This is not a cooking blog...

...but I have to write about these cupcakes I made yesterday.

Some of my sibs and I planned this awesome surprise party for our parents to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary. A dessert party. The best kind of party.

I was supposed to bring cupcakes. So I bought the foil cupcake liners and Hersey kisses (foil wrapped) all to complement the theme of a Silver Anniversary. My thought was chocolate ganche frosting with a Hersey kiss on top (still wrapped, so be careful). But I thought a white buttercream with the silver liners would be prettier. Seriously. I actually had this conversation with myself in my brain. What to do??

I made the cake part of the cupcakes and stressed about this agonizing decision while getting ready for church. Ganache is the clear winner in the taste department; buttercream the frontrunner on elegance. But without some kind of serious boost, buttercream was never ever going to take the cake. Elegance or taste? Which one should be compromised?

I COULD NOT DECIDE.

Then it struck me: Coconut. This is the answer.

I decided that I could smash coconut on the top of the buttercream covered cupcake and it would be awesome.

YAY, BUTTERCREAM WINS!

It would be like a hostess snoball. And who doesn't love the coco/choco combo? My parents would both love it. I knew this was going to be a hit with them and I felt like the best daughter ever.

So I whipped up the buttercream. But it just tasted blah. I don’t have any vanilla, didn’t want to use almond extract and knew that coconut flavor in the buttercream was the only thing I wanted. But alas, I did not have any.

As I stood in front of the mixer staring down into that bowl of lost dreams and dashed hopes the heavens parted, and an idea so amazing, so wonderful, and so perfect that it can only have been whispered from a more celestial sphere floated down and struck my grateful heart.

i …c …e ...c …r …e …a …m

I had a half eaten pint of coconut ice cream in my freezer. Totally normal.
I melted in and mixed it into the frosting. Not as normal.

YAY, IT TASTED AWESOME!

The cupcakes were perfect. They were elegant and beautiful. My parents loved them and they rivaled ganache in the flavor department.

The moral of the story is this: always have ice cream on hand. It is the often overlooked pantry essential.

My parents are pretty amazing; they deserved amazing cupcakes.

Mom and Day,
Congratulations on 25 years of happiness.
Wishing you many, many more.
Love, me.

Grrrrr

Dear Mrs. Teacher,
I am sorry for punching [boy2] in class. I know it got u very angry and I won't do it again. What I should have been doing is sitting paitiently.
[boy1]

* What he should have been doing is getting his lab equipment, not wandering about that classroom punching [boy2] for fun. sigh. I was very angry.

Dear Ms. Teacher,
I am sorry for lightly punching [boy1] in the arm. I now understand that any form of horseplay is unacceptable. I will never do it again.
Sincerely, [boy2]

*"lightly"? Does this sound like an apology to anyone or an excuse?

And it's at least within the realm of possibility that at some time, some place someone would have mentioned "don't goof off” to him before. He is writing this as an epiphany that was serendipitously explained to him for the first time. Ever.

---

In addition to this little bit of rascality that sent two students to the hallway for 20 mins, a girl blew a burning candle that was attached to a note card across her desk and into the head of another girl.

8 graders + fire = grumpy Ms. Teacher

good news: no one had to stop, drop, and roll.

I need some chocolate.

Peaches. LOOKOUT!

The production:

The product:

The punk rock version:

Star Gazing

Last summer my roommate and I drove 1,210 miles to watch the Perseids meteor shower. It's true that you could watch it any place on Earth but we wanted to go where there was no interference from moisture, air or light sources. We drove to Great Basin National Park and watched the show from Wheeler Peak at 9,886 feet.

It was unbelievable.

We saw over a hundred meteors in a little over an hour.

This year the moon was full and ruined any chance of real excitement. Those meteors were out there and they were igniting oxygen in the atmosphere but who's going to notice with the moon stealing the show? Other than an astronaut taking pictures from above?!

So cool. Picture taken from here.

But luckily my life is full of fellow lovers of science and one of my friends invited me to watch the Delta Aquarid meteor shower which peaks on the same night that the Perseids are just begining to ramp up, sans the moonlight getting in the way, making a double combo event. We headed out to Snoqualmie Pass in the SUPER early hours of Saturday July 30th and watched the shower from 1 to 3 a.m.

We forgot to count but we saw more than 30 an hour.

We got back to Seattle around 4 and headed straight to Beth's Cafe because we were starving. My english muffin had easily 1/4 cup of butter melting out of it leaving behind this dangerously delicious puddle of butter for my hashbrowns to soak up.

Last week I went to Girls Camp (!) and they let me teach a star gazing mini lesson to the campers. We had fun laying on our backs staring into the sky and soaking in the beauty above us. Of course the moon was approaching it's fullest phase (waxing gibbous for those of you who know a thing or two about the moon) so we didn't see much; and for half of the time there were large clouds obstructing our view. But we did see two amazingly bright meteors which is always a delightful surprise.

Star gazing is one of those experiences where every human eye and heart can feel the awe and amazement that, to me, testifies of a Creator.

Charlotte Brontë expressed it well when she wrote, "We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us; and it is in the unclouded night-sky, where His worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence."

The following is a video I came across that captured both my attention and the essence of what I think Charlotte Brontë is saying. Certainly, if nothing else, it echos my own heart.

Blastoff!

. . . for the last time.

Atlantis final launch.

7-8-11