Food, glorious food!

I have been rather ill behaved of late with sporadic posting, but I have an excellent excuse for that, which is midterms. Yay midterms! Also getting things in on time to the publisher, which is just as much of a thing. 

This weekend, facing two imminent midterms and writing-related-work, I kind of...froze. I sat there in front of my computer and decided that not only could I not take another moment of trying to memorize exactly what Romanus IV was doing in 1011 (answer, getting his butt handed to him by Alp Arselan at the Battle of Manzikert because he had left his reinforcements in the hands of an uncle of the child-emperor he was determined to depose), but if I had to puzzle over the exact weight of my main character again I would either scream or crawl under the bed and never come out.

So seizing my tolerant housemate by the arm, I went to the grocery store and then raided the cookbook shelf (my parents, convinced that I would starve without suitable instruction, have given me more cookbooks for my apartment than most people see in a lifetime). 

I then proceeded to go through all of the dozen eggs I'd just bought. The products of this were rewarding, to say the least. 

I must confess, though, I did not make this first one. These are the tolerant housemate's lemon bars, which may have won the award as the best lemon bars ever, even over my mother's! (Sorry mom!)

We baked them in a pie dish, since we do not actually own a small, deep sided pan suitable for lemon bars, brownies, or other such delights (a thing that must be remedied soon. I got another dozen eggs on Tuesday). 

These are cinnamon chocolate chip muffins. Though the flavor was lovely, I have somehow mastered the technique of making the tops of the muffins perfectly tender and their bottoms something akin to cardboard. I blame the fact that I left the wet ingredients in the fridge and the butter congealed and made the dough a funny texture. Moving on. 

 Here are the lemon bars, freed from the wax paper and the pie dish. In future, the wax paper will be omitted. It was...difficult. 

This last one, I cannot take much credit for, as it came from a box. It's an almond sweet bread--think a giant cinnamon roll except with crushed almonds and almond icing. The tolerant housemate loathes almonds, but I love them. (So does my main character in Weather, one of the few things we agree on!) I also added caramel to the center, which was a success, though it did make the bread ooze a little in the oven. 

So now, dear reader, you know how I retained my sanity this weekend. After all the baking, I went back to studying and working on other projects quite happily. It might have been something to do with the lemon bar I was munching.