Just so you know...

The Joanne's Fabric and Craft store by my house now officially has 2 rows of fall stuff. It's never too early to start thinking about Halloween!

Planning Stages

Incase you didn’t know, summer, in California, is really really f’ing hot. Turning on the oven to 350 degrees isn’t exactly appealing so I’ll be a bit sparse in the baking area for a bit.

I just wanted to let you in on something I’m planning for Halloween ‘10…

(from http://www.haunteddimensions.raykeim.com/index500.html)

I always get a little bit Halloween crazy a little too early, and it usually hits right about July. As some of you may know I’m dealing with the loss of a friend right now, and instead of burying myself in something useful to me (cough, research, cough) I’m delving into something completely useless, but completely fun. I’ve found a template and I’ve got some tricks up my sleeve…

At any rate, I’m excited, and I’ll be doing some test builds with paper pretty soon.

Not dead!

Taking a break from studying to let you know that I'm not dead...just studying.

I'm in my last stretch of midterms, with my last one today at 11 for my Bio Lab practical.

Let me quote my teacher to you: "You can study 8 hours a day for the next week, and you will still fail"

So...yeah. Very encouraging, and I've been doing my best to remember everything we've ever learned or looked at in the lab and those crazy latin names really don't like to stick in my spongy brain.

But! I was inspired while sitting here at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf to let you know that their pumpkin chocolate chunk "muffin" (hah, muffin, don't make me laugh, its a cupcake without frosting) is absolutely delicious. It seemed vaguely halloweeny, and a good excuse to break from my study session.

I'll be tempted to try their caramel apple ice blended thing next...why is fall coffee food so damn yummy?

Back to malacostraca and pedipalps and synconoid sponges!

Danse Macabre

This song just oozes Halloween to me. Camile Saint-Saens is brilliant, and when you look up the song on youtube you find all sorts of fun videos put to the music. I liked this one particularly.

In band (yes, I'm a bandie, trumpet for 12 years now) we played the...well the wind band version rather than the orchestral version, so that will probably have a place in my heart forever. We had a saxophone play the violin solo and the windy, reedy, breathiness of the sax just made the song that much creepier to me.

If you want I can go all music theory on you and tell you about the representations of wind and ghosts and skeletons by all the different motifs and themes, but I'll refrain. I should be working anyways.

Enjoy! Take some time to look up other vids on youtube, there are some pretty neat ones.

Fluffy Stuff

I think its called tulle. Not entirely sure, but its fuuuun. Yet another project inspired by a sale at JoAnne fabrics...$2.50 for fifty bajillion yards of tulle, and they just happened to have black and orange. So I had to, naturally. I think it looks lovely and ethereal on the stairs, and while it's black and orange I like that it doesn't like scream in your face "ITS HALLOWEEN AND I'M BLACK AND ORANGE BECAUSE ITS HALLOWEEN". It was very...well transparent because it's tulle, so I doubled over the tulle and then draped it along the banisters like we normally do at X-mas with our cranberry wreaths.

And I had just enough to drape a bit from the chandelier in our dining room, accompanied by some dangling spiders, of course. Got to have a little spook. And if you look carefully, you might notice that I recycled the spiders from my pumpkin scone setup. Way to repurpose!

Okay fine, I'll go back to Chem now. It's so hard to enjoy Halloween when school gets in the way. But I did officially put a countdown to Halloween on the whiteboard in the research lab I work in. Woohoo!

PS: Ta-da!

Ignore my mannish, pale, and obviously not professionally manicured hands, I finally got around to painting some festive color on my nails!

That is all. We now return to your regularly scheduled programming.

Pumpkin Obsession

Chemistry will be the death of me...

On another note! Today was fabulously rainy, a rare sight in SoCal and so I took every opportunity to enjoy it, including splurging on a Starbucks run between classes. I got a pumpkin spice latte and a pumpkin scone, because one can never have too much pumpkin.

I loooove pumpkin. Pumpkin pie, pumpkin scones, pumpkin lattes, pumpkin soup, pumpkin seeds, oh boy.

So last year, on a whim, I decided that I needed pumpkin scones because I was going broke buying them from Sbux. A quick search of the internet gave me juuuuust what I needed, a recipe actually designed to mimic those fantastic scones.

But I made mine better. Not only did I up the spice, being a spicy pumpkin pie lover, I made the spice glaze on top a bit spicier, as well as purple! Now on my first batch I actually took the time to pipe out spiderwebs and then decided that was bogus, so the next batch I did squiggles and slapped some plastic spiders on the tray. Voila!

They were so good that my mom immediately volunteered me to bake some for her office for their Halloween potluck. Um...thanks mom? It just gave me an excuse to make and eat more.

NOTE: I take no credit for this recipe at all in any way shape or form. It is just delicious and worth sharing. A quick google search for "pumpkin scone recipe" should take you to a Starbucks Pumpkin Scone recipe on Reciepezaar. They get the credit!

Ingredients


Scones

* 2 cups all-purpose flour
* 7 tablespoons sugar
* 1 tablespoon baking powder
* 1/2 teaspoon salt
* 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
* 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
* 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
* 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
* 6 tablespoons cold butter
* 1/2 cup canned pumpkin
* 3 tablespoons half-and-half
* 1 large egg

Powderered Sugar Glazze

* 1 cup powdered sugar
* 1 tablespoon powdered sugar
* 2 tablespoons whole milk

Spiced Glaze

* 1 cup powdered sugar
* 3 tablespoons powdered sugar
* 2 tablespoons whole milk
* 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
* 1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg
* 1 pinch ginger
* 1 pinch ground cloves

Directions

TO MAKE THE SCONES: Preheat oven to 425 degrees F. Lightly oil a baking sheet or line with parchment paper. Combine flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and spices in a large bowl. Using a pastry knife, fork, or food processor, cut butter into the dry ingredients until mixture is crumbly and no chunks of butter are obvious. Set aside. In a separate bowl, whisk together pumpkin, half and half, and egg. Fold wet ingredients into dry ingredients. Form the dough into a ball. Pat out dough onto a lightly floured surface and form it into a 1-inch thick rectangle (about 9 inches long and 3 inches wide). Use a large knife or a pizza cutter to slice the dough twice through the width, making three equal portions. Cut those three slices diagonally so that you have 6 triangular slices of dough. Place on prepared baking sheet. Bake for 14–16 minutes. Scones should begin to turn light brown. Place on wire rack to cool. [EDIT: I opted to make mini scones just by dropping spoonfuls onto parchment paper, if you do this just watch the scones, they should be done in about 10 minutes]

TO MAKE THE PLAIN GLAZE: Mix the powdered sugar and 2 tbsp milk together until smooth. When scones are cool, use a brush to paint plain glaze over the top of each scone. [EDIT: I found that this made WAAAY too much icing the first time, so the second time I just eyed it and added milk to a little powdered sugar until I got the consistency I wanted. Then, rather than brushing it on, I found I got a really nice coat and a really nice crunch if I carefully dipped the top of all my mini scones into the glaze. I would not recommend the hassle if you honestly don't care]

AS THAT WHITE GLAZE FIRMS UP, MAKE THE SPICED ICING: Combine the ingredient for the spiced icing together. Drizzle this thicker icing over each scone and allow the icing to dry before serving (at least 1 hour). A squirt bottle works great for this, or you can drizzle with a whisk. [EDIT: Instead of making another batch, I took the leftover glaze from the previous step, added the spices, added a lot of purple food coloring (this was before I discovered the magic of gel food color) and put it in a ziploc bag with the corner cut off and drizzled away!]

Add spiders, and voila!