That Northern Town

OoooliolioOooooO! I went to Olympia this weekend for a mini break. The trip was uneventful and after I'd set up my roost in that crazy room-that's-not-a-room room (it's essentially a way of connecting the sauna that was added later to the house... like a huge glorified hall with no insulation, that is separated from the rest of the house by a sliding door.) Star and I immediately started mixing this and that in bowls and eventually we created these!Butterfly cupcakes from that cupcake book we got together. They are a lemon-poppy seed cupcake, with lemon filling and a lemon sauce drawn down the middle. Even though they took zest from three lemons and the juice of two to make, they were wonderfully light and not too lemony. That book is definitely paying for itself.

I'm sorry these pictures are still so yellow even after I worked on them in the ol' Photoshop... we took them at night and whether we used flash or not they just wouldn't turn out beautiful. Trust me, they are wonderful and pretty in real-person life.After cupcakes we went to the re-opening of the library in town (apparently there was some sprucing up going on between the time I left and my visit) and listened to Kimya Dawson play. I say listen because there were so many people there that we couldn't actually see her, however Star did manage to gain about two feet by climbing on Ben for part of it. If you aren't immediately saying "Ohhhh Kimya Dawson... cool!" to yourself, it's because you don't realize that she's the one who is on the vast majority of the Juno movie soundtrack. Once you've heard the cd, I think you can imagine the gist of her style... there was an awfully cute children's song talking about poop and butts though. I'm always charmed by children's songs that don't try to avoid references to bodily functions because that's really all children talk about (ok, I'm going to qualify that, it's really all boy children talk about.)

After everyone woke up the next day we went to the Co-op down the street (I'd never been to that one and now I wish I had!) and got some tasties including some pretty purple carrots! Star had invited some people over for a little visit at 6 and in the mean-time we made cheese!Star had read about a cheese making kit either in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle or Omnivore's Dilemma (sorry Star, I can't remember, but I'm sure that you'll correct me in the comments later). The idea intrigued her and she bought the makin's for hard and soft cheese. We made some mozzarella. Now, in hindsight, we probably should have used whole milk to do it (I think that's why we didn't have many curds, Starzy... just occurred to me... unless we did and then I don't know what happened), as it was we used a half gallon of milk, a tablet of some such thing that makes curds appear like magic, and a stove. When you make mozzie you have to knead it for a while until it looks like taffy which just so happens to be what I'm doing in these pictures. Unfortunately, you have to heat the cheese in the microwave until it's lava hot, so I was pathetically trying to do it with a spoon. It worked, more or less.

(p.s. If you ever wanted to create the illusion of cooking with yours truly, I bet you could print this last picture, blow it up real big, cut it out and then stick it on the wall of your kitchen. Cooking never seemed so cool! Just a thought.)

And then you have cheese! We made a lovely quiche for the party with the purple carrots, mozzie cheese and other tasty things. I decided to write about what we were doing in the pictures because Star has already done a lovely summery of what we did together on her own bloggerino and I'm going to be lazy and point you in her lovely direction. It was a fantabulous weekend, I even miss that little room I commandeer when I visit.

Le Sigh

It's the end of an era, Jessie is going back to school. yessss........ However, this means that I started to get the baking itch, I wanted to send her back with some cupcakes. Now, to back it up a little, Star and I were in Portland the other week and she took me to Powells to see The Book. The Book is the ultimate (in my world, that is) book of cupcake recipes, also appropriately called Cupcakes!. She'd gotten one a while before and now I had to get one so that we could bake the recipes together, even though she's two hours away. I'd already baked Cinnamon Sugar Puff Cupcakes (p. 64, Star) and something about their warm cinnamoniness plucked a few heart strings. Everyone loved them. Afterwards it was deemed that the Cinnamon Sugar Puff Cupcakes were not in fact cupcakes proper because they didn't have any frosting (a. This was said with a bit of an eye twinkle and b. I don't like frosting which made this recipe even appealing) so it was decreed by the less than silent masses that I make another batch of real cupcakes, complete with frosting. Thus the White Christmas Cupcakes were born (p. 128, also Star). I didn't use their frosting because I didn't have any of the ingredients. The Joy has plenty of sugar/butter/egg based frostings that are pretty easy. I think I blew the frosting anyway though because it came out on the liquid side of things. Ah well, I'm not going to be eating these, and they sure look purty.

Here are your cupcake pictures Star!

Someone Hand me a Paper Bag Before I Hyperventilate!

Our friend Lisa was here last week. She knits just as much as I do and she recommended this website called Knit Picks. However, when she mentioned it she was talking about the knitting needles they have on there. I went and scoped it out but knitting needles don't really do anything for me. For some reason I wound up on that site again this morning and glanced at their yarn. This is where the heart palpitations and erratic breathing come in.

THEY'RE PRACTICALLY GIVING IT AWAY!

Now, I know I get excited about little things. Like buttons. Or cupcakes. But really, this is fantastic. I ordered a boxful of 100% wool yarn hand woven by poor Andean folk for $3 each. And a book. Ok, I'm exaggerating a little. I ordered four skeins of really REALLY nice yarn and my favorite knitting book Vintage Knits (found that for pennies as well). Have you ever seen that Austin Powers movie where the femme bots' heads explode? Well, if you have then you could draw a pretty good parallel between Powers' mojo = Yarn and Femme Bot exploding head = Hannah exploding cranium.

Oh, and on top of that I got the two knitting patterns from Hansigurumi on Etsy that I'd ordered around Christmas!The Garden Snail

The Jackalope

Star, I wish you were here. I think you'd understand the magnitude of this amazingness. All that's missing is some fresh baked cupcake to make this day coma-inducingly good.

But wait, there's more! My Grandmother Joyce was here last night for a New Year's Eve dinner and she recommended this site called paperbackswap.com. You list any paperback books you don't particularly want on their and people can request them. So you pay for the shipping out and for every book you send you get one credit and you can then order any book you want and receive it for free. Each regular book costs 1 credit to order, audio books are 2. By listing ten books when you sign up you get 2 credits to play with. I did that last night and I ordered the Forsyte Saga. I just got an e-mail telling me that my request had been filled and I'll be getting an e-mail in a couple of days saying the book has been shipped! I'm pretty excited.

5tar and Hannah, Together at Last....

It was very cold today. It even snowed a little. So, Star (I mean 5-Tar... I'll talk about that in a minute) decided to have a date day involving cupcakes, puff paint and all manner of good things along those lines. I made my way over to the Glen at noon solid which is a pretty good time... plenty of time to wake up and diddle around a little, Star even managed to get a shower in before I got there.

Today, like all fantastic days, started with me eating three of Star's cookies, she makes crazy-delicious oatmeal-raisin cookies, and reading a paragraph of this crazy communist newspaper that Jessie and Ben have year-long subscriptions to. the reason it was only a paragraph was because it took me that long to struggle through it, the writing was THAT horrible. I'll have to post some examples later when my brain recovers from having to translate paragraph long sentences into normal person-speak. But that deserves and entire post to itself.

Anyway, Star and I got rolling around 2 and went to Joann's to pick up puff paint, some fabric and whatever miscellany we found on the way, which turned out to be more miscellany than the stuff we actually came for... but I guess that's half the experience. I wound up getting some fabric for a skirt which I can tell you right now, will be awesome. Awesome in the true sense of the word. The colors will BLOW YOUR MIND. And it was all on sale, so that's twice the fantasmic-itude. Star got some puff paint to decorate her ceramics apron, a little dollar white erase board for her fridge (the magnet on the marker part came unglued the instant it came out of the package so of course we found it in the dollar bin), some Hello Kitty stickers, a teeny tiny pot and seed package that, once you soak it in water, will start to sprout... in theory and lastly a pair of knitting needles, but we forgot the yarn part. We made a little pit stop by Ace Hardware and bought a two dollar bag of potting soil for all the 5o cent plants we picked up at Top Foods a while ago (they're pretty little flowers... Star'll know the names but I can't remember).
We went back to the Glen and on the way Star found these....

GIANT ICICLES! She looks a little bit like a scary bag-lady who would kill you with an icicle, only to have it conveniently melt leaving no trace of the murder weapon. Not only was this a CSI episode, but Star also came up with the idea when Corbin found an even bigger icicle earlier that morning. Much like...
THIS ONE!
They're just growing off the sides of the buildings. I don't know what that says about the insulation.... probably nothing good, but heck, I don't live there (suckas!).


So we got back to her apartment and made totally home made (well...... we didn't make the sprinkles, but it's close enough) cupcakes. Which are delicious.
I really like cream cheese frosting so I'm glad we made chocolate-cream cheese frosting for these.

Star likes to fling the sprinkles when she decorates so naturally some of them wound up in the butter on the counter and we thought, why not add more?! And really, there's no good reason NOT to put sprinkles in your butter. Plus, later Star made me a tastey egg sandwich and the butter she used had these sprinkles in it. When the eggs cooked, the sprinkles melted and made colorful streaks on the eggs, sort of like that nasty cake mix with the sprinkles in the batter you can buy at Safeway... you know, the one that tastes like chemicals. Star and I have now decided that any time either of us is at the other's house, we'll wait until the other person leaves, dart up and put sprinkles in their butter as a crazy surprise.... sort of like cleaning the counter with a pair of men's underwear. Maybe you had to've been there, but it was excellent as far as I'm concerned.
And this is Star's fantastic new apron. We decorated it ourselves. I called Star 5-tar becase she thinks the S on her apron looks like a 5... and saying 5-tar makes her sound like a dinosaur... which is BRILLIANT.


Bitchin'.
The end. That was our day.

Tomorrow is another day, full of crazy times, places and new things to put in our butter.

It's Cooktime with Majorge!

Star and I made some kick ASS cupcakes... or should I say upcakes. Cupcakes will forever be known as "upcakes" on this blog, before I forget.

So these are the beautimous upcakes. They look like little moons with asteroid divits in them. Trust me, even upcakes that look like moons are tastey, so by default, ours are pretty amazing.

Aaaannnddd... this is where it gets tricky. We rocked the upcakes partially because they were so easy to make, and only happened to come from a box. But frosting is just better when made at home from scratch. Not so lardy that way. However, homemade frosting does not come from a box, thus the minor set back.

So we read off the ingredients, made sure we had them all and then went to town. At least it LOOKS like I'm reading the recipe. Really, all I'm doing is skimming the ingredients and ignoring the actual directions. Who needs 'em anyway? Suckas do, that's who. And I'm no sucka.

This egg is marked. Whether that was sign of doom or fulfilled some sort of egg-prophesy, we may never know. However, I think we used that particular egg in the first batch of frosting which, in the end, turned out just fine but had a rocky beginning so that might have had something to do with the egg mark. I'm prepared to blame everything on that egg. Yup.

What these pictures DON'T show is the fact that I didn't actually READ the instructions. I just threw in all of the ingredients and then we made this powder ball that had a teensy bit of egg and butter in it. Star stuck with it and out came sugar-egg-butter paste that is better known as Butter Frosting I.

And ta-dah! It's a happy upcake. The HAPPIEST upcake, in fact.
And all of the happy upcakes family.
Soon they will all go to a better place... namely my tummy (oh, and Star's too, we can't forget about Star's tum).

Make upcakes today, and feel happy!

That's an order.