Tuesday, December 6, 2011

When Peanut Butter Attacks!

Dear Aspiring Bakers,

Sometimes I really don't think. But mostly, I think I'm thinking, but I'm really not thinking at all about the eventual outcomes of my actions.

Why this sudden realization? Peanut Butter Death Squares. I was commissioned to bake for our grad Christmas celebration, and obviously being very conscious of what I was doing, signed up to make a dessert. Now that may not seem like a bad idea, especially because it's a fairly easy task. However, I managed to mess up a recipe with only five ingredients, then practically kill one of my friends with a severe nut allergy.  The squares which were suppose to be consistency of a cheesecake bar, softened so much after I'd taken them out of the freezer that they became a mass of peanut butter an icing sugar. I had left my serving platter out (and far away from the rest of the food, as well as my severely allergic friend), hoping that by some miracle the temperamental squares would magically be eaten before they melted completely.

As per the usual, things didn't work out the way I'd hoped. At the end of the night I came back to the buffet table to find the majority of my squares massacred with a pair of tongs. The chocolate on top had been broken up by an attempt to cut the stacked portions apart, there was peanut butter mash smeared over the table, and I was certain someone had given up on trying to be delicate and just dug in with a spoon. In other words, my dessert was a fail of epic proportions.

Tragic? Perhaps, depending on your perspective. I like to imagine that I succeeded in not killing my friend with the nut allergy, instead of thinking about her obvious shunning of me the entire night. Either way, I won't be using peanut butter any time soon.

Rest You Merry,

Arctic Hipster

Sunday, December 4, 2011

Short and Sweet

Dear fellow writers,

You know when you get to that point in an essay where you've just elaborated so much on a point that you can't stop? Or maybe when you are writing in your journal you describe your day in such great detail you only make it to lunch before your exhausted? More obvious than that perhaps, when you are telling a story to your friends and they really don't care about the context, but you can't help explaining it anyways?


That basically sums up why I haven't been posting: there is this need, ridiculous as it is, to correctly fill you in. Yes, this is the Internet and obviously I'm not going to mention names, addresses or credit card numbers. Yet reader, I feel as though we have created this bond, and you deserve to understand the circumstances in which these posts are written. 


It must be the Holiday Season that's making me so sappy. Ugh. 


Even now, I'm catching myself erasing and re-writing to make each sentence more precise. Is there an end to this?
 No. I probably will always write twelve page essays. I will most likely never be able to keep an accurate account of my life in a journal (however that sounds a bit narcissistic anyways). 


But maybe that's okay.


Books are long aren't they? They take years to write, you can always edit and re-edit. Isn't a novelist a failed short story writer anyways?


Maybe there's hope for me then, and for all you excessive describers out there as well. We just have to write the next Harry Potter book. 


Ha ha, hope.


Keeping life Short and Simple,


Arctic Hipster