It's my party and I'll cry if I want to

I know I haven't written in a while.  There hasn't been much happening.  Or much to say.  Not much cooking either - not enough money to do anything fun.  In fact I didn't make a birthday cake this year.  It hurt a little bit. But I guess it's time to realize that my birthday doesn't really matter.  I mean it does.  But not in the way that it used to.  Or that I wished it did.  I mean 364 days of the year I do everything for everyone else.  This one day of the year I just want to be the center of attention.  I want to be treated like a queen.  I want presents and fabulous food and bottles of wine and cake.  I want to be pampered.  I want to be spoiled.  I want to feel like I matter more than anyone else.  I want to feel loved.
And I guess I did feel like that.  Just not in the way that I had idealized it.

Anyway, moving on from that.
I had a little talk with Boyfriend the other day.  Things have been really really good between us lately.  Like blissful good.  Like we get each other on another level good.  We have been out on a couple dates lately, which is important to me and I think helps us stay connected with each other.  And the other weekend we went to a wedding of a good friend of mine (groom - also complete aside Boyfriend consumed raw baby spinach at said wedding!  Shock!  Although he did put butter on it - ew, I know).  And I'm not sure if it was that or it's just that time.  But there was lots of talk about "our" wedding (all Boyfriend's doing).  And then there was joking about things on "our" wedding etc.  And that just brought back a wave of a bunch of old feelings.  And I mulled it over and decided I needed to express my feelings on this seemingly meaningless chatter.  Initially I was afraid I was making too big a deal about this, but it was bothering me.  And as invalid as certain other nameless persons tried to make my feelings, I know that I have a right to them, so I spoke up.  Initially the way I put it to him was that I don't want to talk about weddings or marriage.  But I knew I needed to flesh that thought out because it made it seem like I don't want to get married at all.  And I do.  To Boyfriend anyway.  I'm older and more mature and I don't want to get married just to say I'm married.  I want to marry HIM.  Big difference.  But really I don't want to talk about it until HE is really ready to discuss it with some amount of seriousness.  This is a touchy subject for me.  Mostly because I've been down this road before, and I don't want to get my hopes up.  If something were to happen between us, the thought that we were considering marriage would make it that much harder to get over.  I'm a tough little lady, but I'm pretty sure it would be that much harder to recover from that sort of thing a second time.  I tried to explain all of this as best I could.  I hope he understood.  I mean I don't bring it up to him because I don't want him to feel pressured.  So I hope that he can understand that I don't want him to bring it up because it will just give me expectations.  I don't want him to bring it up unless he can meet any expectations he gives me.  He knows that my big thing is people not following through when they say they will.

Well this was all kind of heavy, and there are other heavy things on my mind that I would like to consider, but I'm pretty sure I've exhausted everyone's attention span for the time being.  So I'll leave you with your moment of levity: A bottle of wine makes me worse at mah jong, not better.  For some reason this surprised me.

Your body is a wonderland? Well my body is a bitch.

I feel like I should be writing more about cooking things.  But I haven't been.  Cooking things that is.
At least I don't think so.  I mean I made dinner last night (whole wheat fettuccine, sausage, tomato sauce) and it wasn't anything exciting.  But I haven't been cooking because I haven't been eating.  Something decided to wreak havoc on my body on Monday afternoon and I haven't a clue as to what happened.  I went to grocery shop for the week and pulled into the lot then I got all shaky and light headed.  My heart was racing and then I thought I was going to toss my cookies.  I grocery shopped anyway because, what the hell, I was already there. Then went home and cried in bed because I thought I was dying.  Boyfriend came home later and gave me a strict bed rest order that lasted through Tuesday.  So I've been out of commission for a couple days and my stomach is still pretty much being a bitch, but it feels the same whether I eat anything or not.

Oh.  But, I did make something!  Carrot cake mix cookies with white chocolate cream cheese frosting.  Except the cookies were really fluffy and spongy and light so instead of frosting the tops of them I flipped them over and made them into whoopie pies!  Genius!  I know, I know.  And I think I have finally solved my white chocolate tempering problem.  I have attempted several times to make white chocolate cream cheese frosting and every time with out fail, the white chocolate burns or turns back into white chocolate flakes upon hitting the cream cheese and butter in the mixing bowl.  I seriously feel like I cannot win with this.  But!  BUT! The geniuses (genii?) at Philadelphia have fought my battle for me.  They now make dessert cream cheese!  Holy hell, yes!  White chocolate, milk chocolate, and dark chocolate cream cheese.  Amaaaaaazing.  I cannot wait to experiment with the dark chocolate variety.  And normally I am anti chocolate.  But.  I do love dark chocolate above all others.  And I am thinking birthday cake thoughts here.  Normally I go the fruity, sometimes frosting-less route, but I am envisioning amazing things with the dark chocolate cream cheese.  Although I think there will have to be some sort of raspberry filling.  Originally I was dreaming of a fluffy white cake with citrus curd in the middle and fluffy whip cream frosting and apricot preserve glazed fruit arranged all pretty on top.  Now I am having second thoughts.  Hmm...I am also still on the look out for a faboosh recipe to one up either of these birthday cake ideas.  Thoughts?  Anyone?  Bueller?

bridal-stravaganza dessert trio

One of my very good friends recently married.  This was not her first marriage so she decided to keep the ceremony short and sweet and very very small.  I was one of two non-family members invited.  But even though this was the second time around and she and he were already living together in a well established, well furnished household, some of my work friends and I decided to hold a bridal shower type event for her.  Initially, I was planning to bring a pasta salad (which in retrospect would have been SO much less work than what I did), but I found out there was going to be a green salad and a potato salad and probably wouldn't have been much need for a pasta salad.  So I fell back on dessert, which is where I always seem to end up with these types of things.
It did not help that the week of the shower eastern Massachusetts weather decided to be around 80-90 degrees with 70% and up humidity.  And my kitchen has almost no ventilation of any kind.  It was like baking in a sauna.  I would hurriedly sweat my tookis off and shove something in the oven and quickly retreat to the dark cool of my bedroom.  It took me the better part of two days to make three desserts this way.

First were key lime cupcakes with blackberry buttercream.  I ended up making both of these on day one and decided to assemble right before leaving for fear of melting (which I was ultimately right to fear).  Day two I made red velvet cake truffles and strawberry brown butter bettys.  The truffles sounded SO easy, but were a pain.  The bettys sounded painful, but ended up being so so simple.  Go figure.  Initially I wasn't going to make the bettys, I had the ingredients for a no-bake chocolate mint bar, but realized at the last minute that I might want to make something that wouldn't melt.

So the cake truffles.  I had SUCH high hopes for these, but they seriously left me wanting.  Maybe it was because I cheated and used canned frosting?  Who knows?  I felt ok in using box cake mix (I actually have no issues with box cake mix, though I will go from scratch 60% of the time, I have HUGE issues with canned frosting as I have mentioned before.  BLECCCHHH!!!!)  Basically all I did was bake the cake, cool the cake, crumble the cake up into a very fine crumb, mix the cake with a can of frosting so that it was moist-ish and would hold a shape, roll cake balls, chill and set cake balls for several hours in the fridge and then dip cake balls into melted chocolate.  I think my first issue was that I needed more chocolate than I had; I think it would have been easier and neater looking if I was able to completely submerge the cake ball.  My second issue was trying to cut corners and melt the chocolate in the microwave (which I find never works as well as a double boiler).  My third issue was kind of a generalized problem I have when it comes to baking (especially when making cookies) - when I have to form things by hand I get really lazy and start making things too big.  My final issue was something I should have recognized before even attempting this - my chocolate melting issue.  Any time I am in a hurry to do something my chocolate NEVER EVER EVER tempers/melts properly.    If I can take my time with it, it comes out beautifully.

So clearly bridal stravaganza is complete.  I have sufficiently celebrated them (for the time being - they are having a much larger reception/party in August).  And I'm happy for them.  I am the one, after all, who forced them to suck it up and get together in the first place because I knew they were both interested in the other and I was tired of chasing sketchy guys away from her when we would go out to the bar.  I told him to man up and get off his ass and if he wanted her to do something about it already.  And here it is almost a year later and they're married.

The man in my life of course accompanied me to the wedding and pointed out that while I am happy, I will probably not be sincerely happy for anyone getting married until I do the same.  This is probably truer than he realizes as I've lost out on the whole wedding/marriage thing once before when my ex-fiance had a mental bipolar breakdown.  And as much as I love my guy and believe that good things are headed for us down the road (we're moving in together by August 1st), I have kind of lost or given up or buried that idea of a wedding, etc.  I honestly don't care if I ever get married as long as I feel like he'll always be there and be reliable and love me and father my children someday.  I've given up the dream of the white dress and the party and everything that goes with that because last time I was that excited and happy and secure in something I lost it.  Not only did I lose that, I lost almost everything else in my life structurally speaking.  It has definitely taken me sometime to come to terms with that and accept the fact that my path will be bumpier than I anticipated.  I'm actually really scared of getting engaged this time around, even though I can picture the two of us having a strong marriage.  Almost like, once that happens I'll lose everything again.  Put it this way: I want the marriage, the strong permanent relationship and everything good and bad that goes with it.  The idea of a wedding scares me and just seems too surreal.  I mean even after I was engaged the first time, my ex basically flat out refused to discuss any tangible wedding plans with me, no date, no location, no number of guests, etc.  To the point where I had given up trying to get him to talk about it and anytime I told anyone that I was engaged I was almost more embarrassed than had I been single.  We were engaged for over a year before he ultimately broke it off.  I had actually reached the point of thinking "What's the point of being engaged if we're never actually going to get married?"  I was actually the first among all my friends to get engaged.  Now they're almost all married, and I'm not.  Very, very rarely this fact bothers me.  The vast majority of days I'm thankful I'm not married to the other guy (and bound to a lifetime of stress and trouble and his mental illness that he refused to properly address) and that I have found my current guy - someone who has told me that I am his soul mate and better half.

.i am tired.

I am tired of  alot of things.  Tired of not having enough money.  Tired of feeling like crap.  Tired of hiding things from people (and no it is nothing like an affair - suffice to say my boyfriend is one of a handful of people who knows the whole story and has supported me through it).  Tired of trying to make things in my life better and getting stonewalled at every turn.  One step forward and two steps back.  Something like that.
Now I know it is not an attractive quality to constantly engage in your own personal pity party.  And I know that there are oodles of people that have it worse than I do.  I openly acknowledge that I am not facing starvation, natural disasters, or third world death squads.  Further, I don't even have to live at home with my parents and listen to them harp on my "wonderful" life choices.  But I do know that everyone is allowed to really feel and perhaps wallow in the various burdens and stresses in their lives.  And I recently dealt with circumstances that has given me pause to really feel bad for myself and examine the various misfortunes I've either invited into my life or that have otherwise befallen me.
Don't get me wrong, I love my life and despite floundering and struggling as I have in the past three or so years, I would probably not choose another way.  My family is always there, my friends (some of whom I've met through this nontraditional path) are tremendous, and the man in my life loves me and accepts me no matter what and pretty much always will; he is a pillar of strength, love, and support.  He is my light in even my darkest hours, and trust me the hours have been pretty dark these past couple of weeks.
But here is to hoping that I am slowly pushing through to the light, and there is a new apartment, a new job, and a more serious romantic relationship waiting for me on the other side.  Because let me tell you.  I deserve something good right about now.

And I never did tell you about my cake, did I?
Check this place out for the general gist of the recipe.  Seriously so good if you like a light and sweet cake.  And non chocolate.  Also majorly labor intensive, but very impressive looking.  Definitely a celebration cake.

Cake Doctoring

So I know I called a moratorium on cake eating a little while ago, at least until my birthday/my brother's wedding, but I forgot something - one of my very good friend's birthdays.  I found out last week that nobody was planning on making a cake for the party that she was having this past Wednesday.  So I felt that this was a tragedy and offered.  She requested red velvet cake and as I am pro from scratch cake I figured piece of cake (hahahaha, see what I did there?).  Until I checked my bank account.  (Yikes, that is a scary place).  And so I was going to compromise, I was going to do box mix cake and homemade frosting, because honestly I don't have too many bones with box mix cake as much as I find frosting from a can to be utterly revolting  (which considering how much I've been accused of being a sugar addict is kind of strange).  I went to the store only to discover that my particular store of choice does not carry a red velvet box mix, and I really couldn't muster the motivation (or the gas in my car) to go on a multi-store search.  So I re-evaluated.  I found a chocolate mousse cake mix.  Now there was something I could work with because there would be no canned frosting involved (!!!).  And because I felt guilty that I wasn't delivering exactly what was asked of me I compensated by also making two dozen funfetti cupcakes which did unfortunately get the canned frosting because I know some people like that junk.

So the chocolate mousse cake was pretty much your standard chocolate cake mix although I couldn't for the life of me get it to release from the pans.  I found a handy tip/trick from Bon Appetite online and totally warrants sharing.  Now this only works for metal or non stick pans (do NOT do this with glass pans unless you would like them to shatter or otherwise get ruined).  But if your cake was stuck (like mine were), you can turn a burner on your stove on (gas or electric works, but if it is electric give it a chance to heat up).  And pass the bottom of the cake pan through the flame or on the hot burner for several seconds.  Then when you flip it and shake it should finally release (though still slightly unwillingly).  So the cake gets made, the mousse mix gets made and as I'm inspecting my mousse mix and the cake mix box I realize that there is only enough mousse to go on top of and in between the cake layers.  I consider that this will probably be fine and then I consider that my cake had some stickage problems and is a little unsightly.  I want to put mousse mix on the outside edges too I decide, which means one of two things - I can run out and by another box of just chocolate mousse mix and hope that it matches in flavor and consistency to the one I already have or two I can find something else to put in between the layers, thus giving me enough mousse mix to put around the sides and hiding my cake's flaws.  I opt for door number two.  So I open the fridge and stare blankly into its portents and unearth some "fancy" jam (I call it fancy because it is a) not Smuckers and b) costs around 7 or 8 dollars a jar) which is my favorite type of jam to bake with (hello jam cookies!) because it is usually thicker and stands up to heat better than say Smuckers.  So I now have the better half of a jar of fancy red raspberry jam (I used Stonewall Kitchen jam, I love love love this stuff).  I dump the entire contents of the jam jar onto the bottom layer of the cake and spread it around with an offset spatula.  Now bear in mind this jar was not full, although I think an entire jar of jam would work well on a 9" cake, because I ultimately found myself wanting more jam when I had a piece.  Then I slapped on layer number two and slathered the whole thing with chocolate mousse et voila a chocolate raspberry chocolate mousse cake!  I grabbed a bottle of raspberry wine that was sitting around my room (which paired PERFECTLY, don't knock fruit wines until you try them) and served that up for a semi homemade cake doctored birthday dessert.  It was definitely a huge hit.