Hi Hat Hell

So, like many cupcake aficionados, I've fallen for the whole Hi Hat Cupcake trend (oh, you too?). For those less into the whole cupcake thing, but still curious, they're those tall 'n' swirly cupcakes w/ a creamy, white frosting dipped into chocolate. They're visually reminiscent of chocolate dipped soft-serve cones.

Like any semi-decent baker out there I did my research and found that many of the reviewers on that Martha Stewart recipe had difficulty dipping their frostinged cupcakes into the chocolate, so I checked out some blogs out there and got a sense of what was working for people. This recipe on The Barmy Baker looked good, but then I blew it in a couple of ways. First, I was making the cupcakes for the kids so I wanted a vanilla cupcake and so used my good tried and true white chocolate cake recipe and I used Martha's dippin' chocolate recipe (which made use of semi-sweet chocolate) instead of Barmy Baker's (essentially I just used the meringue frosting recipe from Barmy Baker).

Big mistake. For one, I think a more lightly-textured cupcake than my white chocolate ones (they're pound-cake-y and dense) would have held onto the meringue better and, secondly, Martha's dip was too thick so when I dipped those things, the meringue came off in the chocolate. It was like a boot stuck in mud. I think I also needed to be less timid and dunk 'em quick and deep so that the top of the cupcake paper was included in the dip and provided more of a sturdy base for pulling out of the heavy chocolate. So, I scooped up the meringue, mostly coated in chocolate and plopped it back on the cupcake. I know, they're ugly. My sister is rolling over in her grave right now and she's not even dead. My sister and I fight about cake and baking all of the time and her big thing is the aesthetics of the stuff. And, (I sense an angry comment here..) I think that is her biggest concern so she is probably UPSET about how ugly the things are. But, they tasted good. The kids wanted the undipped ones, though and it wasn't an aesthetic thing. It was a we-like-vanilla thing.

Do you food bloggers out there usually only post about your successes? See, I want to know where you went wrong. Did you bake it too long? Too much rosemary? It fell off the spatula?

I'm supposed to be starting my preceptorship this week, by the way, but I just got my preceptor's name and number today. The person coordinating that whole thing at Nursing School U is new at it and disorganized anyways and now I look disorganized. I called my preceptor and left a message, "Uh, hi I'm your preceptee and we're starting this week, so, uhhhh, give me a call so we can synchonize our watches." Or something like that. Needless to say she hasn't called back and that watch is ticking and I've heard from those who have gone before me that doubling up on the schedule later on to make up for lost time is like Hi Hat Hell. Zort!

Four Pounds Of Butter

The baking season is in full swing here at the StudentNurse household. I am not exaggerating when I say that I have gone through four pounds of butter in the last week. Yes. I know you're thinking about saturated fat and heart disease and heck, you're nigh on a Health Professional here, StudentNurse, but that four pounds of butter was distributed pretty evenly over an entire elementary school

(that was the root beer cake for Family Heritage Night - bake something from your heritage! and somehow a root beer cake struck me as something my midwestern relatives may have baked at some point and I was feeling pretty ironic and all until someone plonked down a pink, greasy box with several dozen donuts in it)

and two elementary classes (carrot raisin muffins and sugar cookies X 2 batches oh, and the chocolate chip cookies that didn't go where intended because of a case of strep throat in one of the StudentNurse kids). And I have to say, too, that I am fully aware as a near'bout Health Professional (just a little over three months here, folks!) that all of this butter and sugar and root beer flavorings are not good in such quantities (especially since nutrition is one of my areas of self-appointed expertise (I couple that with my other Area Of Interest: vector-borne diseases- "Ask Me About Hanta Virus!" my bumper sticker would say), but, I repeat:

It Is The Baking Season. It can't be helped.

So, about the above cookies (that'd be batch #2). I got the recipe here and it is the best sugar cookie recipe I've ever met and I tell you I have made at least two batches of sugar cookies q year (q= every for you non-nurse-y types) for at least a decade using a different recipe every time and I am difficult to please.

I like these a bunch because they are not too sweet and, subsequently, they can take a full load of sprinklin' sugars, raisins, red hots, or mini M & M's without burning your taste buds with SWEET. And, by the way (and since you already think I'm evil in the nutrition department), the inventor of mini M & M's should be awarded some sort of candy Nobel Prize. Those things are perfect for making little mouths and buttons (et al.) on cookies. And, shut UP (no, YOU shut up), I am way more frantic about food dyes than you are - WAY MORE. I understand Yellow #5 is Satan's Own Yellow, but...

Baking Season.

Those poor snowmen need eyes and buttons here, people! My husband almost ran to our local grocery store to purchase candy corn so that I could fashion little candy corn cob pipes for those guys. THAT is evidence, too, of our devotion to The Baking Season. And did I mention that we live in a neighborhood considered to be grocery-store deprived (sure, plenty of liquor stores) so much so that not one, but TWO non-profits set up fruit and veggie stands within two blocks of my house (in either direction) on two different days of the week. And, also, when he made the candy corn offer it was well past 11 PM.

OK. A couple of notes on my sugar cookies.

A) What's up with refrigerating overnight? Forget it. An hour, maybe, but COME ON, this recipe calls for softening the butter and it's not a pie crust. Texturally these things are great. They are short-bread-y and not as sturdy as some work horse sugar cookies and so require careful packaging up to move from your house to the place of consumption/ admiration, but, just yum.

B) I used orange zest because my lemon tree is sorrowful and neglected and has two tiny green lemons waiting to perish in the unseasonably chilly weather going down right now.

C) You will need to use lots of flour on rolling surface and pin: this dough is sticky. I made it twice and once did fridge it overnight and that batch was even stickier than the dough I disrespected.

D) Have I mentioned how much I love parchment paper? That's my other bumper sticker: I *heart* Parchment Paper.

Finals Ate My Brain

Unable to rub words together to form sentences: it's finals time. And what happens in the StudentNurse household at the same time as 2/3rds of the finals weeks at Nursing School U? (No, gnashing of teeth and letting the house get to a disaster of CPS-taking-away-the-kids proportion happens EVERY finals week). Yes. One of the kids has a birthday. And, remember when they were three and you could get away with baking one cake? Now there's the school cupcakes and the family party ("Hey Bumble bee, howzabout a make-your-own-sundae bar for the family party?": Phew, that worked!) and the friend party. So, add the house already a disaster and a couple of baking prjects and now the house is a sticky disaster. And that's just the thing about this place: the fun never stops! We're sticky, but we have cupcakes lingering around. There's ice cream in the freezer and a doll wrapped in pink paper hiding in the laundry room. So it's a mess and papers are here and there and books are this way and that and dishes are under and over and in between...There's only so much paper, so many dishes and so many books available left to add to the mess, right? It can only get as bad as it can get because there's a limit to the materials here. (All right that's a serious stretch, but...) And one of my finals was canceled because of glitches with the school's networking system! It's a holiday!

Oh, did I mention that I have a preceptorship in L and D at the hospital I wanted? Woo hoo!

Nurse Molly's Search is from the Tiny Pineapple site.