Salted Caramel and Pecan Blondies

My weekend mornings typically consist of either baking up a storm in my kitchen for the blog, or heading to the gym to get my workout done and out of the way, so that I can come home and do some baking.  It's been my routine for the past year or so now that I've been living at home from college, and for the most part, it typically works.  There are, of course, weekends where I break out of my routine because I have something special planned and I neither bake nor workout, or because I've somehow managed to bake ahead so far in advance that I can give myself a weekend off from my kitchen. Weekends off are nice.  I love working for the blog, but every now and then, it's nice to know that I can wake up late and just chill, because my recipes and photos for the upcoming week are already taken care of. 

Weekends where I'm off because I've planned ahead don't happen as often as I would like them to, sadly.  I try to plan ahead, I really do, but it just doesn't always happen.  I keep a little notebook full of random ideas that pop into my head so that I can bake and post them, but the problem is that my little notebook gets a little too full at times.  There's too many random ideas, and since I like to keep things seasonal, I typically have more seasonal treat ideas than I can reasonably prepare, photograph, and write about by the time the season ends. For instance, I know that I really need to do a post on apples, because what's more fall-appropriate than an apple? The problem is that I just can't decide which of the ten apple ideas I have written down to actually make.  This situation happens more often than I'd like, which usually leaves me having to bake every weekend. I don't mind it, honestly, but this past weekend, I was just not having it.  The weather was awful (it was cold and rainy), and I went to bed the night before knowing that the next day would be gray and miserable.  I think that made me wake up on Saturday and just want to crawl back into bed and sleep all day, because I consider that the best way to spend a rainy Saturday.  

Salted Caramel Cashew Popcorn for the Make and Takes Blog!

The Academy Awards are SO soon!!!!!  Do you guys get excited about the Oscar's?  I'm one of those people that literally count down the days until awards season (although I'll be honest, the Oscar's are the only ones I actually watch).  I get super excited for the day that the nominees are announced, and once that happens, well, I'm all about scheduling my weekends and free time to watch as many of the nominated films as I can.  I haven't done as well this year as I have in years past, but I'm hoping that I can watch at least one or two more films by the time the Academy Awards take place on Sunday night.  I have my Sunday night all planned out: I'm going to wear my comfiest sweats, plop myself on my bed, turn the television on, and not move for anyone or anything until the winner for Best Picture has been announced.  It sounds like a perfect evening, an evening that could only be made more perfect by the addition of some salted caramel cashew popcorn. 

This is a super fancy yet super easy popcorn to prepare.  It's perfect for snacking on, and perfect to enjoy during the Oscar's on Sunday, whether your Oscar viewing party is just you or a group of your friends.  The only thing I'll warn you about with this popcorn is that it's really dangerous- once you start eating it, I can almost guarantee that you'll have hard time stopping!  For the full recipe and additional photos, head on over to the Make and Takes blog!

Banana Caramel Cupcakes

Geeeeez, it's been a while since I've written anything on this little blog, or even taken the time to take a glance at it.  I've been unbelievably busy these past two weeks.  You see, my senior portfolio was due yesterday, at 5 PM, so in these past two weeks, I was literally in the architecture design lab every spare second I had.  I had an obscene amount of work to do to get my portfolio finished, and there were definitely moments where I thought I was just going to lose it.  Like I said in my last post, I did a pretty awful job of documenting my files from my early studio classes, so figuring out how to represent those studios in my portfolio was a bit of a challenge. That, along with more sleepless nights than I'm willing to admit to, too much take-out for dinner, too little exercise, and the stress of having to produce something that I could be proud of in the end was driving me (and I know all my classmates were probably thinking similar thoughts) crazy!  In the end though, it was all worth it.  I learned a TON of new Photoshop tricks when preparing my renderings, I feel way more comfortable working with InDesign, and produced a portfolio that, given the circumstances, I'm actually very proud of. There's definitely things I wish I could improve about it, but for my first portfolio, I think it came out beautifully, and I love it.  I also learned a very valuable lesson: DOCUMENT AND ARCHIVE EVERYTHING. Seriously, what was I thinking back in sophomore year!?

I'm actually not too terrible about documenting things in other areas of my life.  For instance, I have all my blog photos perfectly organized and stored on a giant external hard drive.  They're organized by month, and each recipe has folders for the original, unedited photos that make the cut to be posted on the blog, Photoshop files, web files, and web files that have been cropped and resized for submitting to sites like Foodgawker or Tastespotting.  Even all my academic work for school is perfectly organi...wait.  Why am I talking about my archiving tendencies.  That's boring and irrelevant and completely unimportant when banana caramel cupcakes are the topic of today's blog post, and this cupcake is staring at you in the face.  Just because I'm still sleep deprived doesn't mean that I can lose focus of my priorities.  Moving on to cupcakes!

Homemade Samoas

Let's start this post off by me saying that I was never a Girl Scout when I was little, and I could probably count my experiences with actual, real-life Girl Scout cookies on one hand. Yep.  I'm a deprived human being, I know. I think Thin Mints and Samoas are the only Girl Scout cookies I've ever tried, but from what I've gathered, they're also the most popular, so I guess what counts is that I can vouch for the two most popular cookies. They are deeeeliiiciouss.  

Given that I have little first-hand experience with eating Girl Scout cookies, it's pretty obvious that I also have little experience with the actual selling of the cookies too.  This is actually just fine, because if there was one thing I HATED having to do when I was little/in high school was go around selling things for fundraisers.  I was a shy and awkward kid, and I transitioned into an equally shy and awkward teenager, so going up to people, even if I knew them, to ask if they wanted to buy whatever I was selling seemed like some sort of really cruel punishment.  Funny story time- the symphonic band I was in in high school always had one thing or another to fundraise for (the two biggest fundraisers we held were for a commission by a Juliard-trained composer and for a performance we were playing in at Carnegie Hall...big stuff!), and the method of choice for raising money was selling chocolate bars.  This was a terrible thing for me, because not only was I a shy and awkward teen at the time, but I was (and obviously still am) a major chocolate fiend.  Guess who ended up buying most of the chocolate bars I was in charge of selling?  If you guessed me, you are correct! But anyway, I digress.  Back to TOTALLY DIY, HOMEMADE SAMOAS.

This is exciting stuff, so get ready.

Chocolate and Salted Caramel Cookies

Here we go again, it's time for another quick/brief/short/hastily-written-at-1-am kind of blog post!  Why, you ask?  I've fallen behind.  Believe it or not, I have a bright aquamarine sticky note stuck to my desk outlining my schedule for blog posts, and these chocolate and salted caramel cookies were supposed to have been posted yesterday, not today.  Oops.  You'd think the bright color of my sticky note would have been striking enough to catch my attention, but I guess that when that bright aquamarine sticky note is sandwiched in between a bright purple and a bright pink sticky note for several weeks, you just sorta become accustomed to fluorescent colors, and they no longer have any effect on you.  That makes sense right?  If not, I'm going to keep telling myself that anyway.  Moving on!

I'm not only behind on my pre-scheduled blog posts, but I'm also behind on life in general.  My independent study project has moved to the back burner for now, and my portfolio production is so far behind that it's not even in the kitchen anymore, let alone near the back burner.  Up until now, that is.  Yes.  Tonight, as in, within the next fifteen minutes, I'm going to open up Indesign/Illustrator/Photoshop (obviously not all at the same time, as I seriously doubt my little Macbook pro can handle that kind of stress) and get work done.  Forrealz. It's going to happen.  I don't have class until 1:10 pm tomorrow (today?), so it's not like I have to wake up early or anything.  It's time for an all-nighter!

Chocolate and Salted Caramel Tart

Well,  today was the day. Today was the day I registered for classes for the upcoming spring semester.  It was like any other time in the past, you know.  Tons of time wasted spent researching classes and professors, and attempting to figure out how to best pick classes so that you'd get the maximum amount of weekend time possible. It was no different this year, except today, I registered for classes for the last time ever.  WUT?! 

Yes, it's true.  I'm a senior in college, with one semester (ok 1.5 semesters) left until commencement.  Where did the time go and how did this happen?  Is this even real life?  

Someone, pinch me, please.

It's crazy to think that at this time next year I won't be writing blog posts from my dorm room, and I won't be editing photos in the library instead of doing homework.  Nope.  None of that will happen next year.  It's a little mind-boggling and a little overwhelming, but at the same time, is very, very exciting!  At this time next year, I'm going to have something much bigger to think about...grad school applications.  Ew, I don't even want to think about that in those terms.  Grad school is only a thought that is looming in the back of my head right now; I know I'm gonna have to just suck it up and create a portfolio and work on applications, and take the GRE (ugh) at some point, but for now, I'm trying to just live in the present and not stress too much over what's going to happen later on in the year.  There's too much fun to be had right now!  The holidays are right around the corner (my absolute favorite time of year, hands down), and thoughts of Christmas cookies, hot chocolate, and Thanksgiving (!!) are preoccupying my thoughts.  

Real life?  Psh.  It can wait.  Especially when there are photos of a chocolate and salted caramel tart staring at my face.