yesterday, I chatted with people through my mailbox (they stood on the inside)
The icicles started to melt today.
...but first, some more snow shots.
This was the sunset from the kitchen window where we baked.
My coworkers have been bringing baked goods to work lately, so I decided it was my turn to feed the office. I asked my mother for help, and she mailed me the dry ingredients for homemade chocolate cupcakes. While she included step-by-step instructions, the three hours of baking still turned out pretty chaotic.
Brandeis thwarted me by only selling eggs by the dozen instead of the half-dozen that are usually in stock, so I now have six eggs with no use for them. Then, I couldn't even make it out of the room without forgetting something necessary. At least four times, I swore to Nic that there wasn't possibly anything left in my room that we could need, and would then promptly have to run across the building to get a left-behind knife or towel. Then, my CA decided to work right next to the kitchen. She complimented my Christmas music, and then an hour later told me to turn it off.
Lacking a bowl, I decided the easiest way to bake cupcakes would be in a washed flower pot with a bag in the bottom to minimize leaking. The chocolate cake ingredients looked a little too similar to dirt.
I had a slight accident stirring with the fork and punctured the side of the plastic bag, so it started to leak everywhere. We had to take the bag out and let it sit in the sink while attempting to salvage the last of the batter. I had some slight issues with pouring the batter, ranging from missing the cupcake wrappers to pouring into an empty tin and then having to scrape it out to put a wrapper underneath.
Frosting was another disaster, as I added too much milk to my dry ingredients and it became overly runny. We also had to pick out the blue and yellow sprinkles from a rainbow package for the Hanukkah cupcakes, which took a long time.
The finished product! Chocolate cupcakes with vanilla frosting, decorated for Hanukkah and Christmas (I have generic winter ones that are not pictured as well). The whole process took 3.5 hours because the oven wouldn't heat up, doubling the baking time.