Attention, s’il vous plait!

I shall be in Montreal, Quebec, Canada tomorrow through Sunday, then I’m immediately off to Baltimore, Maryland, USA. I shall be away for two weeks. I may or may not have internet my first week there, but I shall certainly be within reach of my cell phone and text messages. The second week, I shall be staying at my folks’ house and will most definitely have internet access. (Please do not phone or text this weekend, however, as the roaming charges for those things are far too expensive.)

I will do my best to remember to take photos. And maybe I’ll even remember to upload them to Flickr!

one funeral, a wedding, and some roller derby

That pretty much sums up my weekend.

JeT’s Grandmother passed away and the funeral was on Friday. It was an all-day affair: funeral home, mass, graveside service, reception. It was a long day for the family, but they held up pretty well.

That evening was PRD’s second home-team bout: Mob Squad vs The Rats. The Rats won. I didn’t see any of the game, though, since I was at the ticket table the whole time. I didn’t want to leave the other girl there by herself, and she couldn’t leave me there alone because I was putting out little fires all evening. I don’t think I want to do that again. It was stressful and annoying. Everyone who saw the bout said it was awesome. The Rats win means that we’ll be playing them for the next two home games, which is cool. And thanks to Monsieur Renard for working the bakesale table for the first half. Thanks also to friends who came out to watch the bout; I’ll be skating in the August bouts.
The after-party was, um… pretty awesome. Those of you who were there, or received texts and phone calls from me, or heard about it all the next day, know that it was EPIC. That is all.

Saturday was Laura and Aaron’s wedding, which was really fun. The ceremony was quite nice. The minister had a wicked Boston brahmin accent, they walked in to “Shipping up to Boston,” and the last song was “Dirty Water.” We were lame and forgot the camera. Laura looked beautiful, and Aaron was quite dapper. They all (including the bride) wore chucks with their fancy clothes. Laura’s were satin. We danced, we laughed, it was super great.

It was such a busy couple of days, I feel like I should have more to say about it. I guess I’m still exhausted.

I leave for Montreal on Friday, then it’s off to Maryland for two weeks. This place is a wreck and I haven’t even begun to think about packing. Need to employ some house gnomes to do it all for me.

three good things

Also this past week and weekend:

1. The State DVDs (and limited edition t-shirt) came in the mail. I’ve only watched season 1 and part of season 2, but holy shit funny. I wasn’t sure if it would hold up after all these years, but it really does. Some of the sketches are dated, but most of them are still as spectacular as I remember. And the commentary is wonderful. Oh, and I was instantly reminded of why I have a crush on Michael Ian Black. (But I never noticed before that he kinda had Hitler Hair. Oh, well.
2. AND!!! The State DVD opens with a Daria commercial, announcing that the DVDs will be out in 2010. DARIA! NEXT YEAR!! ON DVD!!! sweet.
3. Alison was in town for the weekend! We met up at Park Street and headed out to Coolidge Corner to meet up with a couple other GSLIS folks at Qdoba. One GIANT burrito (and a stop at J.P. Licks) later, she headed out to the airport for to fly back to Baltimore. A brief visit, but it was so nice to catch up a little bit. I’ll be heading down to B-more in a few weeks, and there will be much more fun to be had.

cake and pie and the fourth of july

In which I attempt to redeem my baking reputation.

The cookie pie incident of the previous week left me a little… shaken, I suppose. I decided to try my hand at these first. Cupcakes. I can handle that. And brownies. No problem. Though the construction requires a bit more effort than my usual cakes, they seemed simple enough. Despite a little problem of tinting my home made vegan buttercream, they came out looking rather nice, I think. BEHOLD!

This is how it all went down:

While watching the Sox game with the in-laws next door (which we lost, btdubs), and in between cocktails (grapefruit soda and vodka, if you’re curious), I ran home to check on the brownies periodically. I used a boxed mix. Shut up. I so do not lose any baker’s cred for that. I just can’t get my brownies to be gooey and fudgey like the boxed mix ones. I don’t remember which brand I used. Apart from being a little too sweet (and wicked oily), they were pretty decent.

The batter:

Out of the oven:

I used a cookie cutter to cut them in to discs for the patty portion of the cupcakes. I probably should have done this just after they cooled, instead of waiting until the next morning, because they were a little tricky to get out of the pan. I only broke a couple of them, so it wasn’t a complete disaster.

The patties are the bits on the right:

After several cocktails and a Red Sox loss, I decided I probably shouldn’t attempt the cakes before bed, so I waited ’til morning. I whipped up a batch of Golden Vanilla Cupcakes from VCTOTW for the buns. They came out a little flat, but that’s probably because I couldn’t find my measuring spoons and merely estimated the amounts of things. And about half way through I realized I had the oven on the wrong temperature. Oh, and I baked them naked in the pan (no liners) and I think I was a little over zealous with the cooking spray. They were a bit oily on the outside.

I had a little trouble with the fluffy vegan buttercream frosting this time around. I heated up the shortening to soften it (as I keep mine in the fridge) and I didn’t let it cool enough before adding the powdered sugar. The fat kept separating from the rest of the mixture. After alternating chilling and whipping (several times) I managed to get it to hold together well enough. I also had a little trouble with the color.

Adding the red:

No matter how much red I added, I couldn’t get it any darker than this lovely shade of pink. I didn’t want it to taste like vanilla flavored food coloring, so I gave up and decided that pink was now going to be a design feature rather than a failure.

Pink ketchup frosting:

Once the vanilla cakes were cooled, I sliced them in half, placed a brownie patty in between, piped on some pink ketchup frosting, and sprinkled some sesame seeds on top. JeT found these cute, plaid cupcake liners. I flattened them out a bit to hold each of the burger cupcakes.*

They were pretty tasty. Nom.

The cookie pie came out pretty well, too, though I still need to tweak the recipe and cooking time and temp. It was a little too doughy in the center. I was good and wrapped the edges with foil to keep them from burning, and I put it on a baking sheet this time. Once I get the recipe perfected, I shall post it along with some proper photos. Until then, here are a couple of teasers:

Batter up:

Looks better than it tastes:

We had a few friends over and played a little horseshoes, badminton, and sat around the fire chatting. It was a lovely, low-key evening. (Though I didn’t see any fireworks this year. I think I’ll have to remedy that soon.)

I hope you had a lovely Independence Day with plenty of food, friends, and family. And I hope you saw some spectacular fireworks.

*Did you ever see Good Will Hunting edited for TV? The scene where they get Kelly’s (I think) is edited beyond hilarity: Casey Affleck repeatedly says “gimme my fucking sandwich!” which is edited to “gimme my burger sandwich!” over and over and over. So now I have “gimme my burger cupcake!” in my head, with Casey Affleck’s voice. Which is awesome.