nothing to see here

Imagine, please, that I have flopped into a colorless void of a room, wearing a t-shirt that says "I survived my self-inflicted holiday bake-a-thon and all I got was this stupid t-shirt (and also lots of cookies)".

I made it. I don't feel like my sanity is wholly intact, but I made it!! I also made peppermint bark, 2 dozen plain shortbread cookies, 2 dozen orange spice shortbread cookies, and 40 Mexican wedding cookies, not to mention chocolate Swiss meringue buttercream for a chocolate cake. It took five days in total, but I did it.

The chocolate Swiss meringue buttercream was maybe the most difficult thing on the list? I ended up wasting 2 egg whites, either because I messed something up or because I wasn't patient enough, I do not know which. I tempered the whites, started whipping them on my stand mixer, and they turned glossy and white, but were still soupy as hell. After like 10 or 15 minutes of whipping. So I poured them down the sink, washed all the needed dishes I'd put in the sink, and started over.

I had the same problem a second time, but decided to wait it out and keep whipping the damn egg whites. It took something like 40 whole minutes to get them to the desired volume and stiffness. This after thoroughly wiping down every bowl and utensil with vinegar to get rid of fat residue. The recipe said whipping the whites to stiff peaks would only take "1-2 minutes", but apparently I don't get that kind of courtesy from my egg whites. (And honestly, it could have been the fucking humidity in the kitchen!! I don't know!!!)

Anyway, the buttercream turned out delicious, so there's that.

The peppermint bark was easy, thank god. Melt the bittersweet chocolate, add peppermint extract and salt, spread it on a tray, melt the white chocolate, spread it over top of the first, swirl artistically with a skewer, add peppermint candy bits, and put in the fridge to set. Break it into pieces and store it in a bowl in the fridge! Easy!!

The shortbreads were rather time-consuming, it turns out. They also involved rolling out dough for cookie cutters, which I am notoriously bad at. (I tend to roll too thin, which makes for very crisp cookies that are maybe not as delicious as they could be.) That said! I managed to get the hang of the rolling out eventually. Both batches of dough yielded 2 dozen cookies each, which I cut into stars, snowflakes, and scallop-edged rounds. I made the plain shortbread on Saturday, and then dipped them in a simple glaze on Sunday and decorated them with colored sanding sugar. The orange spice shortbread was baked on Sunday, and yesterday I dipped those in an orange glaze, and decorated them with orange zest and gold and silver sanding sugar.

The Mexican wedding cookies were also time-consuming, a little? (Yesterday was kind of all over the place, to be honest.) Though the nice thing about these cookies is that you bake all of them at the same time--all 40 of them, on two different baking sheets. They also had to be rolled in powdered sugar twice after baking (though I kept a half-dozen aside to stay plain for my Dad, who likes cookies but is also type-2 diabetic).

But now! Everything is ready!!! I just have to get all the cookies (and the bark) sorted into treat bags and into the plastic tins I got, and then all my efforts will be complete!! There will probably be leftover cookies, too, so I might enjoy some of those today as well. :D

My parents and I also sat down yesterday and got pretty much all the gifts wrapped and put under the tree! So we are pretty much ready for Xmas!! My brother and SIL and Dearest Nephew are coming up tomorrow afternoon, and it's gonna be a good time!! :D

American Thanksgiving was yesterday. I had a nice time with my family; played a board game with my brother and SIL; hung out with my nephew a little; everyone enjoyed my pumpkin pie who tried it; and at the end of the day I was so exhausted I could have fallen asleep at 7:30pm and been very happy.

More details on that later, but first: the Pie-Making.

I always make the pumpkin pie on Wednesday, so it has time to cool and everything before Thanksgiving. I was using the pumpkin pie recipe I tried out earlier this month [link], and everything was going swimmingly, except that I forgot to melt the 2 Tablespoons of butter I needed to add in the last phase of making the filling. So I melted the butter in the microwave really quick (and kind of overheated it, because the microwave's Melt Butter setting only works in terms of 1 or 2 sticks of butter--and a stick is 8 Tablespoons of butter!). And then, without thinking, I added the hot butter to the filling mixture.

The filling, at this point, contained one very well beaten in egg. I added the hot butter, and there was a... smell. A kind of... eggy smell. And then as I continued with the recipe, adding the milk to the filling mixture, I noticed little... particles, clinging to the sides of the bowl.

I had scrambled the egg.

A desperate part of me said, "You don't know that the pie is ruined!! It might be, but you'll only know if you bake it!!" So I baked the pie, but I was pretty damn sure I'd ruined it, in texture if not in taste. And the graham cracker crust I used was the only one I had.

Which meant I had to go to the grocery store.

In the middle of the afternoon.

On the day.

before.

Thanksgiving.

I put the probably-ruined pie in the oven, and cleaned up a little, and then headed to the store. It was, predictably, a madhouse, but I was only there for one thing (well, two things; I bought a little bag of Lindt white chocolate peppermint truffles because I was Going Through It and I needed a Little Treat, goddammit), so I got in and out pretty quickly. I think it helped that I went at about 1:30pm, which was well before anyone would be getting off work for the day.

Anyway, I got home. Took a little fifteen minute break for my sanity. After that, I had to wash pretty much every measuring cup and mixing bowl I had used by hand, so I could go about making the second pie. I took another little break, because lord knows I needed it, and in the meantime, the first pie finished up in the oven.

It did not puff up like my test run pie did earlier in the month; there were a few little bubbles, but nothing more than that. I let it cool for a little while, then took a spoon and scooped out a little bit of the filling as delicately as I could (so... not very delicately at all). The filling tasted fine, and while the mouth-feel texture was more or less okay, the visual texture was weirdly grainy, and nothing like the smoothness I'd seen in the test run pie.

This made me feel better about my decision to make another pie, and I commenced with that immediately.

(The second time, I melted the butter first.)

Things went much better the second time around: I didn't scramble the egg, for one thing. I made sure to scrape the bottom of my stand mixer bowl halfway through adding the milk (Attempt #1 had a clump of the pre-milk filling mixture glommed onto the bottom where the whisk couldn't reach). The pie puffed up in the oven just like the test run pie had! I did know how to bake a pie!!

The ultimate vindication, however, came that evening, when Mom and Dad both decided to have a slice of the Attempt #1 pie. I went to cut the pie--and the filling stuck to the knife, coming up out of the pie in big, grainy-looking clumps. The test run pie hadn't done that; I was right that the scrambled egg had messed things up.

(I was even more vindicated Thanksgiving night, when I sliced the Attempt #2 pie and none of the filling stuck to the knife.)

(Thanks for reading!!)

It’s funny. Except for a stuffy nose, I felt fine all day Sunday. And then I wake up Monday feeling like crap, and all hopes for a productive week go out the window.

Also this is exactly what I didn’t need right before Christmas. I am hoping the over the counter cold meds I have will kick this thing, because there is just too much shit I have to get done before everything’s hectic busyness forever.

Other than being sick, I'm doing all right for the most part? Not getting a whole lot done, but I'm surviving, which is better than... not. I guess. I think I will have the cross-stitch for my brother halfway done by Christmas. (Thank goodness I'm not stressing myself out by trying to get ALL of it done by Christmas.) Brother and SIL will be in for Christmas in about a week and a half. We're going to see the new Star Wars on my brother's birthday (two days before Christmas).

Christmas aside, I've been updating my WordPress blog [link] regularly again. Or I'm trying to, anyway. Weekly updates shouldn't be as hard as they are, but sometimes you just can't think of what to say. Anyway.

I dunno. I'm sick. It's hard to be productive when you're sick. I'm doing the best I can, which is the all anyone can ask for.

Hope you're all doing well.