Week Eight

I am so far behind I may never catch up, and @#$%^&* Blogger just ate my text for this stinkin' post! I am shouting very naughty words at the top of my voice, which is not very loud because I'm recovering from a cold. There is no justice. Also, ouch.


Week Eight was a very long time ago. I over baked most egregiously, apparently afraid I'd run out of stuff (who remembers?). We had Cinnamon Squares from Dorie:




These are a simple little snack cake, very moist and tasty, with a ribbon of cinnamon/chocolate struesel running through. Better than a poke in the eye.


We also had Dorie's Caramel Crunch Bars:



These are almost more candy than cookie -- a bit toffee-ish and very sticky and crunchy. A little goes a long way.


I also made Dorie's madeleines, just because I love madeleines.



These sold out first.


I felt we needed a muffin, so turned to Dorie's corn muffin (but left out the fresh corn, as my fresh corn had gotten funky in the fridge).




And finally, I wanted to play around with piped decorations again, so pulled out Rose's recipe for zucchini cupcakes (much better than the King Arthur Whole Grain Baking recipe):




There you have it. Eight weeks of bake sales brought in $794. Not shabby. And have you noticed the new total on the sidebar? My lovely friend Melinda pushed us over the top last weekend. We've got the yard sale in a week, and then fundraising is officially OVER for the season. Not that I'm counting days, or anything.

My Grandmother

Mildred Mammano
March 1918 - September 2007

Strike That, Reverse It

This is just a quickie, as I am out of town for a few days (in Chicago! Studying pastry with Chef Norman Love at the French Pastry School! Yes, taking lots of pictures! Yes, it's incredible and I never want to come home again!) and my #$%^&* hotel's internet has worked correctly approximately 5 minutes out of the 2 days I've been here, so I'm at the moment paying for internet access at a little internet cafe just to check on Life, but it's 'spensive, so hence the quickie. Got all that?

But really the quickie is to say that yes, I owe the Blog lots of posts (Week Eight, for crying out loud! The Cabaret, which was freakin' amazing!), but it may be a while. My grandmother has received some very bad health news this week, and I will be coming home to several very difficult weeks as her health continues to inevitably wane away. So, please bear with me. I'll be back, but it may take longer than I would wish.

As Willy Wonka says, so much time, so little to do.

Meanwhile, we've raised about $7500 to date. Someone pinch me.

Fetch the Smelling Salts & Tissues

We have broken the $5,000 mark this week! Woo-hoo!

Aaaaaand our fundraising cabaret performance is tomorrow. (How did that sneak up on us?) Michael has assembled a small but crackerjack group of performers (including our little munchkins) and an eclectic song list, and I have a feeling I'll be in a puddle of tears by the end of the evening. We've had some decent press for the cabaret in local papers both large and small, but based on the advance reservations, 99% of the audience is going to be made up of our biological and theatrical families, which is just dandy. They've all seen me cry before.

I'm feeling very rich in friends this week.

Michael is quite friendly with Rose, the owner of The Happy Rooster (a Philly restaurant). Months ago, when he was telling her all about our fundraising schemes, she whipped out a $50 gift certificate to the restaurant and the idea of a raffle was born.

Just a few weeks ago, while out to dinner with girlfriends, I made casual mention of this lovely gesture. Within moments, Cindy & Maureen had come up with a handful of ideas for additional donations from their contacts in the non-profit world. They very quickly turned their ideas into reality, and with only 2 weeks of lead time, they collectively produced 2 (expensive!) tickets to a piano concert at the Kimmel Center, a family membership at the National Constitution Center, and 10 guest passes to the Independence Seaport Museum. Cindy & Maureen are fabulous, brilliant women, and I feel lucky to count them as friends.

On Monday I called in a favor from the one contact I have in the Philly restaurant scene for another meal gift certificate, and we now have 2 substantial raffle baskets for Saturday, collectively valued at almost $500! (If you're local, go have a meal at Rx in West Philly -- tell Greg I sent you. He is the bomb, and the food is terrific.)

And did I mention that the theatre's Board voted unanimously to donate back to the foundation the $250 rental fee for the space? And that friends who have known me since I was 14 offered to come early to help set up the tables and chairs? And that the finale song is "You've Got a Friend in Me"?

So you might understand my feeling a bit verklempt about the whole thing. Plus, seeing my kids perform always makes me tear up.

(Note to self -- don't forget to use the waterproof mascara on Saturday....)

My Mom Rocks

My mom wrote poetry as a college student. After a hiatus of being married, raising kids, entering and then leaving the workforce, selling real estate and managing rental properties, and then being an almost-full-time grandkid babysitter, she got serious about writing poetry again a few years ago. Since then, she has been published in numerous small but prestigious poetry periodicals, including Ibbetson Street Press, the Iodine Poetry Journal, and the like, as well as in Fine Gardening magazine. Last year, a collection of her work was published as a "chapbook" by Finishing Line Press and is available on Amazon, which is pretty damn nifty.

She got word last week that she's been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Way to go, Mom!

And It Rained

We made good time to the beach on Saturday, got the parrot dropped off just in time before the vet closed, and All Was Well. Dinner out, early to bed, and off to see the ocean on a gray and cloudy Sunday morning. It got windy and cold, which didn't much bother anyone. And then it started to rain.

It rained Monday.

It rained Tuesday.

It rained Wednesday.

We had to go home Wednesday night.

We managed to spend a grand total of maybe 3 hours at the ocean the entire trip.

I got a lot of sleep, but on a crummy matress, which is a double-edged sword. My back is exceedingly tweeked out.

Thank god for my aunt Diane, who lent us the entire Harry Potter ouevre on video and DVD. The kids got caught up with movies 3 & 4 at the rental house, and Michael took them to Atlantic City on Tuesday to see the current flick on the Imax screen there. My parents joined us on Wednesday, and the fellows braved the Boardwalk in the cold drizzle for a little miniature golf, while Mom and I enjoyed an uninterrupted gab over hot steamy mugs. We had an easy drive home Wednesday evening, and I was back to work Thursday morning and thinking about what to bake for Week Eight.....

Theo likes going on vacation.

Week Seven

I realized this week that the longer I stall, waiting for inspiration, the less inspired this post is likely to be. (Call it Fischer's Law of Inverse Inspiration.) So I resign myself to general lack of inspiration, in hopes of finally getting caught up before the end of the holiday weekend. (Wish me luck -- I still have not pulled the school clothes out of the closets to see what still fits. Ay caramba.)

We were due to leave for the beach immediately following the Week Seven sale on Saturday, so I tried to keep the prep as simple as possible to allow for packing and organizing and general pre-vacation madness. Traveling with 2 boys, a husband, and a dog is complicated enough, but we also had to get out early enough on Saturday to drop the parrot off at the vet for boarding. Everything was timed like a Swiss watch and very delicately calibrated. I humbly posit that this is not the best frame of mind in which to embark on vacation.

The obsessively pre-planned baking prep this week took the form of not only pre-measuring dry ingredients for Friday night power baking, but making actual "kits" for each recipe, thusly:

What you're looking at is a container holding separate baggies of ingredients, combined and sorted as to the order in which they are used in the recipe, as well as the pre-measured quantity of butter needed. One of the baggies is labeled as to the recipe and multiple thereof (x1, x2, etc.), as well as oven temp and the page number that the recipe is on for quick reference. If I were slightly more obsessive, I would have pre-sorted (and separated, where needed) the eggs as well. But I'm not quite that crazy. (Shut up.) As it was, it was very handy to not have to think about much aside from cracking eggs and checking oven temps. In between some final packing and picking up a rental van, the actual baking on Friday night took me a grand total of about 2.5 hours, which was a miracle.

Here are the results. In my count-down-to-final-week panic, I was convinced that I didn't have enough items for the sale, and ended up going somewhat overboard:



A double batch of Milk Chocolate Mini-Cakes, from Dorie. These are very good, but I miscalculated while assembling them. They have a ribbon of struesel inside, and I put too much batter in before the struesel, leaving me insufficient batter to top them off. I was out of milk chocolate, to boot, so I made one more batch of batter using bittersweet choc, and topped the pans off with that. You can see the darker ribbon of batter at the base of the bundt-shaped mini-cakes above. And here they are with their glaze -- I left the rose-shaped cakes au naturel.



These are very yummy indeed, and the glaze is nice and sticky. Saturday morning's highlight was watching a 4-year-old girl share one of these with her daddy on the Co-Op patio. Lots of finger licking. (These are big treats, so we sold them for $2 instead of our usual $1.)

Muffins had been a hit the prior 2 weeks, so I made a double batch of Dorie's Orange Berry Muffins. They were delicious, but inexplicably did not sell well. We brought a lot of leftovers with us to the beach, where they came in handy for breakfasts and snacks.



The recipe calls for rubbing orange zest into granulated sugar, which releases the zest's oils beautifully. I had a bag of blueberries in the freezer, which made a terrific combination.

One of my regular customers had been asking me to repeat the Peanut Butter & Jelly cookies, and as they are quick and easy, I threw them into the mix for Week Seven. Of course, this guarenteed that the requesting customer didn't show up! But they all sold, even the ones that Garrick decided should be chocolate chip faces:

Most of the faces were semi-toothless by the time customers saw them, but they didn't seem to mind.

Finally, an old favorite recipe from "The Joy of Cookies." This is a lovely little book with a terrific range of recipes. The Sesame-Anise Melts are killer. Pre-oven and post-oven:


This is a very soft, buttery cookie -- not too sweet -- delicately scented with freshly ground anise seed, and rolled in toasted sesame seeds before baking. The combination is outstanding, and I must bake these more often. I added them to the list this week because I missed them and wanted to nibble on some, but I didn't think they'd be a bit hit at the sale. Joke's on me -- every single one sold, and I didn't get to taste any. I think I'll make a batch just for me next week....

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Saturday was gorgeous, sunny and breezy, with temps in the low 80s. Beautiful weather. Week Six saw us blow past our original monetary goal for the bake sale, so I put an extension on our poster for Week Seven and a revised goal of $800:



The table was a bit crowded with all of the choices, but I managed to squeeze everything in.


The sale itself was fairly uneventful. Lots of visitors and friends, but a relatively slow day. Still, we made about $100, and I packed everything up a smidge early so we could get on the road to the beach! the beach! the beach!