Even though I have my mock lab practical in six hours, I can’t sleep at all.  I think I’ve spent the last 2 hours messing with Wordpress and destroying all rules of valid coding and I broke my admin interface somehow.  But it looks pretty!

Also, I want this lens.    But I can’t justify paying more than $70 for it.  Stupid Amazon is watching me I swear.  They end their sale right before I look it up, and have been teasing me by lowering and raising the price on a weekly basis.  Usually only fluctuates by $5, and all the photography forum people keep telling me to find it used or wait for a sale (which they are positive will happen at one of the major retailers because of past trends).

Patience is a virtue….pffffffft.

Yes, I made more cupcakes.  Am I going to eat them all? Heck ya.  And yes, the chocolate is droopy in the pictures.  Everything melts in the Texas summer, even with the A/C dying just to keep the temperature under 85 in the apartment.

Recipe:

Vanilla Cupcake (makes 12) I only ended up with enough batter to fill 10, and my measurements are strange because I didn’t want to make 30+

3/4 stick (6 tbsp) unsalted butter, melted
3/4 cup + 2tbsp sugar
1 egg
1stp vanilla extract
1/4 tsp salt
1 1/4 tsp baking powder No baking powder, so I substituted 1/4 tsp baking soda and 1/2 tsp lime juice.  FYI, baking soda is 4x as strong as baking powder and needs something acidic to react with to make the cake rise.  Baking powder is just baking soda mixed with cream of tartar.  I didn’t have any tartar, so used lime juice instead.
1 1/4 cups flour
1/2 cup + 2 tbsp milk

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.  Mix all the ingredients together and do not overbeat or you’re going to have very dense cupcake, scoop into cupcake papers, and bake for 16-20 minutes.  Pull them out and let them cool before frosting

Cream cheese frosting

I sort of eyeballed and mixed random things together because I didn’t want an entire batch and had an “ohhhhh I should add some of this” moment, hence the almond and the cinnamon.  I was so close to grabbing the nutmeg, mint, and sprinkles, then reminded myself it would be overload and probably taste nasty.

4 oz cream cheese, softened
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 tsp almond extract
3 tbsp vegetable shortening ie. Crisco; Butter works fine as well, but I was out
1 cup powdered sugar I think I ended up adding about 2 cups
Dash of however much cinnamon you like, around 1 tsp

Cream the butter/shortening and cream cheese together.  Add in everything else, and keep dumping powdered sugar until you get the consistency you want.  I accidentally made it too thick and added a bit of milk to smooth it out.

Chocolate filigree

Melt about 1/4 cup of Nestle chocolate morsel things in the microwave.  Lay out wax paper on a cutting board.  Spoon the chocolate into a parchment bag, snip off the very tip, and pipe whatever decorations you want.  Let it sit in the freezer for about 15 min and they should peel right off the wax paper.

Jon Stewart is great as always…

How can someone conscientiously watch Fox news and actually SUPPORT their programming and agenda?  I swear, it’s the same subset of the population that’s completely racist, scarily ignorant, and have no sense of decency that is screwing over our country.  And the bus driver in the afternoon who has the Sean Hannity show blaring on his radio really pushes my buttons because I have to listen to it for the entire thirty minute ride home.

A Comedy Central show outperforms the mainstream media shows…and yet nothing is being done to make the news programs more accountable.

Source: http://people-press.org/report/319/public-knowledge-of-current-affairs-little-changed-by-news-and-information-revolutions

All nighter almost accomplished.  I figure once every few weeks to hardcore cram for 2+ tests won’t kill me that much.  Since caffeine quit working on me ages ago, my new staple is

http://www.pixiemate.com/

It’s so amazingly delicious (mate chai is my fav because it’s all spicey with cinnamon, cardamom, etc.) and chock full of antioxidants.  Not one of those energy drinks filled with a ton of chemicals.  Just a spin off of green tea for lack of a better comparison.  You basically mix half tea half milk over ice.  The tea is organic and follows sustainable agriculture guidelines.

You can find it in the tea section of whole foods or central market for around $5 a box.  Pricey, but it’s concentrate and mixes over a gallon-ish of yumminess.  I think they sell it in tea bags as well, but I haven’t tried (too lazy to actually brew and I like drinking the stuff cold).

Off to my Ecology exam now…

Want some “CREAMY AUSTRALIAN STYLE” yogurt?

Thought this was worthy of an “LOL” moment. Even my kangaroo clock in the background approves. Didn’t intentionally get it in the shot, but it’s a nice coincidence I think. As far as yogurt goes, it’s pretty damn good, which it should be for the price. Organic yogurt is pricey regardless if it’s Australian, British, Mexican, Greek, etc. And the wallaby brand was actually created by two Californians who went down under a grand total of once and decided that constituted a full on aussie yogurt experience. I’m so bored of studying anatomy that I actually googled that. Yeah…

Silly cockatiel did not like his shadow and kept attacking and hissing at it. Sunset light streaming through the windows apparently is more amusing than the $$$ bird toys hanging in his cage unused.

Only a few days left until school starts again for the summer session so squeezing in as much time wasting activities as possible. Made these cupcakes from scratch, which meant a few things had to be fiddled with. Very yummy, except the butter had a funny taste from absorbing all the refrigerator smells and sort of showed through in the frosting. Recipe is below, as requested from someone who drools over all the pictures of baked goods on my Flickr and wants to copy.

For apple cupcake
Adapted from I<3cuppycakes

1 cup applesauce
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon ginger
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon nutmeg
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 large eggs
1/2 cup oil
1/4 cup apple juice
1 teaspoon vanilla

Mix, pour in cupcake sleeves, bake for 16 minutes at 350 F

Cinnamon Frosting
1 stick butter, room temp and beaten
3 3/4 cup confectioners sugar
3-4 Tablespoons milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 Tablespoon ground cinnamon

Mix, add food coloring, and spread/pipe

Caramel Drizzle
1/2 cup heavy cream
4oz caramel candies

Mix in saucepan and heat until melted, cool in refrigerator. Pour in plastic bag, snip off the tip of a corner and drizzle over frosting

Pictures from back home, nothing really to elaborate on.

New fence

Side yard, they killed all our grass storing materials

My turtle. The other one was sleeping.

Making pizza

Making german chocolate cake with strawberries in the middle, covered with cream cheese frosting with the sister

With our cable line being cut (no phone, tv, or internet since Wednesday), I had quite a bit of catching up to do on news. Yes, only a few days but I’m a prolific reader who used to read the daily newspaper from front to back. With the media the way it is, you have to go through several sources to get to the real point of the story, and sometimes it’s still ambiguous.

Anyways, found this video of Chris Matthews on Hardball absolutely tearing up Kevin James, a popular right wing radio talk host. If only more so called ‘experts’ would be publicly humiliated (O’Reilly, Coulter, Limbaugh) instead of having the power to influence naive voters. Not trying to sound arrogant, but the average American has no clue what’s going on and sadly cannot decipher for themselves the bullshit they are constantly being fed. I’ve heard these people make the most racist, flagrantly dishonest accusations, and sadly people support it otherwise they wouldn’t be on the air. Apparently YELLING REALLY LOUD AND NOT LETTING THE OTHER PERSON GET A WORD IN IS A TACTIC THAT WORKS. And if that fails, bring up 9/11 and terrorists. Who needs credibility and facts…

Amy and I were bored, seems like a perpetual thing. Anyways, we had the crazy idea to go make sushi. Spent a good afternoon chasing down ingredients, finding sushi grade raw fish which apparently Texas has interesting laws for, and finally making the stuff. Was amazing, $25 got us a LOT of sushi, with plenty of extra ingredients we can use next time. Much better than the overpriced stuff at the student union that’s been sitting out for several days.

Some chardonnay to go with it, and wasabi and soy sauce

Massive block of chocolate Matt bought when he was here, but ended up getting shoved in the back of the fridge. No worries, we found it, waited half an hour for it to melt, then dipped a whole carton of strawberries.

All while watching P.S. I Love You. Very sweet movie, probably in my top list of sappy emotional flicks. Lots of moments to relate to personally. Falling in love with a foreign guy (with a sexy accent) at a young age, which is a cause for bitterness with family, the emotional rollercoaster that goes with being apart (although my situation is nowhere near as devastating/definitive).