Thursday, December 30, 2010

Let's Have a Mixer

Oh, herro dere.


Ayy, mami!!

Ayy blondieeee, you so beautifuuull..

(That's what some random dude said to me the first time I went off-campus freshman year.  He was old enough to be my father)

I got a Kitchenaid mixer for Christmas.  I fell in love and I will blockade myself in my apartment and just put baked goods outside the door.

I really wanted to make something with my mixer the other night, but we couldn't find the yeast that I bought at the store to make pizza dough, so I had to make something else that required a mixer: meringues.

MERINGUES ARE SO MUCH EASIER TO MAKE WITH A KITCHENAID MIXER!!

Life is so much easier with a Kitchenaid mixer.  Or so I'm finding.


Start with egg whites.  I just wanted to make one pan of them because it was late and I really just wanted an excuse to play with my mixer, so I only used two.  We don't need any more sweets in the house.


Aerial view of the egg whites.  ABOUT TO BE KITCHENAIDED!

New verb.  I made it.


Anddd... THE BEATING BEGINS!!


Pretty soon, they're starting to take form.  It was just so relaxing watching the mixer do all the work for me.  I could get used to this.


Oh hello there, stiff peaks.  I've been waiting for you.

I never know how long to beat the egg whites for.  I'm so afraid of overbeating.  One of these days I will just beat some egg whites to see what happens to them if I beat them for a long time.  And then I will know.

(Oh yeah, and add about a half-cup of sugar and a splash of vanilla while the mixer is on low after the eggs are beaten properly)


Fold in an ample amount of chocolate chips (I think I did just shy of a cup).  You have to do this part by hand.  I'm sorry.  My arm is sorry too.


The beast roars.  It has done its job.


I wanted to make medium-to-large meringues because I am lazy and didn't want to stand there spooning out meringue for a long time.  But you can make them as small or large as you want.  Also, this picture was taken 2 minutes in to cooking because I forgot about it.

Bake for 25 minutes at 250 degrees, and then shut the oven off and let the meringues sit there overnight.  This will dry them out to perfect meringue consistency.  In theory.


Nom meringue.  I brought these to work and Amy and I ate them all in one day... with a little help.  But they don't count because they're just egg whites, right??

RIGHT?!?

Sigh.  It's a constant battle.

I took one last close-up picture but it's blurry, and I've embarassed myself enough already.

Tonight is PIZZA NIGHT!  Photos forthcoming.

Love and mixin',
Courtney

Monday, December 27, 2010

Snow Day!!

We're snowed in from Travelers.

This Lolcat describes how we feel.

Love the blizzard,
Courtney and Amy

Sunday, December 26, 2010

Christmas Cat

Merry belated Christmas!  I hope you had lots of food, family, and presents.  Unless you were bad this year.  Then I hope you got nothing.  Just kidding.


Santa came to our house and brought me a Kitchenaid mixer.  I plan on doing nothing but baking for the next three weeks.  If you live in Connecticut, you will probably be receiving baked goods sometime soon because I will most likely make enough to cover the whole state.  It's not a very big state.

I tried to make a Christmas cat.


He didn't like that very much.

But he did like his catnip.


So much so, in fact, that I took a video of him.


Don't mind me being weird in the background.  I just do that sometimes.


Freako.  I guess he goes with the rest of our family.
There's supposed to be a BLIZZARD today!  What a perfect day for BAKING!!

Love and Christmas,
Courtney

Friday, December 24, 2010

C is for Cookies

And for Christmas.  And Courtney.  And cupcake.  And crazynutsopants.  But this blog entry is about cookies.  Lots and lots of cookies.

Baking cookies is my favorite part of Christmas, so I make my mother wait until I get home to make them.  This is mostly because she would rather I make them anyways because then I do all the hard work and she gets to eat them.  Hey, it works for me.

This year I invited Becky and Colleen over, and they unsuspectingly agreed because they didn't realize that I would put them to work, like little worker elves.  Speaking of elves, I haven't watched Elf yet.  I'd better get on that seeing as Christmas is in thirty-two minutes.  But I did provide them with pink wine, so they can't complain too much.

I put them to work with the sugar cookies, which I cut out.  The wonky ones are mine, naturally.


Look at those little elves.  They're so presh that I couldn't help but take pictures.


Becky did most of the work, but Colleen provided most of the humor, so I guess it evened out. 


They both requested that I not take their picture, but I ignore requests the majority of the time, and I knew if I pointed the camera they would smile.  It's a Pavlov's dog thing.


Here are our decorations.  Anything seem a little off to you?

*Sings* One of these things is not like the otherrr...


Paprika cookies.  They're all the rage.

No, in actuality, I just grabbed everything around the decorations, and I thought the paprika was red sprinkles.  It wasn't.  It was paprika.


But when Becky suggested we make an "everything" cookies, I demanded that we include paprika.  It was with the decorations.  It is included in everything.  But Becky was super excited to put some on.


Hello, snowman.  You have paprika on you.  Nobody is going to eat you now because that would be gross.  Did you know that paprika is a snowman cookie survival technique?  It is.  In fact, this cookie is now in a baggie in my purse because I didn't want anything to happen to it.

I do things like that a lot.


Becks and Colleen were really proud of this candy cane, and I don't have any pictures of the finished cookies, so this is the best representation of the greater collective I have.

We had a little baby problem with some of the cookies, though...


They were flat.


So, so flat.


I used the regular Tollhouse cookie recipe for these and they came out so strangely.  I mean, they taste delicious.  But I've make these cookies ten million times and I don't know why they did this.  I blame the oven.  My mom blames me.  But she's wrong because I KNOW I MADE THESE CORRECTLY!

Whatever.  More for me, man.


On the other hand, I know exactly why these ones were flat.  I added a cup too few of flour on the first go 'round.  I realize that this doesn't help my previous argument that I did not mess up the chocolate chip cookies, but I DEFINITELY didn't.  So I added extra flour to half of the dough and then all was right again.


These suckers were my favorite growing up... peanut butter kiss cookies.  If I eat too many I get a tummy ache now, but I generally just power through it.  I'm tough like that.


These are my grandpa's (Wolfgang Amadeus, and yes, that's really his name.  My great-grandpa was a composer.  I win the cool grandpa game) favorite, and they are lemon cookies with frosting and a cherry on top.  My mom made them.  The recipe never makes enough.  It's a problem.


Chocolate cookies.  Delicious.  I baked these, and they look and taste wonderful.  And yes, my mother made the dough, but that's besides the point.  I can make cookies without messing them up.  That's the point.


IT'S LIKE A MOUNTAINOUS REGION OF COOKIES!  Like the Rockies.  Or the Appalachian Mountains.  But Hansel and Gretel version.

My first leading role was playing Gretel in the third grade.  My tights itched and I was afraid everyone would look up my dress during the sleeping scene.  One time the kid who played my father got sick and I had to improv to save the day.  I didn't wear my glasses for the show and I probably almost fell off the stage.  I was so cool.

Stop looking at me like that.


Meringue cookies with chocolate chips.  I made these right before mass tonight, and they expanded SO MUCH in the oven.  Which is why they are humongous.  But I love them because you can eat a million without feeling full.  Or sick.  Because it's meringue! 


C is also for cheesecake, so I made a chocolate swirl one for dessert tonight.  It was reeeally good.  Also, I didn't make the cheesecake because it began with C; I just made it because I wanted to.  That first sentence was misleading.  I apologize.

C is also for chocolate, PS.


C is for chili.  I made it for dinner.  It was sitting on the counter when I was taking pictures of my cookies, so I took a picture.


C is for cat.  This is my cat.  His name is Lucky.  I plan on dressing him up like Christmas tomorrow.  He may hate me.  But then I will feed him and he will love me again.  I love my cat too much.  I accept that.

----------

Now it's time to go to bed and wait for Santa to come....


...so MERRY CHRISTMAS from me and my fam.

(We're in height order.  Not planned)


We're such a mess.

Love and Christmas carols (another C),
Courtney

Thursday, December 23, 2010

Festivus

Hello, blog.  Hello, world.  Have you missed me?

Don't answer that.

I'm feeling a little punchy today, as Caitlin Nosal would say.  Guess who reads my blog?  Caitlin Nosal does.  I hope she's reading this right now and feeling really special.  Because you are, Caitlin Nosal, you are.

I hope that one day I'm so famous that when I shout out to people in my blog it's a really big deal.  That is my goal.

It's Christmas break which means that my mind is clear (relative statement) and I'm back at work, and being back at work reminds me of blogging because this is where I started this blog.  I blogged a lot about Amy's and my escapades and lunch breaks to Target, but I don't think there will be very many of those over break unless I can apparate to her car because there's no way I'm walking outside at any time that I don't need to.  This is New England, and it is cold, and my mother is holding my impenetrable winter coat hostage because she is halfway through fixing my zipper.  It's all probably a scheme to force me to become more tolerant of the weather.  It's not working.

Today I'm being rebellious and pushing the boundaries of business casual at the T by dressing like a hipster a little bit.  On a regular hipster scale, I think I'm at about a 4, but on a hipster-as-compared-to-people-who-live-in-Connecticut scale, I'm probably at an 8.  I would take a picture and show you, but that would be a little bit weird and, as always, Sue would just look at me and think I'm a crazy person.  Which I am.  But I don't have Amy here to boost my confidence in my crazy today, on account of the fact that she got stranded in Europe but now is home, so I'll err on the side of not-crazy today.

(As a sidenote, I originally wrote "air on the side of caution," then Googled it and corrected myself.  Also, I would like to know if you're supposed to use "a" or "an" in front of numbers as you would if you spelled the number out, as I just did.  Because 8 doesn't start with a vowel or a consonant because it's just a number!  It has no letters.  It's just something I think about sometimes.)

I think about really random and odd things sometimes.  For instance, because I'm back at work today when I went into the bathroom I was immediately reminded of the fact that I ALWAYS go into the same bathroom stall at work.  And every time over the summer that I went in there and the toilet seat was up, I would be like, oh!  That means that it hasn't been used since it was cleaned.  So I think to myself, maybe I should just put the seat back up afterwards, and then if it's down next time, I would know if anyone else used it.  But then I think, what if somebody else has the same exact idea as me?  And then my plan would be foiled and I would be tricked into believing a falsity.  And I literally think this same sequence of thoughts EVERY TIME I go into the bathroom stall.  Including this morning, four months after the last time I thought it.  This boggles my mind.

I told you that I think about random and odd things.

Would you like to know the definition of stream-of-consciousness?  It's this blog entry.

HAPPY FESTIVUS!
Courtney

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Inappropriate

Sorry I'm so bad about blogging and stuff.

I CAN'T HELP IT I'M JUST SO EXCITED FOR MY BIRTHDAY ON SATURDAY!!!!

But this is funny.  Or so I think.

In other news, Jen just signed off and said "FUCK YA" and I thought she was insulting me.  Then I realized that she was responding affirmatively to my exclamation "SENIORS!" because tomorrow is senior night.  And then I was no longer insulted.

Stay classy,
Courtney