Cream puffs and kiddos

It's been a while....lots of the same going on in general--working and baking. Christmas was great, lots of support from my parents....it's weird to think I've been single for 6 months, but it's slowly starting to sink in. Dog is getting enormous, haven't taken him to the vet to be weighed but best guess is between 80 and 90 pounds. Cat got a new condo (compliments of carpet remnants, an old basketball hoop pole, and my dad's ability to make anything) and is in kitty-heaven. My neice is in town for a visit...20 months old and so damn cute!

Work is getting....frustrating. I'm excited that one kiddo will be graduating the program at the beginning of February. She was my first ever client and I've been with her family since she started the program 2 years ago. I'm so proud of her for the progress she has made, but I'm also insanely nervous for her to transition out....what if she regresses? What if her parents stop following through? I guess I should have a little more faith in all of them...she finally started sleeping in her own bed again after 4 years of sleeping with mom, so they must have been listening to me at some point over the last 2 years.

On the flip side of things, another of my kiddos is regressing big time, but it's not his fault or his family's. This kiddo has a serious degenerative disease that will eventually be terminal. His seizures have increased and their anatomy is changing....not good signs. As a result of the seizures he is losing some of his recently gained skills and is constantly tired....resulting in him being constantly grumpy and emotional and having a big increase in behaviors. I know that following through when I give him a directive is important to his therapy, but what about what's important for his happiness? I mean, no one knows just how long this kid has, so it makes me feel like a terrible person when I have him engage in non-preffered activities....a big part of me just wants to let him play all day.

Ok. Enough depressing-ness. I have been doing quite a bit of baking lately, from making my own caramel for a 'Twix' torte and Mexican toffe (both from "The Perfect Finish" by Bill Yosses) to general Christamas baking to mini beef wellingtons and mini maragarita cupcakes. But my favorite over the past month has by far been the cream puffs. Frenchie's husband loved the blueberry coffee cake, so she ordered another one at the beginning of December. She didn't request anything for Christmas, but asked for cream puffs for New Years. And, if possible, nougatine or florentinas. After several trials, and one attempt to rip my stove from the wall, I declared the nougatine impossible with my current stove (it's an electric flat-top and the burners don't hold a constant heat, but insead turn on and off--making caramel and candy rather difficult). So I switched to the florentina. Which cannot be cooked on parchment--as I discovered the hard way. I got one useable florentina rolled before my cookie sheets warped and all the batter ran to the centers. Damn. So cream puffs it was! After a slight debacle the morning I was due to deliver the pastries (apparently cream puffs can't be stored in a sealed container....who knew?), I whipped up another batch and they were crazy successful! Unfortuantely I have not been committed enough to look for my camera charger, and I'm sick at the moment and so feeling too lazy to go get the cable to get the pictures from my phone to the blog. But who know, maybe I'll get a burst of energy...but don't count on it.

Today was banana bread (favorite recipe for this is the one from Southern Sideboards) and laundry...generally a lazy, sicky day. Are constant body aches a sign of anything? All I know is tomorrow I go back to work with a school kid who is very.....hands-on. As in, lots of physically blocking him from various objects of obsession and lots of physically aggressive melt downs. And this achy-ness? Yeah, it is so not going to work for me tomorrow.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Ok...haven't posted anything in a while, but I've also been crazy busy with work and baking. My new kiddo at work can turn his tantrums on or off in an instant, which makes my mornings rather exhausting. I've also been working on revising lie 80% of his programs because the woman who wrote them didn't do so great with them.

On the baking side of things, I successfully made gluten-free apple-spice doughnuts! But failed miserably with the cake doughnuts....which I'm ok with, I do NOT like making doughnuts.  Frenchie nailed down what she wanted for Thanksgiving just last Friday....not leaving me much time to prepare. So, get get over the stress, I made 4 dozen mini pumpkin pie cheesecakes with brown sugar toasted pecans....my camera charger is still MIA, so no pics :( Baking for Frenchie started Monday night with 6 dozen mini pumpkin cupcakes, and continued through Tuesday (thankfully a snow day), with 6 dozen mini dark chocolate hazelnut cupcakes and 4 dozen mini flourless walnut cupcakes with a honey whiskey glaze. Then came the coffee cake...by far the easiest, but the one that takes the longest to bake...so while it was doing its thing in the oven I was able to get most of the decorating done. It was all going swell....till I went to remove the coffee cake. And ran the knife around the edge. And missed a spot. At 9:30 pm. Long story short(ish), called mom, she brought more blueberries and came to help assemble the pumpkins. It all turned out fine, (thanks mom!) and the goodies were delivered to Frenchie yesterday morning.

So that's it for now, seeing as how it's Thanksgiving morning and I'm supposed to be over at my parent's house oh....20 minutes ago.

Baking-induced insomnia

So much baking and so little posting. I made the cake for Frenchie...used an old family recipe (how cliche does that sound?) that I've always liked, but found the flavor a little flat. So I personalized it a bit with dark French chocolate and buttermilk....fabulous. Made a divitinty icing and a chocolate ganache to top it off...

Sadly...that was the last picture before my camera battery finally called it quits....wouldn't be so bad if I could find the darn charger. Since the cake, there have also been successful chocolate pumpkin cupcakes with a cream cheese/whipped cream frosting as well as yesterday's amazingness: a spiced honey pound cake with a honey liquer syrup. So very very good.

So this weekend's baking is actually serving a purpose. I recently joined The Daring Kitchen and the Daring Baker challenge for this month is donughts. I have 2 ideas in mind so far, and a potential 3rd....so there might just be copious amounts of frying in my house this weekend.

I'm also toying with a frosting idea (based on the frosting used for the chcolate pumpkin cupcakes) for the chocolate hazelnut cake Frenchie wants...I previously topped the cupcakes with Nutella and a piece of chocolate, but will need something a bit lighter for an entire cake.

So that about sums up my kitchen activities till now...more pics to come once I find the damned charger.

your delusional sunset

Weekend discoveries, bad first, good after (because really, who wants to end on something depressing?)

1. I'm not quite ready to watch romantic comedies....I may laugh at all the funny parts and tear up when appropriate, but I'm left feeling rather bitter at the end. Might need another month or so...

2. My chocolate pumpkin cakes turned out not so good. This is the second time a recipe has gone horribly wrong in 3 weeks. Not good.

3. Cold Stone no longer has dark chocolate ice cream. Sad, sad day (especially as said ice cream was needed in response to #1).

D (because I can't decide if it's bad or good or just plain 'is'): Dog does not like large, inflatable, light-up, ghost-topped, lawn decoration pumpkins. As in full-attack-mode-teeth out-hair up-barking like a maniac and scaring the shit out of me.

5. I heart my down alternative mattress topper. It is fluffy and warm and snuggly. yay!

6. Shopping is cathartic. And raises endorphins (See also, dark chocolate ice cream). And gives me a reason to put off doing laundry for just one more day...or two.

Rugelach, meet mini torte pans!

Ok...so the original plan for baking this weekend was to use the freakishly adorable molds lent to me by Frenchie. I had it all planned out...carrot cake with cream cheese icing. I bought edible spray paint. Colored sanding sugars. I was so darned excited. Until I tried the batter....hmm....well, maybe it would be different when it cooked and the carrots weren't crunchy. Yeah. Nope. Not only was the batter bad, but even if it had miraculously become edible in the oven (I can hope), the cakes refused to come out of the molds. So, no super cute, spray paint and sugar decorated, cream cheese frosted carrot cake. Damn.

I was determined to bake though, so I pulled out a Christmas cookie cookbook that my mom got for me recently and flipped to one I've been dying to try: Rugelach. The book says they are Eastern European and the cookie dough is made with cream cheese and topped with fruit and nuts then rolled into crescents. But it was Sunday afternoon. And I had to pick up a friend at the airport in like 4 hours. And hadn't really slept. So the prospect of rolling out the dough and making 40-some odd crescent cookies was not so much appealing. Enter the torte. I used my mom's Italian grandmother's recipe for the dough from her apricot and apple torte, sprinkled milk, cinnamon, and brown sugar on the crust, and topped with honey (not called for in the Rugelach recipe, but makes it oh so much better!). Here are the results:

Running with scizzors

I have a lot of extra energy in the evenings....so I'm making hair clips for my niece, Curly. I had bought her 2 super cute flower clips when she was out visiting this summer, but they were $7 each (absurd!) and my sister wants more. So between me and her Curly will have a veritable garden of hair clips.


The little yellow one with the green ribbon is my favorite so far



Amazing amazingness.

Amazingness #1: Over the weekend, in between two separate 8 hour shopping stints, I made about 70 mini marzipan pumpkin stems and curly-cues...along with, of course, mini pumpkin cupcakes....


The beginnings of my mini pumpkin patch

Amazingness #2: This morning when I stopped in the office at work for some papers Frenchie, my boss, asked if she could place an order for Thanksgiving! She had mentioned it in passing a few times, but this morning said that she definately wanted the mini chocolate hazelnut cakes (see this post) and that she had her mom bring some chocolate from France (French chocolate!!!!!!) for me to make them with! YAY!

Amazingness #C: After informing me about the chocolate (French chocolate!!!!), Frenchie told me she had something I could borrow. Ok...we are currently at a day care/pre-school, so when she takes me into the kitchen telling me how excited I'm going to be I really didn't believe her...till she pulled out 2 of these:

SO FREAKIN CUTE! Yes, those would be little mini carrots. And radishes. And cabbage (cabbages?). And look at the adorable little peas!!!!! I'm planning carrot cake for them and am super excited to spray paint the frosting...I bought a can today to start practicing :) (And yes, that would be a Williams Sonoma bag in the background....which also makes me happy, because, although I did not buy the cute little pans there, I did see other cute little pans there and purchased a fabulous cutting board and spatula)

Amazingness #4: It's 8 pm onTuesday. Which means that a) I survived an atrocious Monday and b) Glee is on. And I'm a Gleek. So this makes me happy! Woo! (But seriously....look at the cute little peas!!!!!!)