cinnamon roll cake + maple cream cheese glaze.

I just listened to Dean Martin's That's Amore. And played a rousing game of table tennis with the pops. And that's about the extent of my activity. I have actually been doing nothing for at least 2 hours now .. I mean, at least I don't feel like a blob, because I ate relatively well today, despite having made this cake. Well, this cake was my lunch .. and a damn good lunch it was.

The other day I bought a bottle of Archer Farms Thai Peanut Sauce (if you shop there enough, you know which store I'm talking about) and box of whole wheat penne pasta because I was convinced I would eat healthy this entire break and get back into shape.

How has that been going? I haven't opened the pasta yet. I opened the sauce bottle to taste it, but it's been chillin at the back of my fridge since. I did make a healthy dinner once of brown rice, an egg with half the yolk removed, fresh veggies, and thawed corn nibbies, but then ate a bunch of crap afterwards .. #fail.

I have been using that hashtag too much. And I have been using hashtags more in non-twitter context than in my tweets. I need to stop both. I am not a fail, and people are not personal twitters. Instead I should focus on positive things. Like how I read 3 sections of orgo that one morning I woke up early. And how .. I can't think of anything else. OH how I played Just Dance Wii last night and got a good workout in! After eating those mocha brownies my best friend brought .. but still! Oh and how I convinced another of my good friends to get a twitter!

Okay that last one's more peer pressure. Speaking of drugs, did you know DARE would take kids on field trips for some schools? Not cool, this little show of favoritism. Well I got those cool flippy calculators and .. erasers .. so .. I win?

Anyway, this cake was most definitely not a fail. Quite the opposite.

inside-out german chocolate cake.

So I have awesome friends. Who I do awesome things with. And who also make me awesome birthday cakes! I'll let Danielle do the rest of the talking - yuppp. This is a guest blog post!!

I'm in the black dress; Danielle's wearing red!

Hey friends!  This is Yatee’s suitemate, Danielle, and she asked me to do this guest post… she likes to show me off sometimes.  Not really, but after helping bake her birthday cake, I have been given the honor to make an appearance on here (so much pressure!). 

Celebrating Yatee’s birthday is fun, because her birthday is over winter break, so we try to make it a surprise.  And when’s the best time to make a massive cake?  Obviously in the middle of finals when we’re all stressed to the max and can use the cake to 1. Honor our friend’s birthday, and 2. Eat all our feelings away. We’re nothing if not efficient.  Andrea found a recipe for this beautiful inside-out German chocolate cake, and we decided we would bake it in the small time frame between our organic chemistry final and our friends’ holiday party.  So to give an idea of what went into baking this masterpiece, I will tell it in the form of a dramatic narrative.

whole wheat molasses bread.

I figure what with all the delicious things I have been eating, with zero shame, in massive quantities, I should at least have something healthy on standby. That's where this bread comes in.

I was browsing different blogs for some inspiration and came upon this recipe on joythebaker's site. The pictures drew me in - the loaf looked really nice & hearty, with a gorgeous crust. I wanted it.

And so, in literally 10 minutes, I mixed the dry and wet, added dry to wet, and quickly greased a pan to bake it in. Then I ran to watch Midnight in Paris with da fammz. Have you ever seen that movie? Owen Wilson, Marion Cotillard, and Rachel McAdams are in it .. I like them all. And it got all these awards/nominations .. but I have to say, I don't think watching it with my family was the best choice. I feel like maybe, if analyzed, it would spur some great life revelations. However, surrounded by my brother who kept trying to provoke me into attacking him by poking me, my dad who was fiddling with his videocamera, and my mom, who I could tell was on the brink of passing out, I did not find it that awesome.

I'm thinking about it now, actually. I like that it was just accepted and okay for Owen Wilson to have gone backwards and live in more than one decade. I guess on a higher level, that means ... something. It's not coming to me right now. I'm having an entirely inappropriate and utterly hilarious texting conversation with my best friend, as well as texting this other person with whom I get excited to text. The latter just found out about this blog ... oh boy.

So maybe some inspiration will hit me later and maybe I'll continue writing as if no one I know reads this blog .. till then, let me tell you how much I like this bread!

cutout cookies.

It was hard not putting an exclamation after the name in the title - these cookies are so attractive!

Hm, is this what it would be like if you had really attractive kids? Do all parents think their kids are attractive? I think so. I would. Hell, they're my kids, they will be amazing. And probably super fat, because I will bake so many things for them to eat ... no, the actual food I make will be extremely healthy. And I won't be baking as much, so they'll be fine.

Jeez, here I am thinking about my kids when I'm not even in a relationship yet. Well .. we'll see how that turns out. Anyway, I've been spending a lot of time thinking. Which is usually not the best thing. No really, it's just not good in general - take the entirety of my break, for instance. I have been home about 48 hours, and I have already freaked out massively about what my future will be, whether I am majoring in the right area, and about how inadequate I feel my research is to what I think I want to do in my life. And also just my life and whether I am a failure, but I mean, no big deal.

But I have always been a proponent of thinking positively, so I figured out a plan of what I need to do. Having a plan to face a problem calms me down a lot. Just like before I checked my orgo grade & thought I'd failed, I needed to make a plan of what exactly I'd do in the instance that I did fail. Thankfully I didn't! But that's what helps me get through things.

And that's why I didn't have a heart attack when my mom told me she'd given away all our Christmas cookie cutters, as I was rolling out this dough and ready to bake up some Winnie the Poohs dressed up as Santa ... #champagneproblems. I survived, you'll be glad to hear.

peppermint bark medallions.

Oh hai thur! I'm home for good, fellas. Fellas makes me feel like I'm from a Spaghetti Western, the genre of Western films that were produced by Italians, namely Sergio Leone, who also went by Bob Robertson in order to appeal to a larger American audience.

I took a History of Italian Cinema final a couple days ago, if you can't tell. That's an immediate side effect of finishing finals - your brain, now saturated with copious amounts of information, starts making relations of mundane things to things you learned in class. 

Someone said "rules" yesterday .. immediately thought of cadherins. Thank you, cell biology. I still feel a need to wholly understand how those proteins work .. smh at myself. 

But for now, I am lounging in my lounge pants in my own bed at home, my head resting against Carlito, my new pillow pet. HE'S A MOOSE. Did you know moose are pretty solitary animals? They don't really form herds, and they are rather sloth-like unless provoked. Not as provoked as this ibex, though! 

That's my favorite video ever in the history of youtube videos. 

And peppermint bark medallions are the easiest things you could make in the history of ever.

pumpkin pie.

I'm aware it's December (isn't that crazy?! it's already the end of the year!) and that pumpkin pie is a more fall thing. Frankly, I don't give a damn.

Mmm look at me going all Rhett Butler.

Ever since right before Thanksgiving break to now .. a lot has happened, and is happening. Finals are coming up, and although they will be crazy hard ... I can't bring myself to stress about them yet. Today I went shopping with Andrea for secret santa and baking stuff. Cool, we'll just fail, no big deal.

No, the shopping was kind of necessary, but I'm still worrying because I'm too relaxed right now. I have been busy despite the lack of studying. Weekdays are always ridiculous, and weekends are packed. Last weekend was the last time we had to slack off, so I had fun. This weekend was good too.