Busy Oven!

Another busy day for the Unemployed One! My days absolutely fly by now! Since it's the holiday season I get to add baking into the mix of writing, reading, cat-harassing, walking, and making art.

A few weeks ago an email appeared in my inbox from my mom and step dad's email address, titled "Fw:Recipe". Joe was kind and thoughtful enough to email his sister to ask her for a recipe he enjoyed as a...boy or man or something and wanted to taste once again. As soon as the recipe was received, it was immediately sent to me, since I'm the only one in the family who can prepare a food item if it doesn't involve the microwave. Okay, okay, I'm not trying to be cruel here, both my mom and step dad are highly capable of using the toaster, too.

I'm not kidding when I say I'm very happy that Joe assumed I would be willing to make these cookies for him, and also assumed I'd be capable of taking on the task. He loves food and I love making it for him, so it's a good partnership. Not to mention the $20 he kicked in so I could buy the laundry list of ingredients needed, which included Maraschino cherries and raisins.

It was an arduous process, mostly because I didn't have a picture to look at. I prefer looking up recipes online to getting them written down or mailed to me because if I can see what it's supposed to turn out like I know where to start.

At any rate, here's step 132, after the dough is made, chilled, rolled, flattened, sweared at, thrown on the floor, picked up, has the cat hair picked out of it...um, wait, you didn't hear that from me. After you've got your square of dough you press all of the ingredients into it, like so:

Then is the really hard part - rolling it into thirds without losing all of the stuffing and while there are two cats threading themselves between your legs. It should (I hope!) look like this:

Then I baked them and after they were cooled, sliced them into bars:

They're supposed to have powdered sugar on them, but I was out, hopefully they're still good without it!

After that project I got back to my art project. My concept was a polymer clay background with a yarn tree with polymer clay leaves on it in the foreground. Here is a closeup of the leaves I made:

And this is the background:

Both of those items were baked in my very busy oven to harden them. After that I assembled the project:

And put it in the shadow box I bought the other day:


I'm not so sure I'm finished with it yet. When I am I'll glue the glass on, but I'm not ready to make it permanent yet.

Phew! Time to go get ready to bring the cookies over to the 'rents house...and get a free dinner. I love free dinners. (In case anyone feels like sending me one.)