Cream Puffs and Hobbits

Today, my mother (the estimable Robin Winter) decided to teach me how to make cream puffs. Unfortunately, no photographs remain of this endeavor  as we were much too preoccupied with chucking the flour into the boiling water and butter and stirring it madly to take pictures. 

The first batch turned out terribly. Due to my father's long running battle against cholesterol, we have used a sort of egg that consists only of egg whites in a box, and this and the dough for cream puffs do not coexist. As a result, we wound up with flat cream puffs the first time around and had to run down to the corner store (a rather funky little place full of foods labeled in Cyrillic and German) and get a dozen eggs.

These did the trick, and we've now got a whole bunch of cream puffs, though three fewer than we made. The first two of these we ate. The third...

"He did it!"

Yeah, we should have learned not to do that by now. 

And while we were doing this, we were watching The Hobbit. Now, I'd seen it in theaters  but my mother hadn't, so I fear her recollection of the film will be broken up by timings for cream puffs (Wargs! "oh wait no time to turn the oven down to 350!") It's a lot of fun, but I have rather mixed feelings about it. 

As a Lord of the Rings fan since about the age of ten, I'm very fond of all the books and the appendices, and oh boy did the writers do their research. It's lovely to be so immersed in that world. But...well, I don't like cliffhanging scenes and sometimes it seems that practicality was sacrificed for the sake of the Wow-Factor--some of the action scenes grew tedious because it was all about people swinging on bridges and falling improbable distances. My impulse with those was to sit there and look at the shiny world that'd been created and wait for the plot to reappear. 

As per my earlier remark, the bad parts outweigh the good, and I'll happily line up for the next premier anyway. But there were a few points where the baking was a nice break from the movie! 

The Unintentional Hiatus

Well, that was rather longer than I planned to go without updating! Unfortunately, school had other ideas. I wound up working in another lab, and it's been spectacular fun. The housemates and I had many nice breakfasts (must upload pictures at some point!) and had many panicked evenings of studying. I also got that nasty coughing cold that's been going around and gave it to the Tolerant Housemate, who has cursed me many times as a result. Said coughing cold has refused to move out, which has done just wonders for my productivity. (Sarcastic? Me?)

But now I'm finished with finals, have bade farewell to the housemates, and am relaxing at home with good food and a lot of cats. 

By a lot of cats, I mean three. But they're all rather high-maintenance and very people-oriented (read, demanding) and so sometimes it seems like we have even more cats than we do. 

The cats. 

After living elsewhere for several months, it's rather an adjustment not to be able to leave food out on the counter! Even peapods aren't safe. Neither is cilantro or anything green and leafy. The black cat will even eat cake, and last New Years, got into someone's spilled champagne, and drank enough he was sick under the table. We've had to be very careful with him and alcohol since.

In novel-related news, I'm just about done with the first round of edits. Release date still seems to be May 1st, so here's hoping that doesn't change! 

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.