Cupcakes Take the Cake!

Ok...so I borrowed the title of this blog from a cupcake blog that I follow. So sue me.

But anyway, now that I have that off my chest, on with the story! I haven't blogged in far too long so I'm going to make this a good one. Fasten your seat-belts.

This past Wednesday and Thursday night Shane and I were baking up a storm. His boss's 50th birthday was just around the corner and he was charged with making some delicious birthday treats for him. So we picked out a recipe for my brand-spankin'-new cupcake cookbook. We couldn't make just any old box cupcakes for this occasion! We selected the Lemon Coconut Snowballs and got down to business. Here is how the events played out...




Tuesday evening: I had dinner with my aunt (Who just invited me to go to London with her in April! YAY! More blogging on this is sure to follow...) and was telling her about my baking plans for the week. She drew my attention to the fact that I may want to spread my baking over the course of two nights since I hadn't yet gone shopping for the ingredients and we had cake, frosting, and lemon filling to make. This would likely take a bit of time. I could do the grocery shopping and cake part on Wednesday night and the frosting and lemon filling on Thursday to have everything ready to go for Friday. I am sooooo glad I heeded her advice. We would have been up all night on Thursday if we hadn't spread things out.

Wednesday evening: After a day of being stuck in the house because of the snowstorm, I ventured out to Stop and Shop with Shane to pick up the ingredients for our cupcakes. We were able to easily find almost everything...until this stupid little jar proceed to evade us for what seemed like at least 20 minutes...


What the hell is "cream of tartar" anyway??!?! We called both of our mothers (Shane couldn't reach his and mine wasn't completely sure where to find it...we had been staring at the spices section for some time and were insistent that it wasn't there and that was the only place she could think of it being), looked in every imaginable area we could think of, and then Shane discovered, via his handy dandy Blackberry, that McCormick makes it. It had to be in the spices section. Upon returning to that area for the umpteenth time we, of course, found it immediately. Oops...sorry mom.

Then it was time to go to Target. The recipe required the use of a sifter and I didn't have one. So I ran in and got one, along with a double boiler that could be used, optionally, for the frosting (Why not? If I'm going to get into this baking thing I'll use it again and it wasn't all that expensive.) and some little paper cupcake tin liners because they only had foil ones at Stop and Shop and I didn't like those. I'm very particular about these things.

We then returned to my house, made the cake part of the cupcakes, then put them in the refrigerator until we could fill and frost them on Thursday. We were able to complete all of this by around 10 of 9...just in time for LOST. PHEW!

Thursday evening: I had a doctor's appointment after work and Shane was planning on getting dinner with his Dad so we were going to be getting a little bit of a late start on the rest of the cupcake making activities. My doctor's appointment went a little longer than I expected and Shane was going to beat me to my house so, very unintelligently, I was hurrying home. Keep in mind that there was just a snow and ice storm the day before. Just a mile or two away from my house a car stopped abruptly to allow the car in front of it to turn left. I proceeded to almost slide right into the back of said car but opted to run into an icy snow bank on the side of the road instead. And got stuck there. Stupid front wheel drive. Fortunately a couple very nice passers by stopped to help me and, of course, after I called Shane he rushed to my aid as well. A couple shovels and firm shoves later I was out of the snow and back on my way. But not without some battle wounds...



Very luckily it wasn't anything too ugly. That piece leaning against my tire in the first of the two pictures above came off the bottom of the bumper on that side of the car and if you look right under the headlight in the second picture you can see some cracking in the plastic. That yellow signal light on the side there also popped out but, also luckily, I was able to pop it back in pretty easily. Ugh. But I have to keep in mind that this is much better than my car would have looked if I had rammed into the back of that other car. And, most importantly, I wasn't hurt...so I can't really complain.

Back at the house we got to work making the filling and frosting for the cupcakes. Well...Shane mostly got to work while I frantically tried to do dishes and clean up around the kitchen just so we could have some working space. Typically I would have done this earlier but I just didn't have time. I had the camera out this night too so we were able to snap some more pictures...

Here is Shane very expertly grating some lemon zest for the filling.

Here is the freshly blended frosting...mmmmm...I love frosting.

Here is me anal-retentively putting the shredded coconut on top of the cupcakes. I didn't like the way Shane was just dumping the coconut directly from the bag onto the cupcakes. It just wasn't pretty that way.

Here is the obscene amount of frosting we had leftover when we were done.

Here is the obscene amount of lemon filling we had leftover when we were done.

Aaaannnddd...(drum roll please)...THE FINISHED PRODUCT!



Mmmmm...much blood, sweat and tears went into these cupcakes. Anything for Al's big 5-0!

Lights Up On Washington Heights

I had a weekend full of Broadway this week - Avenue Q on Friday night and In the Heights on Saturday. Needless to say, I feel very fortunate right about now. Both of the shows were amazing! But I'm feeling sort of brain dead at the end of this truly wonderful 3-day weekend so this is going to be a very photo-heavy, writing-light, kind of blog post. I'll make up for it with some great narrative next time, I promise. In the mean time enjoy the pics from my Saturday NYC trip!

The picture above is of my father, his wife Lisa, and my sister, Hillary waiting in the Old Saybrook train station for our way-too-early-for-a-Saturday train. We took an Amtrak train, business class, into the city and then took a town car from Penn Station to Time Square. I should note that I only travel like this when I'm with my dad. When it's up to me I take good ol' Metro North from New Haven to Grand Central and then hoof it or take the subway wherever I need to go.

A picture of the aforementioned folks in Time Square. It was around this time that a woman dressed in a flapper outfit sashayed up to me and said "Hatcha! Whoopie!" and handed me a flyer for Chicago. Now THAT is a dedicated street team member. She was wearing tights in single digit temperatures!

You can barley see it in this pic but if you squint you can see the "2009" and the ball that drops on New Year's Eve at the top of this building just about the Toshiba stuff.

This is where we had lunch - a Pan-Asian restaurant called Ruby Foo's. Apparently Howard Stern likes this place...according to my dad he mentioned it on his show once. I'll just take his word for it. I thought the lanterns hanging from the ceiling were pretty. And the wonton soup wasn't bad either!

My sister, me, and my dad in front of the Richard Rodgers Theatre. We look a little bit chilly, don't you think? At least it wasn't really windy.

The In The Heights set. I thought it was so cool how they used scrim material on the buildings so you could kind of see through them at times. It was such a great show!

Alright that's all for now! Happy MLK Day!

Time Zones Illude Me

I'm going to do an itty-bitty little blog "no-no" for this entry and write something about work. However, I have changed all the names to protect the innocent and I'm not even going to say where I work...though I'm fairly certain anyone reading this knows anyway.

This morning I needed to make a phone call to a woman who was in a different time zone...far enough away that there was a three hour time difference. I didn't want to forget to touch base with her though so I figured I would call and leave a message about what I wanted to discuss with her and she could call me back whenever she got to work. I dialed the number, the phone rang a few times, and then, to my surprise, someone actually answered the phone. Someone I think I probably should not have disturbed because I have the distinct feeling that he was someone important. The conversation unfolded something like this:

Mystery Man: Hello.
Me: Umm...hello is "Deborah" (not really her name) in?
MM: ...(long pause)...(said with a distinct tone of annoyance) do you know it's 6:30 a.m.?
M: I'm sorry...
MM: Call back sometime after 9...k?
M: I apologize...I will.

Boy oh boy did I feel like an ass. But in all seriousness...what on earth was he doing in the office at 6:30 in the morning, hmmmm??? Is it really all that hard to believe someone would call to leave a message at that time of the day if they were up? Unless this mysterious stranger happens to like to start his work day extremely early, the only logical explanation I could come up with is that this woman's office happens to be in the place where this person lives. Maybe? Either way I had that embarassed, tight-chested, "oh jeez" feeling for a good half hour after the incident and I did not call back until well after noon our time, 9:00 a.m. their time.

Now that I've been thoroughly vague I will leave you with this lovely sunrise photo from the fam Long Beach Island trip '08 to complete the early morning mood. Because I want my blog to be a good blog...and good blogs have pictures.

A Response to a Complaint

Someone apparently thinks my blog is inferior to others because it does not have pictures. ::Sigh:: Some people are just impossible to please I guess. So in response I have selected some photos at random from my computer and I am posting them below, complete with captions. Enjoy!

This is me the day I brought my car home. Before this I owned a 1987 Toyota Camry. This car is a vast improvement.

This is my friend Jess, my sister Hillary, and me in Boston touching a cow's butt.

This picture was taken on the back deck of the house my dad sometimes rents on Long Beach Island. I enjoy it there very much.

These are some flowers I received sometime not that long ago. I really liked the rose quite a bit. It opened up very nicely.

This is the place on Cape Cod where I got my tattoo. This picture was taken a few years after...the building was completely vacant.

This is a picture of Shane beating me with a frisbee the day before my friends' (Brandt & Kathy) wedding. This photograph pretty much epitomizes our relationship.

Happy? ;)

For Auld Lang Syne, My Dear

Happy 2009! We're four days into the new year and, just as I'm sure we all are, I'm very excited to have that clean slate feeling of a whole twelve months before me.

2008 certainly ended memorably though...yes indeed, with a story that is certainly blog-worthy in my opinion. I am notorious for getting things all nicely and neatly planned out in my head - imagining everything falling perfectly into place - and being very upset when those plans are, inevitably, muddled as painstakingly precise plans often are. And I wanted this December 31 to be very special so of course I had a game plan in mind. Shane and I were planning on going out to a nice dinner so I'd gone out and gotten something fun to wear complete with a new pair of four-inch heals (How cool is it that I can wear four-inch heals and still not be anywhere close to taller than my boyfriend? But I digress...) and a fancy new purse to match. My sister had given me a gift certificate for a manicure and pedicure at my favorite nail salon in my home town of East Hampton so I made my appointment for mid-morning on the 31st and my hairdresser even made time in her schedule for me to come in and have my hair done. How cool! I, admittedly, can be a bit of a girly girl at times and enjoy getting dressed up so I was looking forward to it all very much. Then after I was all done up Shane and I were going to go see the early fireworks in Bushnell Park, go to dinner at Dish, and then drink champagne and count down to the new year. Who could possibly ask for more?

And then the weather hit.

4-8 inches of lovely, fluffy New England snow all falling within the mid-morning to early afternoon time window in which I was going to be doing my running around and getting pretty. Damn.

Did I give up and cancel my appointments you ask? Don't be silly...of course not!

So in whiteout conditions I made the journey to East Hampton to get all prettied up. And I made it there and back without even hitting a single car or guardrail! But then I was faced with a unique dilemma...my roommates were both gone for the day and the driveway needed to be shoveled. Double damn. Upon explaining my plight to my hairdresser she provided me with a plastic shower cap to protect my perfectly coiffured do. Stylish.

Once I got home I set to work clearing the driveway...with only about an hour and a half to go until Shane's scheduled arrival time to pick me up. Diligently I began shoveling away the snow all the while with the plastic shower cap sliding down on my forehead and over my eyes until it got to the point where I had to stop and fix it because I couldn't see (this happened repeatedly). Meanwhile my various neighbors' driveways were being cleared by folks with plow trucks and snow blowers...and me in the midst of it all with my measly little snow shovel. Needless to say I felt a bit foolish. And while I toiled I secretly hoped to myself "Wow...I really wish one of the guys in those trucks would see how pathetic I am and offer to give me a hand."

And my patheticness paid off! Low and behold a pick-up with a plow on the front pulled up to the bottom of my driveway and inside there where three guys who offered to help me finish clearing my driveway. Oh providence! $20 later the job was done and I was happily getting ready for my night out. Seriously...sometimes being a sad, puny little girl really does pay off.

The rest of the night proved to be truly lovely (although minus the fireworks...even I'm not such a hopeless romatic that I'll brave freezing temperature and snow drifts just for one of those "awwww" moments)...although the 4-inch heals proved to be a bit of a nuisance. They're not really very good for walking on ice in. Oops. Luckily Shane was able to half-drag me from my house to the car and then from the car to the restaurant. As clumsy as I may have wound up looking I think the first impression was still pretty good! I looked kinda sexy...as long as I was holding still. :-p