Dessert Friday #22

Don't worry. I'm still alive. Just really terrible at keeping up with posting.

On Friday, my friend Katherine told me about this computer game called Machinarium, so...that's what I've been doing since Friday. It's a point and click puzzle game, you're a robot, you have to go along and solve these puzzles...I'm making myself sound like the most interesting person in the world, right?

Absolutely wrong.

I got Nick and myself cupcakes and a slice of red velvet cake from Magnolia for Dessert Friday last week.

Yup.

Everything looked great, as you expect it would.

Pretty.

I have to say...big, big letdown. I got a pistachio cupcake:

Interesting.

And a devil's food cupcake:

Indulgent.

Let me just say...save your cents and stick with the regular vanilla cupcake with vanilla buttercream frosting. The pistachio frosting tasted interesting, but it was so fluffy I almost felt like I was eating Cool Whip with crushed pistachios sprinkled on top (disclaimer: I have absolutely nothing against Cool Whip, but when I'm paying $3.50 for a cupcake barely the size of my palm, I'm expecting better). The devil's food cupcake had cream cheese frosting, so that obviously won me over. Still though...I think the vanilla + vanilla is better.

And then. Then there was the slice of red velvet cake.

Hello.

Okay. This thing cost $6.00, and sure, it's slightly bigger than your average slice of cake, but I will absolutely not buy it again. The cake itself was dry and tasted nothing like red velvet cake. My friend at work, Eileen, made red velvet cupcakes for my birthday that tasted 100 times better than this stuff. The frosting? Don't get me started. Oh wait. Too late. I got started. Not cream cheese frosting, which is a crime. It's some weird very whipped up stuff that wasn't even their vanilla buttercream (which is heavenly, I'd just like to say). It tasted like water and powdered sugar whipped together (which it probably was).

So, in summary, I will not be buying red velvet cake from Magnolia again. It's basically just dried-out cake with some red food coloring, and it tastes worse than anything you can make from scratch yourself (not a baker? you could still do better than this), and it's $6.00 out of your wallet.

I'll eat it if you don't want it.

End rant.

Oh, I also got a 2-inch thick memory foam mattress topper last week for my bed.

It's alive.

Don't worry, it didn't stay crumpled like that.

COMFY

Which isn't really a great thing, because now I'm even less motivated to get out of bed in the mornings, and the only thing I want to do is sit in bed and play Machinarium. Which is what I'm off to do now.

You are lame.

Rude Kitten

I'm starting off the week after the holiday nice and strong by being sick. It's great. Couldn't have asked for a better entrance into the arctic zone and depression that Chicago will turn into in the coming months.

I came home from work a bit early today, with the intention of sitting on my couch and spacing out on my iPad. This lasted for a couple of hours, until Bailey noticed that I was paying more attention to the internet than to her.

This is concerning.

I was chatting with Nick online since he was still at work, and apparently she wanted in on the conversation.

Hey Bailey is here.

All she managed to type was gibberish.

This is hard.

Then she decided to just sit on me so I couldn't use the iPad at all.

Were you doing something? You're not anymore.

And thennn...she realized that I was wearing a hoodie with a zipper. Bailey loves zippers, and for the next hour she tried to chew and paw on it while I played defense. She was so obsessed she got a little cross-eyed with focus.

I WANTS IT

I won in the end, although she put up a good fight. She didn't chew on my zipper anymore, but she still didn't let me use my iPad.

WHAT'S MORE IMPORTANT, ME OR THAT THING?

Touché.

Dessert Friday #21

I was texting happy Thanksgiving thoughts to my friend Katie yesterday, and at one point she asked me, "Are you making a turkey? Or maybe a turkey-shaped pile of cream puffs?" So, naturally, I wanted a cream puff...

And I give you...

Yes. Yes I did.

It happened again.

Katie, you are an inspiration.

And of course I kicked myself for not thinking of a turkey-shaped pile of cream puffs for Thanksgiving instead of an actual turkey. But that's okay, because my turkey did actually turn out okay (again, thanks to Mark and various online sources during my moments of panic)!

EDIBLE

In fact it was more than edible. It was actually good. And I didn't poison anyone! Which just goes to show: the more I panic, the better I do. It's a lifestyle. I predict high blood pressure in years to come.

There was a ton of food, which unfortunately I didn't photograph very well because I was too busy panicking. But there was stuffing:

Homemade!

And mashed potatoes, and homemade gravy from the turkey drippings, and a bunch of food (mostly veggies, thank goodness, because I didn't think to make anything green) that my mom brought over, and an APPLE PIE that NICK MADE which you'll just have to take my word for made it to the dinner table.

There was also Pink Lady Finger Junk (so named by the Edds family). This is a dish that Nick (and everyone else in his family) absolutely needs to have on Thanksgiving. Ingredients include (not a complete list):

• Strawberries
• Pineapples
• Marshmallows
• Strawberry Jell-O
• Lady fingers

Just from this list, you might think this is dessert. I treat it as dessert. Nick has a heart attack when I refer to it as dessert, but I can't consider something with fruit and sugar and JELL-O in it not dessert (Mark, please back me up on this one). But apparently the Edds eat it with everything else (like STUFFING) during dinner.

Whatever floats your boat. I will eat it for dessert. With apple pie. Double dessert for me.

My local grocery store apparently doesn't know what lady fingers are, and the last time I made this dish, I bought what they considered lady fingers, which was a box of crackers with sugar sprinkled on them. Uh, what? No. This year, I again failed to find them, and instead of using weird crackers, decided to bite the bullet and make my own homemade lady fingers.

Homemade!

I got a bit impatient and started blobbing them way too big, and they got super round.

This lady had too much turkey.

But overall, a big success and it definitely tasted better than the store-bought kind.

Success!

See what I did there? Yeah, I put all the good-looking ones on top, so you wouldn't know from the picture that I actually burned a small batch of them, because I got greedy and tried baking two batches at the same time and used the bottom rack, which I will never put anything on again because apparently things just automatically burn on the bottom rack.

Junk.

You just let it sit in the fridge until it sets. I think the actual name is something along the lines of "Lady Finger Strawberry Torte." Don't ask me why it's known as "junk" now.

Bailey spent almost the entire day yesterday starting at 6:30am being CRAZY.

Who, me? Not me.

Yes, her. I guess it was for the best, because by the time dinner was about ready, she was too tired to be curious about the copious amounts of food we had just sitting out. The most she did was sniff lazily from her throne.

If you could bring me some, that would be great.

Didn't happen. She did get extra wet food in the morning though. So there you go. Kittens get Thanksgiving, too.

Now I'm off to play this game that I just learned is called Gomoku. My dad has had a set for awhile, but I'm not big on strategy games (I don't like having to think so hard while playing games), so it's basically been collecting dust, until Nick heard about it yesterday. It's basically like Connect Four, except instead of four in a row, it's five...and instead of dropping pieces into a vertical board, it's on a grid...so really, not like Connect Four except for the fact that in both games you try to make connections with your pieces. Nick is crazy about this game and forced asked me nicely to play 9404850 games after dinner tonight.

I won a whopping (count 'em)...two games. One of them was pretty epic, though. Almost half the board was covered.

I'm the black pieces.

Nick also wants to learn to play Go now (it uses the same pieces and board as Gomoku), but I think I'm going to have to turn him over to my dad for that one, because that waaay surpasses the level of strategic thinking I like to do for games.

UPDATE: Nick informs me that I actually won a whopping THREE WHOLE GAMES. So there you go. Gomoku master, right here. Bring it.

Happy Turkey Day!

I am responsible for cooking this thing today:

PANIC

My first ever Thanksgiving turkey. Shout out here to master chef Mark for emailing me instructions on how he made his turkey, thus reducing my panic level from "dangerously high" to "can maybe think straight."

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Here's to hoping I don't poison anyone with an undercooked turkey.