Rugggggelach

For this week's Tuesday with Dorie we made Rugelach cookies, chosen by Grace of Piggy's Cooking Journal. I'd never made cookies like this before, likely because it looks complicated. In reality, it's not complicated at all but just takes patience. This recipe especially allows for creativity with the filling, which I enjoyed.

I was hesitant about mixing my dough in the food processor because as you can see it's tinyyy. Fortunately it all fit and the dough came together very quickly and easily. I may now be a convert to this method.

Rolling the dough into "circles" became rolling them into something that is hopefully not a square. I chose to go ahead and cut the dough before I put any of the toppings on it and I think that was a good choice - it was a lot simpler to roll them up when I was ready for that.

Here are the pre-baked cookies. I did a different flavor for each pan: apricot preserves, pecans, cranberries, and a little cardamom added with the cinnamon for one; red currant jelly (couldn't find the raspberry), pecans, and semi-sweet chocolate bits.

Finished product! These are absolutely delicious. I am especially impressed by the dough - it's so flaky and good. A definite sign of approval was that my 14 year-old brother couldn't decide if he liked the fruity one or the chocolate ones better. Also I ate about 6 of them after they came out of the oven. Tasty tasty!

unfortunately....

I cannot stop eating my rugelach.

TWD - Chocolate Chocolate Cupcakes

When I saw the recipe selection for this weeks was chocolate cupcakes I inwardly groaned. I think this is the third time in a month I have made cupcakes but I figured since this is my first TWD post I sort of had to make them. At least I could make these sort of Halloweeny. :)

Off we go:
Mix mix mix...I've found that the warmer zone on my oven is good for speeding butter to room temperature if I forget to set it out earlier, which is pretty much always.

The batter was nice and light and tasted awesome.

Here they are out of the oven...had I read the P's and Q's I would have seen that many people were having problems with dryness and baked for a shorter period of time. I did 22 minutes on the dot, but I probably should have checked them earlier.

This wasn't a great week for innovation in Megan-land since really I was baking these as stress relief and so I just stuck with Dorie's glaze, using semi-sweet chocolate instead of bittersweet. It was a very rich glaze but tasty.

And here I exhausted my creative brain cells for the day by using the awesome Halloween sprinkles that were in the cabinet.


The verdict:
Mine were a little dry, there's no getting around it. Probably if I had done what others did and added a second whole egg instead of the yolk, or baked for less time they would have turned out ok. Still, they were very edible...I just wanted a glass of milk with them!

Thanks to Clara for picking a fun recipe!

Oh well

I'm realizing that in joining TWD, I'm really going to have to up my exercise routine. And by that I mean start one...

Dusting off the old blog...

I decided to make use of my space here and use it for Tuesdays with Dorie posts or anything else that seems relevant. So, as soon as my book arrives, we're off! (Hopefully Tuesday next, with the Chocolate Chocolate cupcakes)

alright, so this is part 1 of the mondo-update

So, this is what I did this summer. I sailed a 30ft boat with 12 people on it and backpacked in the mountains of Maine for 3 weeks. I LOVED it and think about it each day...not joking. QVO651 is awesome.

These are the lovely folks of my course...from LtoR we have Donnie, Justin, Jazzy, Genevieve, Allie, Ryan, Julia, myself, Neil, Dan, Angie and T (instructor #5). And Donnie has sweet suspenders.

This was one morning when I had second to last watch near Hell's Half Acre, which was around 5am...made for some gorgeous skies. Yeah...ask about the jellyfish we swam through to get to shore.

On Hurricane Island, the former settlement and Outward Bound base which is now used as a pit-stop for sailing courses like ours. We spent 2 nights there and still never got our land legs completely back.

Only because of the situation in which we took these pictures will I be ok with the public seeing them. I miss people :/

So this is from the backpacking part of our trip which was the first part, even though the pictures are out of order. We all agreed that if sailing was first we would have been more likely to try to leave before backpacking even started had we known what it entailed.

Basically this is my "bivvie" that I set up to sleep in for my solo (3 nights and days..SOLO). I surprised myself and really enjoyed being alone for those 3 days...it definitely gives you the opportunity to think over things, as well as catch up on sleep and dry out all your wet clothes.



Ok so this is from sailing again when we stopped in...Farmington I think...to fill up with more water. See, Mainers have a sense of humor too!

















This was our last morning backpacking. We left our solo sites the morning before and promptly got off trail and ended up on mount wheeler, the mountain we did not have to climb. I think God was probably laughing at all of us that day because I cannot possibly count the number of times I got smacked in the face with a spruce branch. Even Bonny and Dustin were frustrated with how far off trail we were (it wasn't even our fault) and that's saying something. We ended up camping on the mountain on rocks and other ridiculously uncomfortable things and after waking up at 3:30am to get hiking by first light, we finally made it to this skippy peanut butter jar that denoted the top of the mountain. Note the tree cover - the reason we were trying to get to the top was so we could take a bearing and do a triangulation. HAH no bearing to be had here, no siree.
BUT we did eventually get off the mountain and found the trail about oh.....7 hours later.



Props to blogger for making it really easy to put your pictures in order. So this is our first day of sailing and wow was it cold when the sun went down and the wind picked up. Sleeping on the boat that first night was definitely interesting. I'll take a nice patch of dirt over oars any day.









This is Dustin, one of our instructors for backpacking. He is hot, and that's all I wanted to say.













Pre-departure camp clean up, featuring Julia Thayne's lovely butt in the left foreground. We had a routine, like a big happy family. :)












3 weeks without a cell phone, computer, or radio. What do you think that would be like? I loved it. The first day on the trail I kept hearing this bird that sounded like the first note of my cell phone ring and so I would hear it and search around for the sound and go "oh wait, I'm in the middle of NOWHERE." Before I left for OB I was realizing how badly I was attached to my computer, and I think going cold turkey was a good thing. It kind of sucks how much I have to use it for school. I think our generation is going to have carpal tunnel by the age of 30, if not sooner.

I really can't describe my OB trip in a succint sentence or paragraph or whatever. It was horrible at times and utterly thrilling at others. There is a quote by Jack London that I feel is very appropriate:

I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather my sparks should burn out in a blaze than it should be stifled by dry rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than asleep and permanent as a planet. The proper function of a man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them.
I SHALL USE MY TIME.

mini-update

Obviously I suck at life for not updating this for oh, say, about 3 months, but I'm a very busy and important person. One day, like tomorrow hopefully, when I don't have a paper to write and readings to read and arabic to listen to, I will try to sit down and cover the highlights of my OB trip and what has happened around here lately. It is very tempting to do it right now, but today I started my "DETATCH FROM THE COMPUTER" phase of my life. So...

come back tomorrow