back at it

so, I decided to pick up the 'ol blog again.

I miss my stories.  I miss knowing what has happened in my life.  see, I have a HORRIBLE memory, and I wanted this to be a place where I could go back and remember moments in my life I wouldn't normally remember.  and as it turns out, I don't remember much of the last year.  the details anyway. because I didn't write them down.  or maybe they're lost in facebook statuses somewhere, I'm not sure. 

so here I am, back at it.

my little hiatus stemmed from a lot of things.  I made a major life change in the last year and people are critical, ya know?  so I didn't feel like I could totally ignore it in my blog, but I also didn't want everybody knowing stuff about me while I tried to figure it out either.  now I'm to the point that I believe in it and I don't so much care what other people think.  it's not even a big deal to me anymore, but it was then.  we cut meat and almost all dairy out of our diet.  see?  no big deal.  

it was really fun to watch the scale (which stayed the SAME after working out WITH A TRAINER for almost a year) drop almost 15 pounds in a few months time.  turns out what you eat really matters. :)  

now that I got that out there (I may have mentioned it before, I don't really know) and you all think I'm super healthy, I'd like to take the time to share a recent kitchen adventure.  some call it cooking, some call it baking, some call it making supper.  to me, it's always foreign and uncomfortable, no matter how many times I do it, so it's an adventure.  and this adventure was far from healthy.

My sweet hubby turned 33 last week.  At his new job, you bring treats on your own bday so that nobody ever gets forgotten about. these are the things you don't learn about in marriage counseling.  the expectation that the wife brings some extravagant thing to make everybody in the office think they are so awesome.  

well his bday was on a saturday.  and the kids really wanted a surprise party for him, which is hard to do when he's with you all day on his bday.  So Friday we decided to do it, and i was going to make him a candy bar cake with brownies, bc the guy loves chocolate, and this girl doesn't so much love cake.  plus, I thought that it might be what I want to bring to his work the next week, so I better try it out first.

so I went to the store and got 2 boxes of brownie mix thinking that if I make two 8x8 pans of brownies, they'll stand up high enough that the kitkats on the outside of the cake will look good.  then Brielle and I went on a mission to find colorful candy coated chocolates to put on the top to add a little color.  but they couldn't be m&ms because they're all at risk of having peanuts in them.  the life of an allergy family.  

well it just so happens that my FAVORITE candy in the whole world is sixlets, which are not at risk of peanut contamination. AND they're colorful.  AND they're chocolate.  AND they're not sold in HyVee apparently.  it's a hard job to scour the candy aisles during Halloween season, and enough to make this mama go NUTS.

so we settled on little blue, brown, and cream almond joy bites.  I'll go ahead and skip detials of the part where I picked the kids up from the bus stop while the brownies were baking and FLEW to the dollar general AND Nobbies looking for sixlets, because we settled on the almond joys, even though we did find sixlets.  whatever.  

we got home with TWO minutes left on the timer for the brownies.  go team.

ok.....well....either.....

a) you can't use egg replacer for making brownies (even though I use it for other baking things), or 

b) you can't use Canola oil instead of vegetable oil (I thought they were the same.  but see?  it's all foreign to me...), or 

c) you can't bake 2 pans of brownies at the same time, or 

d) any combination of the above.  

because, folks, these were not brownies that came out of the pans.  they were oily, bubbling, flat slabs of TAR, in a shape that tried really hard to resemble a square.  so I cut them into circles, let them cool for not enough time bc steve would be home soon, slapped some leftover frosting on the edges so the candy would stick, and put the kitkats down (HORIZONTALLY, that's how flat TWO pans of brownies were), sprinkled the pretty cnadies that took me an like 2 hours to decide on, and stuck that baby in the deep freeze to try to keep some sort of shape and prevent the rest of the chocolate from melting off the kitkats.  

it was a total disaster, people.  a whole day wasted.  except for one thing: the photo.  

I love love love this picture, and nobody knows that we ate a total of one piece combined.  nobody knows the kitkats were supposed to be vertical.  nobody knows my husband doesn't even like almond joys.  the kids were hiding when he got home from work, they jumped out and said surprise, and he had "no idea" that there was a special dessert waiting for us, even though the whole house smelled like brownies and there were dirty dishes everywhere.  and I told him he better act surprised. :)

so this picture captures exactly what I wanted it to.  the kids were so excited, so proud, and they just love their daddy so much. 

but if it wasn't for the blog, I'd forget all about the brownie flop.  

oh, I got off track though.  so good thing I attempted the candy bar cake before the dreaded 'bring treats to work day.'  can you imagine?  I'd have gone to dairy queen for an ice cream cake or something I guess.  But ice cream cakes aren't really in our budget, so instead of risking another disaster, I went with cupcakes.  Steve loves butterfinger, and we can't ever really make that kind of stuff for here because of Lillian's allergy, so I though it'd be fun to bring some to work.  and easy.

so I made regular old cupcakes.  (have you SEEN what people do to their cupcakes?  thank you, pinterest, for making us feel like everything has to be totally freakin fancy.)  in order to make them "butterfinger" ones, I crushed up some butterfinger to add to the frosting, crushed a little more (without the chocolate, which was easy bc if you crush it in the wrapper, the chocolate sticks to the wrapper anyway) to sprinkle on top, and then found these adorable little butterfinger snacksters or something in the candy aisle and put one of those on the top.  they were really boring compared to pinterest, but they were EASY, and I used EGGS, and they were a huge hit.  so there, take that pinterest.  

so there you have it. I survived.  I threw a surprise party for my hubby (ha!) and successfully brought treats to his work.  AND, I blogged about it.