"Dream" Boys, Sumo Wrestling, and Gold Coins

Ah, so here is My Last BYU Winter Semester AKA Things I Didn't Have Time to Blog About Part 2

A lot of this is pretty recent (the last two weeks or so). Why does so much always happen just as finals and final projects are due? lol

One night (way before final study time sucked away all our time) Katie, Emily, and some friends all played the classic board game Dream Phone. It's an apartment favorite.

"He looks cool in whatever he wears, but he's not wearing yellow." Oh Dream Phone!

Me and Emily with the Dream Phone listening to a clue! Katie actually beat both of us and won the game that night!

My ward recently had its closing social. For the first time EVER I am staying in Provo for the summer so its strange to see everyone leaving and not trying to frantically pack up my room during finals (I'm very grateful for the last part). At the social things ended up being unseasonably blustery and cold (Utah weather! It snowed this week!), but we still had a lot of fun. Katie even put on one of the Sumo suits! Go Katie!

Katie also went with me to an art show called Standing in Reserve (done in connection with CUAC). It was in an old building just down the street from my house (I found out about it from one of the TAs in my art history class who was actually in charge of the whole thing). It focused on technology. There were a lot of interesting pieces there. Katie and I particularly liked this interactive exhibit they had where they put you in a video game setting and you collected gold coins (I'm not sure how they did this, maybe one of those Kinect things?).

My family went to see the Taylor Andrews hair show last week. The theme was women in music. Elizabeth worked on the Pink section. It was so fun! And we got to see some of our favorite people: Elizabeth and her dad, Sam.

Elizabeth made that hair piece!!!! Isn't she talented?!

Despite the business and craziness it was a great semester! I hope Spring and Summer terms will be just as good :)

Currently: full from all the crepes I ate this morning, yum

VIPs, Cookies, and Misadventures in Gluten-Free Baking

My Last BYU Winter Semester AKA Things I Didn't Have Time to Blog About

Here are some fun things I did this semester that for some reason never made it to the blog in a timely manner (What was I doing with all my time? Oh yeah, studying like a crazy person):

This year at BYU I got to hear two interesting, VERY well-known people speak: Condoleezza Rice and Mark Zuckerburg.

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In January, Condoleezza Rice came. I really enjoyed her thoughts on education. You can read some of her remarks here.

Mark Zuckerburg, the creator of Facebook, came and spoke at my school. He did a question and answer session based on questions left on the BYU Facebook page. Senator Orrin Hatch came and asked the questions. It was great hearing Mark speak and hearing his perspective on things. Here's a link to BYU's news release about it. It has some of the questions he answered, as well as his responses.

Some other important people that came to visit? My family. Not only did my parents come this month to see me graduate, but my Aunt and Uncle also came to Provo to drop my cousin off at the MTC. We had lunch at Jdawgs before he left. Love you Jack!!!

I also made snickerdoodles earlier this semester. I bring this up not because it was particularly unusual, but because I always have the same problem when I make snickerdoodles. Really chewy, warm, and delicious when they come out of the oven. Rock hard an hour later. Seriously does anyone have a tip/recipe to help me out with this?

Even though they got a bit hard, they were still good tasting (providing you had some milk to soften them up).

Speaking of baking projects that don't go quite as planned...

Remember when I had the post called Conference: Sister Edition (Part 1)? Well Part 2 never made it up, but here's the short version. I attempted to make gluten free cinnamon rolls. Silly me, I thought I could simply substitute regular flour for gluten free flour (plus a little xantham gum). Well it's a lot more complicated than that. I looked up recipes later and I realize now that a combination of flour types would have worked better. Oh well! Thankfully I had regular gluten-full bread baking at the same time so we still had a yummy conference treat :)

Sad little gluten-free cinnamon rolls about to go into the oven.

This bread smelled (and tasted) so good! Plus it was pretty easy to make (You can see the recipe here). I didn't even use the bread machine.

Well that's it for now, but there's more to come!

Currently listening to: The Supremes (a favorite of mine)

The BEST smell in the world

It all started a weekend or two ago, with a short conversation about Cinnabun.

Which evolved into a small craving.

Which grew and grew the longer I sat in church.

Which then exploded into an extremely long baking project.

Ok. Not really extremely long. But when you are craving a cinnamon roll the last thing you want to do is wait for dough to rise.

I wish I could say I came up with this delicious recipe myself, but I found it on allrecipes.com(one of my favorite recipe sites). There may have been walnuts and raisins involved in different stages of this recipe, but I choose to leave them out.

We started by putting the dough ingredients into the bread machine. These were the ingredients for the dough: 1 c warm milk, 2 Tb butter, 2 Tb sugar, 1/2 tsp salt, 3 1/3 cup flour, and 1 1/2 tsp active dry yeast.

This is Pasha's machine that none of us had ever tried using before (I used to make bread in my family's one, but its been awhile. Taylor and I managed to figure it out pretty easily. I can see why it was my kid cooking job now; the whole process is pretty simple).

After we put stuff in we saw the time come up for the cycle: 1 minute and 30 seconds? That seems abnormally fast. Oh, they mean 1 hour and 30 minutes. Got it. At first we kept taking peeks at the machine to see what it was doing (as if that would make it go any faster). Then we just watched 30 rock.

Then I made this sauce stuff for the bottom of the cinnamon roll pan (which will come later). I put 1/3 cup butter, 1/2 cup brown sugar, and 2 Tablespoons milk in a sauce pan and melted it together.

Once it was ready we rolled it out and brushed it with melted butter (1/4 c). Then we sprinkled cinnamon (2 tsp) and brown sugar (1/2 c) all over. I decide to be fancy and add nutmeg, but went a little bit overboard. It smelled very nutmeg-gy. Be careful if you decide to add that stuff!

Then we rolled it up tight (see all that cinnamon-y goodness oozing out?). And cut it up. Which was an adventure. We tried doing with dental floss like they suggested but it never quite did the trick. We ended up making it work with a plain old knife.

We placed them in a 9 x 13 pan with the brown sugar/butter sauce in the bottom.

Then they went into the oven, and...

Ta da! Scrumptious cinnamon rolls.

The recipe suggests flipping the pan over so the rest of the brown sugar/butter sauce as the bottom drips on the rolls. But when we made ours the bottom absorbed most of the sauce (which made it very yummy and moist). Instead we whipped some powdered sugar and milk together for frosting, and then got to eating.

It was midnight by the time we finished, but trust me no one regretted it.

And then the next weekend ... we made them again! We had a much better idea of what we were doing so it got done a bit faster with less complications (I stayed far away from the nutmeg). Plus we had more friends helping :)

Currently writing: yet another research paper

Adventures in Cupcakes

Last week we did cupcakes instead of cake to practice decorating. Gabby and I made chocolate cupcakes. Half of them had raspberry filling, the other half had whip cream. We didn't pick a theme or anything. We just tried to practice the techniques we learned in class. Plus we tried to frost 10 each when we were really supposed to do 6 each so there were a lot of cupcakes to frost in a little amount of time.

Gabby adding the final touch to this dotted cupcake.

You'll notice the one on the left has a lot going on. That's because I basically tried to do almost everything we learned on one cupcake. It kind of turned into a frosting fiesta, lol. Oh and look at Gabby's cool pom pom flower on the bottom left corner of the picture on the right.

I don't know why, but this was my favorite one that I made.

The one on the left is me practicing flowers, the one on the right is me practicing being ugly. jk, but seriously I don't know why I made a cupcake that looks like it has green peas all over it!

This was my favorite of Gabby's cupcakes. The flowers all bunched up together look really interesting.

Currently anticipating: Glee!
Currently reading: Gary Schmidt books

Cake Decorating Class

Gabby and I started our cake class this month. We made our first cakes this week. Gabby did a BYU cake and I did a double rainbow cake. Anyway even though I'm definitely NOT a professional, I thought things went well for my first attempt at cake decorating ever.

Gabby baking her cake.



Gabby's awesome BYU cake!



My double rainbow cake... not perfect but I had fun making it.


As you can see, I only know one technique right now... the star tip. Oh and I made the cake with a rainbow confetti mix, you know, to keep with the theme and all.

Oh and just in case you haven't seen the double rainbow video, it's just a guy freaking out over a double rainbow... in a hilarious way. You don't have to watch the whole video to understand it (I never do).

And just in case you have seen the original video, here is the KFC/TacoBell remake. Lars showed this to us the other day and we could not stop laughing.




Currently Reading: lots of picture books for my adolescent lit. class, oh and I finally read Hunger Games!

Me, Bobby Flay, and the Great Red Velvet Cake Adventure

Occasionally I like to bake. However, I'm not always that in to baking and cooking shows. They usually just make me hungry! I sometimes make an exception from this rule for some of the more entertaining food network shows. Recently I was watching the Bobby Flay Throwdown! In this show Bobby Flay finds people who are especially known for one certain dish and then he tries to out do them. This particular episode was about Red Velvet Cake. Bobby Flay won, but me, and everyone else in the room, were wondering if they made the right decision. Both cakes looked delicious, but how could we really know unless we tried them ourselves? So I decided to go for it and recreate the competition at home.

Here are the two recipes I used: Bobby Flay's and Cake Man Raven's. I added a little extra cocoa to Cake Man Raven's based on the reviewers on the food network website. I also let both cakes sit in the fridge overnight before the first taste test on the advice of reviewers.

As I am not a master chef, some mishaps occurred during baking. Like a piece of cake falling off as I flipped one of the layers onto the cooling rack. Luckily this only happened on one of the four layers I made and it's easily disguised by massive amounts of frosting!

Here are the main differences between the cakes. Cake Man Raven's was definitely more red (2x the amount of food coloring)! His was also paired with cream cheese frosting and called for pecans on top of the frosting. Bobby Flay's had more Cocoa and was topped with a butter cream frosting.

Cake in process. Each cake had two layers, although Bobby Flays came out taller for some reason.

After making the cakes, I had everyone I could sample them (including myself of course). I brought them to our neighbors, coworkers and family members. Everyone was extremely cooperative (Generally no one ever says no to the question: "Can you help me taste test these cakes?")Then we tallied up the votes.

Many people liked the flavor of Bobby Flay's cake more. However several people preferred the cream cheese frosting that Cake Man put with his cake. Cake Man's cake was also moister. Most people viewed the Cake Man's as more traditional, and saw Bobby Flay's as a new spin on things (I have no idea if this is true). It was a very close race. One of my favorite parts was hearing every one's detailed analysis of the cakes (Cake tasting is serious business!) So what's my verdict? I say the winner is the Cake Man! The moistness of the cake combined with the overall presentation won me over. Not that the other cake wasn't delicious. In fact I felt a little bad because I think it was a bit more competetive on the first day; I don't think Bobby Flay's did as well in the fridge.

The Winner!

That's it! It was a fun experiment! I'd love to do it again, although not with red velvet for awhile (trust me that much cake with only three people in the house was never ending!).

The two finished cakes side by side!

Currently watching: Community Reruns and SYTYCD

It's a boat!

So I had a fabulous weekend full of dancing, ribbons, mocktails, Easter colors, glowsticks, and little origami animals. I went to a No Room for Wallflowers party, pennyroyal cafe, made invitations, saw some movies, and sewed part of a shirt collar. All in all it was a very productive weekend. Anyways today in church Sadie showed me the cutest little post it notes (wait, wait for it...) that had origami instructions printed on them so that you could make little origami swans, snakes, boats, cups, etc. out of them. We couldn't stop making them. Eventually we started writing names on them and gave them away via our ward's brownie note box. I hope people like getting tiny anonymous origami creations delivered to their doorstep.

Now I am baking, and hopefully my cooking adventures will go much better than last week's misguided attempts to make snicker doodles with the wrong amount of baking soda. They turned out rock hard, and I was so frustrated that I just left them there in big pile of sad misshaped cookies on the counter. Later Sadie labeled it "a cookie tower of shame". However I am feeling much more hopeful about this week's baking attempts ( I usually am a fairly decent cook!).

It's nice to have a lazy day. I am going to read, make more invitations, and perhaps watch a movie. Maybe if I am feeling crazy later I will take a nap.

Currently baking: Lemon Squares
Currently excited about: Jamie feeling better and Megan coming back to Provo
Current song stuck in my head: 1,2,3,4... by Feist

A movie that ends with a casino heist and doesn't star George Clooney

So this week was interesting. I went to another French movie, Bob le Flambeur. The International cinema was having a film noir week. Now I wish I could say that I am extremely cultured and was entranced by the cinematography or something like that. But honestly the whole time all I could think about was how can the main girl be considered so attractive, yet her be so mullet-y. Seriously it was distracting. But the ending was interesting. It wasn't your typical finish to a casino heist film. People died, the romance was definitely not true love, they didn't get away with it, and they didn't predict every move or plant fake cops ala Oceans Eleven. However they still kept it interesting and I thought it was an interesting plot twist, if not the most positive one.

Anyways I also saw BYU's modern dance concert, In Motion this week. I usually think that I am pretty open minded about that kind of stuff, however I just didn't get the final dance. For the last number they came out wearing tutus made of plastic grocery bags while surrounded by fog. Just as I was getting a handle on this the dance transitioned into a scene where a majority of the company was sitting on the floor while holding a balloon; this was followed by a giant ribbon acrobatic ensemble, and well, you get the idea. I felt like there was some big metaphor I wasn't getting that would tie it all together, but no one ever clued me in if there was. There rest was good though. There was a fun prop dance, and a couple of bench dances, as well as this one dance based around four women from Shakespearean plays. I didn't know all of the stories but it was still interesting to see them portray the characters. Although the music reminded me of one of those semi-electronic instrumental songs that they like to play in the background of eighties movies (Lady Hawk, anyone?).

Lara also shared an amazing bread recipe with me this week. It had a topping that was olive oil mixed with rosemary, Parmesan cheese, and garlic. Sooo delicious. Fresh bread makes me so happy; it's ridiculous.

Reading: Sister Carrie