Deceptemuffin

Today I was helping at a bake sale in aid of Mabel's nursery school.

Someone came up with the idea of a bake sale last autumn, and when the donations started coming in, we wondered why we had never done this before. Clearly, the parents of the nursery school are in need of some sort of baking intervention, I said in October, as I put my double batch of lemon scones down on a table already groaning under a surfeit of cakes, cookies, muffins, and pies.

So for today's event, I didn't go quite so overboard, and confined myself to just a single batch of banana-butterscotch muffins. Banana seemed to be the theme of the day, as there were also banana-oat-bran, banana-nut, and gluten-free banana muffins on the table, in addition to an impressive selection of chocolate-chip cookies, brownies, chocolate-brownie cookies, chocolate fudge squares, and a few delicious outliers in the form of snickerdoodles, coconut macaroons, and even soft pretzels.

Thing was, as the banana-nut muffins were arrayed on the table in their individual zippy bags, with hand-written labels listing the ingredients, we all remarked on their impressive size and uniformity. In fact, they looked very much like the sort of banana-nut muffins you might buy at the supermarket. Very, very much. In addition to which, the ingredients listed both milk and soy; as a parent of a child with allergies pointed out, nobody bakes with both of those at once. You use soy to replace dairy, unless you're a supermarket who uses soy because everything has soy in it.  We were pretty much, say 99.8%, sure that someone had just bought a batch of supermarket muffins and repackaged them for the sale.

Now, there's nothing wrong with that. Nowhere is it written that donations for the bake sale have to be homemade. If you want to help with the fundraising effort, it's perfectly kind of you to buy something - something you know many people like - and give it to the school to sell on. They were priced at $2 each, so we probably even turned a profit on the original outlay. And the customers didn't seem to mind - I was astounded at how many people's eyes lit up as they scanned the table, spotted the giant, "Texas-sized" muffins, and decided one of those was exactly what they needed. It's bigger, it must be better. I need bigger. Everyone needs bigger.

I didn't point out to any of these people that the muffins were clearly not home-made. Maybe they knew that. Maybe they haven't eaten as many store-bought banana-nut muffins as I have in my time, and don't recognise them. Maybe they don't care, they just like things that are big. But I did feel that we were duping our generous customers somehow by providing these at a stand otherwise full of honest-to-goodness home-baked goodies.

(I reserve judgement on the samoas that had been put two-by-two into small sandwich bags and marked at 50c apiece. I've seen recipes for samoas (reknowned as girl-scout cookies) online, and they were donated by a student's grandmother. Grandmothers have time for meticulous baking, right?)

What do you think? Would you donate store-bought goods to a bake sale? Does it matter, so long as it raises funds for a good cause?

Birthday cake

Cake, I thought. I'm good at cakes. I don't need to just put a bunch of cupcakes in a row and call them a lightsaber. I can make a lightsaber cake.

Hey, self, remember how you don't do fancy cakes? How you're not crafty? How you make delicious traditional round cakes with simple vanilla buttercream or chocolate icing, and deftly wield your little bottle of multicoloured sprinkles, and everyone is quite happy?

So. I said the first to myself. I did not think to add the second until it was too late. Much, much too late.

First I made the cake (Nigella's buttermilk sponge, for just such occasions) in a rectangular pan. I almost fell at the first hurdle by buttering but not papering the pan, and was afraid for a few terrifying minutes that the whole thing had stuck to the bottom, but with a little help from my giant fish-slice, I managed to free the beast.

Then I cut it lengthwise in ever-decreasing thicknesses.

Then I cast about for some way to put it on the table. I taped together several pieces of discarded cereal box, covered in tinfoil. (And they said I wasn't crafty.) And laid out my lightsaber, handle to tip.

I mixed up a lovely batch of buttercream.

The end.

Of the parts that went right, for a while.

Backtrack to the previous day, when I had belatedly decided that I had to buy not just food colouring, but natural food colouring, so as not to send everyone's children home high on Red 40, that evilest of evils. With my stomach still loudly and painfully complaining that no, I was not entirely better yet, I made the entire family drive first to one organic foodstore and then to a second, where I triumphantly exited clutching my three tiny vials of stuff. Red stuff, blue stuff, and yellow stuff, guaranteed to enable me to mix any colour I liked. Visions of a perfectly lifelike silver-and-black-handled green or blue lightsaber cake danced before my eyes. (I may have still been a little feverish too.)

So here we were, the proto-birthday-boy and I, ready to mix our colours. He said he'd like a green lightsaber cake. I pulled a little ceramic eggcup, that had never before seen the light of day since we got it as a wedding present, out of the cupboard, and carefully dripped in one drip of blue. It didn't look very blue, but it wasn't the yellow bottle or the red bottle so it must have been. Then we carefully added one drip of yellow. The yellow was lovely and bright, but my mixture in the bowl was nothing but sludge brown. We added some more yellow. It was still sludgey.

Rather than taint my beautiful buttercream with mud-colour, we decided a blue lightsaber would be fine. Remembering past experience with cochineal (oh, dead red beetles of my past, why are you no longer around to be mushed into natural food colour?), I dripped one sole drip of blue into the sea of cream. Nothing happened. I dripped a couple more drips. Still nothing. The blue did nothing at all. Stupid natural colours made of vegetables. (But really. Have you ever seen a blue vegetable? The yellow is from turmeric or cumin, so it was great, and the red is from beets, but what is the blue from?)

"Purple?" I said. "How about we add a drop of red and it might turn purple?" The boy, bless him, was game. The red worked pretty well, beetles or no. We had lovely pale pink buttercream. If only it was his sister's birthday, I thought. We put in more red. Pinker pink. Half the bottle. Damn pink.

At this point I was stumped. I found my old bottle of Evil Chemical Red and sloshed in some drops of that for good measure. Now it was what you might call definitely dark pink, and I had compromised all my principles, but it didn't seem in any danger of turning red. Dash was getting disheartened. I was too. We decided to take a break and see what Daddy thought when he and Mabel got home.

Daddy thought the pink would be okay. I thought I should go out and buy something. There were three hours to go before the party, and nothing else was done yet. What's a birthday party without a last-minute rush to the shops for something you didn't know you needed?

I went to the local supermarket. No helpful bright blue or green or silver tins of frosting. There were more fake food colourings, but I wasn't sure I was up to more mixing, and I was very vague about how I had been planning to make silver anyway. Silver balls, that's what I need, I thought, with a brainwave. Remember those silver balls that were a decorating staple in days of yore? (Yore being the 70s.) Whatever happened to those? Because apparently they don't sell them any more. Not in my stores, anyway.

I tried a different place, happening into Party City on the way to pick up some paper cups with Yoda on them and a Darth Vader mask - both vital, as it happened, to the party, so it was just as well I'd gone out. By my third stop I had a decision: a jar of red sprinkles (made entirely of Red 40, of course) to make the red icing look redder, and a jar of chocolate sprinkles to make the "black" lines on the handle, which I would just do in plain white buttercream.

I went home; I did the needful. The finished product looked like this.

A little, um, fleshy, perhaps, but the boys didn't complain, and everyone wanted some of the red icing.

But remind me next year, okay? I don't do fancy cakes.

Thrifty

I really have to bake something, because I have a playdate coming over this afternoon and it is my God-given duty to provide my friend and her children with something unhealthy but not chocolate to reject/eat, and I spent the morning at the thrift store where I not only picked up some great clothes for Dash to wear some day when he fits size 7s and 8s - so in about five years, then, but I don't care because I got him a very nice Hilfiger shirt for five bucks - but also became a VIP member and started a rewards card, so I think we can say I'm really hardcore now. Now that Mabel's taking a nap, which will only be one hour and no more, I promise on my honour as a mother, I have blogging and baking to do both, at once and simultaneously together at the same time.

I seem to have decided, without actually noticing it happen, to start making all the recipes that I pinned to my Food board on Pinterest instead of just drooling over them, so suddenly I have roasted vegetable soup halfway made and am committed to making kale and quinoa salad with cranberries, of all things, for dinner, or lunch, or some meal when we will feel like eating healthy stuff and I'll be all smug and also boosted in necessary vitamins and minerals and protein and not meat. (I should also mention that I made these sweet-potato and bean burgers the other night and they were quite delicious and I highly recommend them, and who knows, even your children might eat them, not that mine gave them a second glance but I'm sure that's my own fault for doing something wrong at a very early stage in their vital development. Probably that time I dropped them on their heads. Stomachs. Whatever.)

The reason I went to the thrift store was because I had this wonderful idea. Like everyone else in the Western world who has children and lives within 500 miles of IKEA, we have a lot of colourful plasticware, and it's starting to bug me. It doesn't dry properly in the dishwasher, and the plates are getting all scratched from cutting crusts off sandwiches, and despite assuring you all that we had given up sippy cups about a year and a half ago, we haven't really, though technically we have because we mostly use straw cups instead, but it comes to the same thing.

When we're away from home and the kids have to use real crockery and proper glass glasses, nothing terrible happens except that I'm more careful about not letting them wander around with a drink in hand, which is probably a good thing. So I thought, inspired partly by my friend Mrs Quimby who once mentioned that she lets her girls use little thrift-store creamers (milk jugs, that is) to practice pouring, that I would acquire some cheap china and small chunky glasses, and let the kids use those instead of the plastic. They'll think it's exciting, I'll think they're getting civilized, it's a win/win.

So I did, and we will see how it goes. I just hope I can figure out how to get the permanent-marker prices off the tumblers before we start using them.

The anchovy thing

Yesterday I made fabulous oatmeal cookies. I even pandered to my husband's desires a bit with them, by putting in raisins instead of chocolate chips. But then I added pecans as well, because I had some to use up, and I like nuts in cookies. This was perhaps cruel of me, because B does not, mostly, like nuts in cookies, but I thought it might be given a pass. (Apparently I feel I can't be too nice to the man, because that's giving in to The Man.)

My friend, who had brought over some fresh soda bread and dill butter to snack on with our tea, as well as the cookies, during the playdate that was really a thiny veiled baking-exchange eating-excuse, asked, "Why don't you just not tell him about the nuts and see if he notices?"

"Ah," I replied. "I can't do that. Because of the anchovy thing."

And then I had to explain the anchovy thing.

When we first met, B was not a fan of fish. He had once eaten a piece of salmon that was quite nice, but saw little reason to repeat the experiment. Since those far-off days, I have gently introduced some seafood into his diet, with simple mild tilapia, salmon in peach-habanero marinade, mussels with lots of garlic, things like that. But when we first moved in together, I still had much to learn about the ways of man, The Man, and this man.

I had just moved across the Atlantic and was looking for a job, watching lots of Food Network, and doing the shopping and the cooking, since he was an overworked grad student who had to adjust to being home for dinner and not getting to go to Wal Mart at 3am any more, and who had very patiently let me reorganise all his bookshelves when I arrived, because evidently my psyche needed to lay claim to the place. Rachael Ray, my new girl-crush, told me that if you sizzled some anchovies out of a jar with some garlic at the start of making a tomato sauce, it would taste fabulously savoury but not at all fishy. I couldn't wait to try it.

So I made the sauce, and didn't tell him what the mystery ingredient was. He liked dinner well enough. Then came the big reveal. He was appalled. Horrified. Betrayed. Not happy. As far as he was concerned, I had deceived him. What was next? If a girl starts by sneaking anchovies into a man's dinner, no doubt arsenic and belladonna will soon follow.

I was contrite, learned that I couldn't always anticipate his reactions, and haven't snuck in ingredients again. (Though, you know, he might be happy to find I'd been gradually building up his immunity to arsenic, or iocane powder, when a random Sicilian tries to poison him. Oh well. His loss.)

Last night we were reminiscing about the incident, now that we're so much older and wiser.

"I realise now," I said, "that it was as if I'd fed meat to a vegetarian and told them afterwards."
"Yes, it was. Well, vegetarians might have an ethical reason for not eating meat."
"Exactly. So that would be a reasonable reaction."
"Wait a minute. You mean, my reaction was like that? Not that what you did was like that?"
"Yes. No. Your reaction."
"Oh. Oh. I thought you were being a bit generous there for a minute."
"No, no. As if."


******

And of course, I did check with him this morning that he didn't mind my writing about it. I know now not to spring things, even delicious things, on him without full disclosure in advance. (And don't worry about the cookies. He liked them.)

Snow

It's snowing and I suddenly have a burning desire to look up cookie recipes. To be fair, I'm always happy to look up cookie recipes, but it's nice to have an excuse.

But I can't decide. What do you think is the right cookie for a snowy day?

Meringues and gingersnaps

Finally, some baking updates I owe you.

Gingersnaps going in

One afternoon when the kids were otherwise occupied, I rolled out the second half of the gingerbread dough as thin as my OCD little heart desired, to see if I could make crispy, crunchy gingersnaps. They turned out perfectly.

Gingersnaps all out

And these are the meringues I made to use up the egg whites left over from the other cookies. I whipped the three egg whites (should have been four, but one absent-mindedly went into the cookie dough) with my hand-held electric mixer until they were stiff. Then I mixed in three tablespoons of white sugar and folded in another three of light brown sugar. (Nigella's suggestion to make them chewier.)

Brown sugar meringues

I dolloped them artistically onto parchment paper on a cookie sheet and baked them in a very low oven (140 C or 275 F) for about an hour, then turned the heat off and left them there until they were cold. (Again, Nigella's instruction.) Easy as pie. In fact, much easier, I'll wager. The only thing is that they do occupy the oven for a long time so it's probably best to cook them last thing in the evening and just leave them overnight.

They stay fresh for up to a week in an airtight container, so they're the perfect lazy dessert for a special occassion - just add cream and fruit.

Mmmm