Cooking adventures!

Today I made this beautiful (if I do say so myself) little cake for my mother's birthday. It is full of rich chocolatey goodness covered in chocolate ganache and almonds. Yum!

But seriously, it could not be simpler or more classy. Though I made about thirty dishes, I did this in just over an hour between classes. Worth it? Yes.

Flourless Chocolate Cake
(adapted from a recipe from KirbieCravings.com via foodgawker.com)

Cake:
7 oz semisweet or milk chocolate chips (I used bittersweet and added about a 1/4 c. sugar)
1/4 c. butter
4 eggs
1/2 tsp. almond extract/dark rum/orange extract/whatever you feel like (optional)

Ganache:
1 c. heavy cream
9 oz chocolate chips
powdered sugar

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350F. Grease and line a 6-7" round pan with parchment paper (cake will stick to a greased-only pan).

Microwave chocolate and butter in 30-second intervals, stirring between each go, until melted and smooth (probably about 1 - 1.5 minutes). Meanwhile, beat eggs at high speed for about 7 minutes until almost tripled in size. Add egg mixture by thirds into chocolate, folding carefully until no egg streaks remain.

Pour into pan and bake for 22-25 mins, or until knife inserted into center comes out clean. Will not rise very much.

Ganache: Heat cream over medium heat until just boiling. Pour over chocolate and whisk until smooth. Add powdered sugar for sweetness or thickness. (You can also cool it in the fridge and then whip it for a lighter frosting.) When cake has cooled slightly, poor over it starting in the middle and working toward edges.

Add chopped almonds and powdered sugar (or orange peel, or sprinkles, or whatever floats your boat). EAT WITH A VENGEANCE!

______________________

I also recently made replicas of Red Lobster's Cheddar Bay Biscuits. I've never had the real thing, so I'm not sure how close they actually come to the real thing, but they were extremely good. Worth making if you're craving deliciousness.

This is actually the recipe I used (or a censored version of it...ha. Thanks Imgur.)

4 c. Bisquick
1 1/3 c. water
4 oz shredded sharp cheddar




Mix!





Bake @ 375F for 10-12min

Combine:
1/2 c. melted butter
1/8 tsp garlic powder
1/8 tsp onion powder
1/2 tsp dried parsley
1/8 tsp salt
black pepper

Brush as it comes out of the oven!

EAT!

Wichita Mountains!

Last Saturday Jackson and I drove three hours north to the Wichita Mountains in Oklahoma (which we've pretty much decided is the only place worth going in Oklahoma...)

We wasted no time and soon discovered that our camp site was the feeding grounds of choice to a mother deer and her baby!

(pictures coming soon.........)

Then we saw buffalo and more buffalo:

Drove to the top of the tallest and oldest of the mountains, Mt. Scott, to look out over all of Oklahoma:

And, after locking my keys in my car and learning that one of the jobs of a police officer is breaking into vehicles for absent-minded people like myself, we climbed (literally climbed) the baby mountain Little Baldy right near our campsite:

The next day, we woke up to a flock of wild turkeys harassing our deer friends. Unfortunately, they were gone before we could get pictures. But then we hiked up the ~600ft Elk Mountain, a long and arduous 4-mile round-trip journey of impressive views and massive rocks:

Finally, we packed up and left as quickly as we could, sore and dirty and sunburned and tired. Three hours later, after driving twenty miles in the wrong direction out of Wichita Falls and missing the turn off for Denton (seriously), we made it home and I'm pretty sure I died for twelve hours immediately afterward. 

It was fun and exciting and adventurous and pretty and buffalo-tastic, but Jesus, I am done with camping for the next several years if I can help it. Twice in one school year is more than enough. Bleh. 

Back at School

Well, the new semester has officially started. Ah well. I was getting bored of sitting at home doing nothing anyway. But to all my friends I saw (and some I didn't see) -- good luck and I MISS YOU!

(And I hope you feel like this dinosaur when you go to all your new classes.) 

Anyway. Besides re-organizing my dorm room and putting up these excellent Christmas presents/posters

(Thanks, Brother!)

I have been getting up at the ungodly hour of 8am to attend class. But this morning, there was a surprise! 

That's right! Snow! And barely half an inch of it! But still, freezing cold, slippery white stuff that for a surprising few of my friends was their first-ever real snow. Everyone was a little too optimistic about the university shutting down, but alas, it did not, and I got to go to two new classes. 

The first was Advanced Readings in French Literature, which seems very interesting and potentially fun if I'm not intimidated into muteness by the handful of native-speakers and ridiculously fluent non-native speakers that like to dominate discussion with their weird Quebecois and Senegalese accents that I cannot for the life of me understand. I also accidentally lied and said I was a sophomore instead of a freshman, so I probably set myself up for criticism when I don't actually have that extra year of studying the language under my belt. 

But we will see. 

I want to share this poem that we read in class, for those of you who might kind of sort of speak French, because I think it is charming. 

Le Bonbon 

Robert Desnos

Je je suis suis le le roi roi
des montagnes
j’ai de de beaux beaux bobos beaux beaux yeux yeux
il fait une chaleur chaleur

j’ai nez
j’ai doigt doigt doigt doigt doigt à à
chaque main main

j’ai dent dent dent dent dent dent dent
dent dent dent dent dent dent dent
dent dent dent dent dent dent dent
dent dent dent dent dent dent dent
dent dent dent dent

Tu tu me me fais fais souffrir
mais peu m’importe m’importe
la la porte porte

TRANSLATION: 

"The Candy" (Le Bonbon)

I I am am the the king king

of the mountains

I have beautiful beautiful scratches beautiful beautiful eyes eyes

It is hot hot

I have nose

I have finger finger finger finger finger on on

each hand hand

I have tooth tooth tooth tooth tooth tooth tooth 

tooth tooth tooth tooth tooth tooth tooth

tooth tooth tooth tooth tooth tooth tooth 

tooth tooth tooth tooth tooth tooth tooth 

tooth tooth tooth tooth 

You you make make me me suffer

but I do do not not care care

the the door door

The other class I had today was Honors Advanced Technical Writing, which was surprisingly fun. I know a lot of people in that class, and even though I am one of two English majors in a room full of chemists and engineers, I look forward to the rest of it. I have a feeling that I am going to be very, very good at technical writing, because it focuses so much on form, grammar, and that sneaky magic thing that gives sentences and paragraphs the smooth, stark sound associated with professionalism and academia, something that comes naturally to me most of the time.

My classes yesterday were much less interesting--Modern American Literature, for one, intimidates me. The professor's expectations are understandably high, but it is his cold scholarly manner for such a young dude that makes me wonder if he will be the one to see through my act as a good essay-writer and interpreter of literature--the act I have been playing since middle school--and see me for what I really am in English classes: someone who has absolutely no idea what she's doing.

On the other end of the spectrum, Astronomy of the Solar System is going to be a typical large-scale lecture course--but I predict it will be infinitely more interesting and easier than my waste of an archaeology class last semester. And there is a reassuringly small amount of math, according to my professor. I look forward to hopefully finally taking a science class I actually care about!

My last new class is Organizational Behavior, a management class for my minor. I have it for three hours every Monday afternoon, and oh god, I think it's going to kill me. The subject is dry and unchallenging, the professor is quiet and rambly, and the students are all Business majors, who are a special class of polished faux-rich kids who have their own language of well-rehearsed business quips and are somehow already middle-aged. I felt like I had walked into some sort of baby-CEO church when I entered that weirdly professional building, like they could tell just by looking at me that I was decidedly not a future stockbroker or business owner or financial adviser and were wondering what the crap I was doing in their center of worship and when, exactly, I was going to leave, as the Dow-something-whatever flashed across the little screen in front of them.

So. That was my first two days back at college. What have you been up to? :)

Happy 2013!

My family and I hailed the New Year at our lakehouse on Lake Fork. It was wet and cold, but we celebrated the occasion with confetti fights...

Sparklers and fireworks...

And potato canons...

(video proof:)

I have spent the day or two since hangin' with my boyfriend

And shopping with the money my wonderful grandparents gave me for Christmas!

 I feel very proud of myself, too, because with 150 bucks I bought five dresses, a cardigan, three pairs of tights, and some red heels, and I have money left over to go to the movies tomorrow. Yay for Plato's Closet and Ross! I despise shopping, but clothes make me happy. :3

Oh, and I also (finally) got my car washed and took this trippy picture of soap. I'm pretty sure this is what space looks like. 

Yeah, basically.

Lastly, all of you should watch this video of thirteen interesting (but totally unrelated) tidbits in honor of 2013. 

PS - I have the book mentioned here (Sex on the Moon by Ben Mezrich) and it is definitely worth reading if anyone's interested. :)

Obligatory Christmas Post.

Woohoo! Christmas! Yaaaaay!

It was a really great Christmas, actually. Between the awesomeness that was having literally every single one of my cousins in one place for the first time ever--Lili having come up from Houston with Hannah and Grandmama for a weekend of adventure and "arrowing", and Oliver coming with Simon and Emily from California for Christmas festivities--the week was positively full of rarely-seen family!

                  Granny, Austin, Brendon                                                                

Sophia 

 

               Oliver                                                                                         Lili

First came the aforementioned weekend of Lake Fork craziness (which included endless target practice with my dad's and Jackson's new bows, four-wheeling, Christmas baking, bonfiring, and Jackson capsizing in the canoe before Lili and I came to his [damp] rescue).

After this, Jackson and I came home early to celebrate our three-year anniversary by seeking out my mother's Christmas gift, of which neither of my parents were even faintly aware. It took us hours of searching to find the right one, but we finally went home with the newest addition to the Bailey family:

Meet Poppet Cat Bailey (a 6-month-old, sweet, adorable girl-cat!)

The next day was Tuba Christmas with everyone, including Grandmama's reindeer antlers, as per tradition:

 

Then, of course, was Christmas!

We opened presents:

(I got a new phone, a ton of books, some lovely clothes, and a lot of other wonderful things! Yay!)

We ate Christmas dinner:

And, by golly, it snowed! 

So all in all, it was a pretty successful holiday. Hope yours was as awesome as mine, and Happy New Year!

PS - Sorry for the nosedive in picture quality recently. I haven't had the motivation to edit any of these pictures or upload pictures from my real (non-iPhone) camera. So yeah. Blah. 

Finally Done!

The semester is officially over! I just took my last final and am feeling pretty good about my grades. Now, after I finish up some laundry and load all my crap into my car, I'll be ready to go home for a long and glorious month! YIPPEE!

For the record, this is a picture of all the notecards I have used for studying this semester with Gatsby the Dapper Lego Man for scale. 284 notecards, to be exact.

College!

But to counteract this overload of schooling, I did an uncharacteristically reckless thing and went to see The Hobbit premier the night before my last final. The movie was three hours long, and I only got four hours of sleep and minimal studying, but IT WAS SO WORTH IT! Good god, that movie could not have been better. Far more lighthearted than the LotR movies, but not childish or silly, still appropriately dark. Gah! GO SEE IT IMMEDIATELY. 

Oh, and I did fine on my final, so no worries. Priorities or something. 

Another thing that makes me excited: My boys The Lead Pipes are finally releasing a real album! Professionally recorded and everything! I went with them to record and took some pictures for the cover design. And by the way, their recordings sound incredible. Friends of Jackson, be excited. They're probably looking at a release date in January-ish. 

My preliminary cover design:

Also, enjoy this cartoon I drew while killing time at Amitea:

And here is a picture of a happy sloth friend!

Happy Winter Break!

My Life is a Collage of Stories

You know what I love?

Stories.

Stories are why I am an English major, why I love to read, why I love to write. They are the reason I see the world for what it is, to love this place and these people and this chance we have been given to explore and discover and feel and know. The reason I have battled the biggest and the smallest monsters, traveled through time, died and been born again and again, defeated Voldemort, survived the zombie apocalypse, met the Doctor, learned what love means at the end of it all. The reason I know that the human imagination is probably the most important part of our collective existence, the reason we have survived, and will continue to do so.

This week, with finals approaching and the number of square meals I get in a day reduced to one-ish, I have been lucky enough to have time to experience some pretty amazing stories. Stories that have absolutely nothing to do with school, or academia, or studying, or learning, but have magic and meaning in them just the same.

The first was Firefly, the early-2000s TV show about space cowboys. My brother has been pestering me to get on the hipster bandwagon for years, and only now that I have succumbed and watched the tragically short fourteen episodes plus one movie do I realize how effing awesome it is. Everything you would ever want in a series --  danger! a gang of rebellious outlaws! romance! intrigue! humor! -- all wrapped up in a  story of smugglers aboard an outdated spaceship travelling throughout the galaxy evading capture. When you add in Nathan Fillion and a bunch of other likable/badass characters, the story is irresistible to the lover of post-apocalyptic space epics known as Myself.

The second was Life of Pi. I had the pleasure of reading this book in Ms. Kremer's class freshman year of high school, and while I loved and appreciated the book and its general genius, which was very new to me at the time, I promptly forgot about it until the announcement for the movie. Last night, several friends and I went to see it at last, and I was totally blown away. This was by far the best book-to-movie adaptation I have ever seen, effectively capturing, not only the detailed plot and its complicated twists, but also the essence of the book itself, all its subtleties and nuances and themes and the feel of the story. For this, I respect Ang Lee (the director) and Suraj Shurma (young Pi, who had never acted before) immensely.

Lastly, I spontaneously decided to reread Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows earlier this week, which, despite being time-consuming, has been completely worth it. It's been well over a year since I've read a Harry Potter book, and every time I return to them I am astounded by their sheer genius. These are books that will last generations--and rightly so. This story is so epic and perfect and human, and it holds a special place in my heart as the one that, so many years ago, got me hooked on this beautiful art form.

Sorry this post is long, but if you've made it all the way to the end, I'm going to give you some advice: stop studying, stop stressing, stop whatever you're doing for just a couple of hours and go watch a great movie, read an excellent book, and revel in your favorite stories. Get away, if only briefly, from your own life and problems and worries and experience someone else's for a while.

:)