a muffin is just a bald cupcake. that's okay, I like bald things.

I am having reasonably good karma at the moment.  This is concerning.  Also I'm pretty sure boyfriend has made sure there is a spirit of sorts haunting me while he is at work.

So first - the karma thing.  I worked on Saturday and in a flurry to get out the door and on the road I didn't grab anything to eat except an apple.  I knew that would not be enough for a 9 hour shift while I am in full on musteatmorefoodnowbottomlesspit mode (aka, taking care of lady business).  So I made my way to work, and after I got off the highway stopped at a little convenience store that I frequent and hooked myself up with an AP (Arnold Palmer) and Nutrigrain bar.  I completed my transaction, went back outside into the howling wind and into my car.  I was preparing to pull out of the parking lot when I was sneak-attack-accosted by a gentleman knocking on my window.  He claimed he needed to get back to NH from MA and was out of gas and needed money.  I had only put my window down a hair, but the whole situation felt warning.warning.wrong.wrong.WRONG.  So I apologized and said I had no cash and continued on my way to work.  I immediately felt guilty.  Now don't get me wrong, I've been hit up for money before - it happens pretty much whenever I go to Boston or NYC or Philly.  And I employ my tried and true method of "Do Not Engage.  Do Not Make Eye Contact."  And it has served me and countless millions well.  This however, was decidedly NOT Boston.  More like the middle of nowhere, plus apple trees, and a few people.  

Maybe you think my methods are cruel, and maybe they are.  But maybe I'm lucky to work 12 hours a week and still have to be responsible for phone bill, electric bill, gas bill, and grocery bill for two people as well as putting gas in my car to get to the 12hr/wk job that is 35 minutes away.  Let's just say yes, I did have $10 in my wallet, but I am not necessarily in a position to just give it up considering there is a looming unpaid credit card bill, that has and will continue to loom until I get a real job (which is looking optimistic these days).  So despite my refusal, I did pretty much immediately feel guilty and certain that bad things would befall me.  They haven't.  (knock on wood)  

Second - and this is just kind of a funny aside - boyfriend loves to harass me and interrupt my internet surfing. I normally enjoy this activity on the sofa next to him with my laptop perched on my lap.  He takes this as an invitation to reach over and press as many buttons on my keyboard as possible.  Especially the calculator button.  Yes, there is a button on my keyboard whose sole function is to open up the calculator.  I know, it seems superfluous.  But I didn't choose this computer because of its keyboard attributes.  I chose it because it was cheap.  And I had spilled a glass of iced tea on my last one.  So this morning I am checking email, perusing recipes and meal planning for the week, and I get up to procure some breakfast (more about that in a minute) and return with breakfast to the sofa and laptop only to find about five calculator windows open, something boyfriend is immensely fond of doing, but clearly incapable of because he has a real job and is working hard at the moment.  Curious.

Anyway, breakfast.  Breakfast!  Chocolate!  You too can have it all in one neat package.  Yay!  Three cheers for me!

Chocolate Chip Muffins

Born from boyfriend's infinite capacity to consume chocolate chip cookies, and my indifference to making chocolate chip cookies.  Again.  (I tend to to lose interest after the first sheet of them go in the oven, so the cookies get progressively larger because of my laziness.)

3 cups AP flour (I'm interested to use cake flour next time, we shall see)

1/2 white sugar

1/2 brown sugar

1 1/2 sticks butter softened

1/4 ts baking soda

2 3/4 ts baking powder

2 1/2 ts vanilla

3 eggs

1 cup milk

2 cups choc. chips (I had chunks on hand and they worked fine)

Oven @ 375

For future reference I would add more sugar next time.  Or change the sugar ratio to 3/4 cup white and 1/4 brown.  I understand the brown is there to give it that cookie like taste, but had the muffin base had anything other than chocolate (like fruit) it would not have been sweet enough.

Get the dry together - flour, baking soda, baking powder.  The original recipe also called for salt, but I never add salt, because I never use unsalted butter.  I figure the salted butter compensates for the salt in the recipe.  Unsalted butter is for buttercream only.

Cream together sugars and butter.  Then add eggs and vanilla.  Cream.  Alternate adding dry ingredient mix and milk.  Stir in chips.  Et Voila!

Bake 20 minutes.  No way does this need 30 minutes.  Also, the muffins will rise.  Alot.  That's what you get with almost 3 teaspoons of baking soda.

Things to look forward to this week, yeasted waffles, brined pork chops, chicken soup, homemade naan, probably some sort of mexican food, and hopefully a margarita the size of my face.  YES!

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.

Letting them finally have some cake.

So, my brother's wedding has come and gone, and yesterday was my birthday, so the cake fast is officially broken.  Though there was some slight bending of the rules last weekend when I had Sunday dinner with the boy's parents.

The boy is a choc-o-holic, and firmly believes that there is pretty much no point to cake unless it is chocolate (he told me my birthday cake, which I'll get to, was a waste of cake), so I decided to rally up and make some cupcakes for Sunday dinner.

Triple Chocolate Cupcakes

-1 Box chocolate cake mix (devil's food, milk chocolate, your choice)
-3 Eggs
-1/3 cup veg oil
-1 1/4 cup chocolate milk
-1 bag of semi sweet chocolate chips
-1/2 cup  heavy cream

Mix together cake mix, eggs, oil, and chocolate milk (I made mine with dark chocolate syrup) and set aside.
Melt half a cup of the chips in the microwave and then stir in 1 cup of the cake batter, transfer this batter to a ziploc bag (quart size or larger)
Place a spoonful of the regular cake batter in your paper lined cups.  Snip a corner off your ziploc bag and squeeze a layer of the extra chocolate-y batter over each of the cup cakes, top each off with more of the regular cake batter.  Bake 20-25 min (although the original recipe claims it will only take 12 minutes, no freaking way).  Let cool 10 minutes before moving onto the ganache portion of our show.

For the ganache put the heavy cream into a sauce pan and heat on very low and add in the chips until they melt, stirring continuously.  Be careful not to turn things up too high or you will burn this mixture very easily and it will not be tasty.  After it is melted, take each of the cupcakes and dip them into the chocolate & cream mixture.  And let cool (preferably in the fridge).  Definitely store these in the fridge if you're making them when it's warm out because I can see the ganache getting very melty.

The birthday cake story will follow shortly.