What have I been up to lately…hmmm…

Well, I made a quite delicious discovery – using Portobello mushrooms as the base of individual pizzas!

Behold:

Oh my GOODNESS it was yummy! If you desire to create your own mushroom deliciousness, you can find the recipe here. Just scroll down to find the recipe.

We’re in the middle of landscaping our front and back yards. Husband and my dad installed the sprinkler system, and we’re going to have a paver stone patio, grass out back with rocks around the edges, and in front I’m hoping for a planter in front of our porch so I can plant flowers. Which will hopefully thrive, as I do not have a green thumb. But I think they’re pretty. The flowers. Not my thumb.

With the installation of the patio, we’re planning for many summer barbecues! Which brings me to my next food item.

We love burgers. LOVE them. But, as you know, I do not eat wheat. Not regularly, anyway. I cheat with a bite here and there but no more than that. I thought I was doomed to a life of burgers wrapped in lettuce, which is kind of pitiful.

BUT.

Remember my quinoa pizza crust?

You do?

Do you know what happens when you bake it in smaller rounds?

You can use them as BURGER BUNS!!!!!

My summer will now be complete. All those cookouts on the back patio…sigh…bliss…

I was left alone in the house with this:

And this:

Which resulted in this:

Yum.

Note: Add hotdogs and barbecue sauce to the list of things never to leave me alone in the house with…

Last night I had a crazy dream. I dreamed that we heard some kids needed to be adopted, offered to take them into our home, and overnight doubled the size of our family. And it was CHAOS. In my dream I even wrote a blog post about the experience!

It was one of those dreams that was hard to wake up from, because it felt so real, and there were several moments suspended in that space between dreaming and awake where I had to figure out what was reality and what was the dream. I literally had to process through “Okay, we really did only tuck ONE child into bed last night!”

One of the reasons it felt so real was because in my dream, I dealt with the same feelings I deal with in real life in regards to having a large family. There are days when I wonder “How the heck am I EVER going to handle having more than one child????” and in my dream I would think “What were we THINKING taking on this many all at once???” frequently.

But one underlying theme remains, in the dream and in real life – I know we want to have a fairly large family, and I know God will equip us for it. By the time we have that many kids, a considerable amount of time will have passed. My husband and I will be older, hopefully wiser, and the kids will all be at various stages of life. It’s not like they’ll all be in diapers and eating baby food forever. By the time we bring the last child into our family, the older ones will be able to use the potty, brush their own teeth, feed themselves, change their own clothes, etc. And we will have adjusted. We will always adjust. What is life but a series of chapters? And each chapter bears its own unique adjustments.

Hopefully those adjustments will involve more bedrooms, because in my dream all the kids had to sleep on the floor of the baby’s room on couch cushions!

I should really be in bed right now. But I’m wired.

My hands are in sorry shape at the moment. Especially my right hand. I keep beating it up. I tore a chunk of skin off of my thumb, just below the nail, last week and now have a gnarly scab that doesn’t want to heal and likes to catch on everything. Then I took a slice of skin off the middle knuckle of my pointer finger while I was slicing something for dinner one evening. THEN, I went to put on hand sanitizer after changing the baby’s diaper the other day and the back of my hand started stinging, and I looked down and there’s this huge swollen red scratch across the whole back of my hand and I have no idea how it got there!

My left hand, by comparison, looks perfect. Like it could belong to a hand model.

I’m out of my favorite chapstick right now. It’s this cocoa butter stuff I can only find at a few Walgreens in my city. It is the ONLY stuff that works for my lips. Right now I’m slathering them with something like three different random kinds of chapstick I’ve found lying around the house or hiding in one of my purses and none of it is working and I WANT MY COCOA BUTTER CHAPSTICK!!!! WAAAAAAAHHHHHH!

Whew, okay, I feel better.

I’ve also managed to eat almost an entire bag of dark chocolate chips over the course of the past 48 hours. I bought two for my baking foibles over the weekend and only used one. And leaving me alone in the house with extra chocolate is a bad, bad idea. I cannot resist. When I have real chocolate in the house, I must eat it. Which is why I rarely have chocolate in my house. Because I eat it. I eat it all. If any share of it is supposed to be Husband’s, I make him take it to work. Otherwise, it will not survive the day.

I’m loving having long hair again. I’m pinning it up in all kinds of fun ways when I blow-dry it curly. And when I blow-dry it straight, I take my big curling iron to it and make it all fancy and feel like Kate Middleton. Minus the whole going-to-become-a-royal-by-marrying-a-prince thing. But I’m already married to a guy who treats me like royalty, so I’m good on that part. I just like copying her hair. It’s pretty.

Speaking of which, the royal wedding is the day after my own anniversary. Husband was very motivated to get his homemade computer DVR working so I wouldn’t be waking him up at two in the morning in our hotel (we’ll be away overnight at the time) to watch it live. This is, like, a once-in-a-lifetime guilty pleasure, people!!!!! This is like the Oscars only a million times better!

And now that I have thoroughly embarrassed myself with this entire post, I’m going to go wash my face and go to bed.

Due to yesterday’s post, some of you may now have an image of me being an effortless Martha Stewart type, whipping around the kitchen cool as a cucumber with a smile on my face, puppies scurrying around my feet as I magically concoct these confections.

Except I don’t have any puppies. So scratch that image right off the bat.

Oh, and the whole cool-as-a-cucumber thing? Nope.

Truth is, this weekend was the first time I attempted ANY of that stuff. I have never decorated a cake in my life. I have never employed that method of decorating cookies. I was flying by the seat of my pants going off the recipes I taped on the front of the microwave so I could see them easily as I worked without taking up any precious counter space.

Though I still managed to miss a step. Hence the powdered sugar bomb I set off in the Kitchenaid mixer.

The cookies were relatively stress-free, actually. There was somewhat of a learning curve for beginners like myself, so I’ll share that:

When you add the powdered sugar to the mixer for the icing, mix it on low at first. LOW. Trust me. Or, y’know…POOF. No, I do not have a picture of that moment. Sorry to disappoint you. But yeah, don’t miss that step in the instructions. You can crank it up once it’s all incorporated, like the instructions say to, but only after it’s all taken on a liquid form. Otherwise…well, POOF!

When she says to let the mixer beat it for five minutes, she means it. I had to set a timer and walk away to resist the temptation to stop the mixer and check the consistency of the icing every 60 seconds.

When making the “flood icing”, it’s really true that you have to add water in teeny tiny itty bitty excruciatingly small increments. As the icing gets thinner, even just a drop – a literal drop, not a nonspecific squirt from the faucet – of water makes a big difference in the consistency. And if you add too much water, ain’t no comin’ back from that. You can’t just thicken it up with more icing. You have to scrap it and start over. It’s true.

Don’t be afraid of the “flood icing”. Pour it on those cookies!!!! I figured out a few cookies in that too much was better than too little. Makes it easier to spread around with the toothpick. And it dries smoother.

The Americolor gel food coloring is strong stuff. Which is good. But it is easy to go overboard, so if you want your colors on the pastel side, I’d suggest dipping a toothpick into the bottle and dabbing the little bit on the tip into the icing, whisking well, and repeating if it’s still too light.

Don’t touch the icing, even if it looks dry. Looks are deceiving. Don’t ask me how I know this. Okay, I know, you’re asking. I found out through experience. So just leave the cookies alone until the icing is set. 24 hours is good. Then you can do as you wish with them. I put them in pretty cellophane bags Valerie had found.

All in all though, the cookies were a success. I will definitely do these again. Hopefully for Easter. Easter egg cookies!!!

Now, that chocolate method I was so excited about. It sounded and looked super easy online. Ha! Yeah right. Things are rarely as they seem.

First, the dark chocolate was way too thin. The letters turned out fine in the end, but it was very difficult to write them. I kind of just had to do it as fast as I could and pray it came out all right.

The colored chocolate started out okay. Once it cooled a bit and started to thicken up, I started getting really good at making the flowers. HOWEVER. The tutorial neglected to mention that the chocolate likes to harden in the decorating tip. I had to remove and scrape out each tip with a toothpick probably three times before I was done. Frustrating. So I probably won’t be doing that again. Unless there’s a special kind of chocolate that doesn’t do that.

Or I could just call Karina and arrange a cake decorating lesson. Which I am probably going to do once things normalize around here a little bit.

I also had this grand vision of chocolate-covered strawberries with swirls of colored chocolate surrounding the cake. Um, no. I am not skilled enough with a pastry bag yet to do this. Two strawberries in, I scrapped that idea. You gotta know when to let things go sometimes. So I drizzled (well, glopped really – the consistency was weird) some plain white chocolate on the strawberries and called it good.

The cake, now. The biggest lesson I learned from the cake was this:

When results count, it’s not time for experimentation.

See, I live at high altitude. Cakes fall sometimes. The cake I attempted from the original recipe did not have high-altitude adjustments, but I figured as long as I didn’t stomp around the kitchen while it baked, we’d be fine.

Nope.

See Exhibit A:

Flat Cake.

It was a pretty heavy cake, which is why I think it collapsed in such a dramatic fashion. Our thinner air couldn’t stand up to the heavy cake, and thus it went from cake to crater. After some internet surfing and asking a few night-owl friends who were still awake for help, I ended up going with a boxed mix. It was safer. And honestly, still delicious. Maybe someday I’ll experiment with cake from scratch again, but for now, if I do another cake in the future, I’m goin’ with the box.

And that, my friends, is all. I am now addicted to decorating cookies, and itching to learn more about decorating cakes. All of this is ironic considering I don’t usually eat wheat or sugar. I just like baking and decorating apparently! And I get almost as much pleasure out of watching people eat my creations as I do out of eating them myself.

The creations. Not the people. Just to clarify.

Okay, so after last night’s panicked post about falling cake I’m sure you’re all wondering what the heck was going on.

What’s going on is that today, we celebrated the fact that THIS lovely lady,

my friend Shanna, is having a baby! This afternoon was her baby shower, hosted by my good friend Valerie and myself. It was an afternoon of fun, fellowship, and yummy food.

My part was to do the sweet baking. I had the idea of making fancy cookies as the favors for the guests, as I had seen this post from Pioneer Woman some months ago and have been eager to give it a try! We decided to do “A” shaped cookies, for the baby’s first initial.

Thus, my weekend looked like this:

Friday: Bake the cookies. They have to be completely cool before being iced, and the icing has to set for 24 hours before the cookies can be packaged, so therefore I had a late-night cookie baking session. Which consisted of me making cookies and my husband begging to eat the dough.

Saturday: Ice the cookies.

Outline.

Make the flood icing.

Flood the cookies.

Sigh with a sense of accomplishment. Then turn around and look at your kitchen.

Run away.

Just kidding.

Saturday afternoon, I did the prep work for the cake, making letters and flowers with chocolate on wax paper.

Saturday evening, I decided to bake the cake, this beauty, also from Pioneer Woman. All seemed to be going according to plan.

Until THIS happened.

Disregard the chunks we ripped off and snacked on as we contemplated the massive crater in the middle of the cake. It was a delicious cake. Just flat. Very flat.

After some extended panicking, Husband ran across the street to King Soopers and got me a box of cake mix.

And I got these out of it.

And this morning, these turned into this:

Whew.

And yum. Very yum.

Everything was yum.

I gotta give major props to my girl Valerie – spinach souffle, cucumber sandwiches, chicken salad sandwiches, olive and cheese skewers, sweet barbecue meatballs, lemonade, and raspberry iced tea. All of it delicious. Girlfriend knows how to host a party!

All in all, the whole thing ended up being a smashing success. Valerie, I’ll plan a baby shower with you anytime!

I can’t post pictures because the specifics are supposed to remain under wraps until tomorrow.

Suffice to say there is a cake involved. And I was going to be all ahead of the game by baking my cake tonight so it would be completely cooled and ready to fill, frost, and decorate tomorrow morning. And I would be saved a ton of time and would get out of the house with all my hair still attached to my head.

And then, to borrow a phrase from Mandy Hornbuckle, “Karma said “Oh no you di’n't!” with a z-snap and everything.”

Because my cake fell. Stupid high altitude. I have baked many cakes without following the high altitude directions and they have turned out just fine. But ooooooh no, not this time.

It is 9:45 at night and I have no cake.

Commence freakout.

Or commence trip to the King Soopers bakery. One of the two.