How did that happen? It's possible I'm too bootylicious for ya babe

It’s cool! I just ripped out the inside leg seams and cut off the legs, then used the extra fabric to fill in the gaps to make a skirt!!

Yes, that IS the annotated anniversary edition of The Phantom Tollbooth on the floor!

I had to get a heavier needle and jean thread for my sewing machine, but figuring out how to change the needle was the hardest part of this project! And that was just turning a little knob. Super easy!!

And super stylish!!

Exciting to have a skirt with pockets!!

I'm told there aren't really middle names in Korea, so I'm the only author on the cover with a middle initial!

Ta-Dah!

Oh, and I also work here!

And then there’s this:

As you can see, I was somewhat confused about how to show a letter sent to an address within Chapel Hill

Moaning Myrtle!

Clearly there was only one character to choose for Steven, given his hair situation:

Sirius Black!!! Unfortunately he didn't make Crazy Gary Oldman faces the whole time

Megan went with us too! She dressed as “Harry and Hermione’s love child” which we named Herry Harmione Potter. Her wand really lit up when you flicked it which was super cool!

I like this picture because my hand looks like I might be turning into a ghost!!

For some reason we thought taking pictures AFTER the movie at 4 in the morning was a really great idea, which led to this picture that I now am at a loss to explain:

Possibly I decided that was some kind of ghost gang sign

Yay for homemade costumes!!

I used the recipe I found here at Can You Stay for Dinner? and it was so much easier than normal lasagna! The hardest part was definitely finding wonton wrappers, which are used instead of noodles. I ended up finding them at the Harris Teeter in the fancier, professor-populated part of town, in the produce section near the polenta and tofu. I thought stacking the ingredients in the cupcake tins would be hard or too messy but it ended up being really easy! I wish I had taken pictures of the process, but I was too hungry at the time!

Here is the finished product:

Like a tiny basket of tastiness!

I’m thinking about planning a party where everything is a cupcake. And inviting Roque.

I put them in this box so I could pour them over Steven later and shout "It's snowing shininess!"

Putting the kisses on top after they’re right out of the oven is also really fun! They turned out great:

Beautiful!!

So, because the YA Book Club Holiday party is today at my house (I always volunteer so that I can stay in pajamas till the last possible moment) I thought it was the perfect time to try!

Unfortunately, I was wrong. This recipe seemed so easy the first time I made it! I have no idea why this time was filled with mistakes. Probably I should have made them a day ahead so that I would not also be trying to vacuum/dust/sweep at the same time. But I haven’t given up on this recipe yet! It produced some passable cookies that I will still be putting out tonight. Okay, so some of them are a little bit crispy… okay, maybe a little bit blackened on the bottoms, and yeah I ran out of powdered sugar so the frosting isn’t as sweet and is a weirder consistency. But I bet no one will notice the difference.

So the linked website above has two versions of this recipe, and of course I use the “cheater” one. Not because I am uncomfortable with the homemade kind–you know I’ve got baking skillz–but because I can’t resist that thrill I get from cheating. Okay, and I’m lazy, whatever. With the cheater recipe, here are the THREE ingredients for the cookies:

A box of red velvet cake mix, two eggs, and half a cup of oil

The recipe calls for canola oil, but I use vegetable because that’s how I roll. You mix those up in a bowl until it makes a bright red sticky blob. Then you divide that out and put them on cookie sheets:

Parchment paper is for rockers

Preheat to 350 degrees and bake for 10-12 minutes.
So I know when making cookies you’re supposed to line them up as cutesy little balls of dough, but I like to give mine a little help with flattening out. Especially this recipe. And especially on that pan. I made two pans’ worth of these: one on this, the airbake pan, and one on a normal pan. I am sort of wary of the airbake pan because it acts strangely and often unexpectedly. I think we’ve reached an understanding with each other where I always leave it in for longer than specified and it makes my cookies soft, not crispy regardless. I’m okay with that, I like soft cookies.

Which is why it’s funny that it was the OTHER pan that burned. These aribake ones turned out beautifully.

Okay, so it's only the bottoms that are kind of burned.

This batch also turned out a lot puffier than the airbake one, I assume because I wasn’t as assiduous about flattening them down.

Here's the airbake batch, all flat and beautiful and perfect

Clearly the airbake pan is trying to fake me out to keep me on my toes. It was at this point that I realized the frosting/filling recipe calls for 2 teaspoons of milk and we were out! So I went to the store.

You don't have to use awesome local-dairy-glass-bottle milk, but it helps

Then I came home and realized that the powdered sugar I thought we had was running perilously low thanks to Steven’s many valiant attempts to make homemade hot chocolate late into the night. The recipe calls for 4 cups… I doubt we had half of that. But I don’t know because I didn’t measure. I just dumped it all in there. There was no way I was going to the store again. It is freakin cold outside. Besides, it had the correct amount of butter and cream cheese and milk and vanilla. How bad could it be?

The answer, not that bad. Just kind of weird. It’s definitely not the fluffy consistency from the last time I made these. And may or may not still have tiny clumps of unbroken up cream cheese. But those melt on your mouth like a beautiful surprise. I’m unrepentant.

Anyway, while putting these bad boys together I paired burnt-with-burnt so that at least some (okay, four–but that is eight cookies total!) sandwiches would turn out more or less great. If you ignore the frosting problems.

Okay, the one on the side is half-burned half-not burned. So that'll be a fun surprise.

But obv I’m having a party so I have to put out more than four cookies. I will maybe call the other plate the “crispier” version. Or maybe only four people will show up and then I will assume that my non-airbake pan is psychic and trying to save me from getting fatter than fat on the leftovers! Then later in the cupboard it will teach the airbake pan a lesson about manners and not being weird.

Okay, time to stop anthropomorphizing my cooking gear. I think I will go discuss with my Christmas cone how if people read my blog they would be forewarned about which cookies to eat etc before coming over.

In the category of things I don’t actually need, but now have because of Coke points, is a subscription to Cosmo. I have something of a sick fascination with Cosmo because I can’t believe they’re getting away with pretending to be “fun and fearless” while the underlying message of every single thing in their magazine is “Change yourself to be like everyone else.” Change yourself because you’ll never be happy with that haircut/makeup/boyfriend. Change yourself, because your irrational and underlying fears about your life are TRUE. Change yourself, because it’s your job as the woman to “decode” the men in your life, who, by the way, are always strange 1950s/Cave Men archetypes. I’m always surprised at the new angles they find to make women feel bad about themselves.

For instance, my personal favorite part of the January 2011 issue is a chart titled “What Your Ex’s Next Girlfriend Reveals About You”, which lists categories of women he might choose, and then explains what that reveals about you and, most importantly, what about yourself and your dating style it shows you need to improve. From this chart I also realized that Cosmo would categorize me “The Plain Jane” which is defined as someone who wears jeans and a t-shirt and “her idea of a beauty routine is a quick shampoo”. What does that say about the people who choose to date me after Cosmo’s apparent target audience? “His bland choice means that your beauty (and brains) intimidated the hell out of him.” I love how they worked that parenthetical implication that not wearing make up is for stupid girls in there. Anything to sell more sparkely eyeliner.

Anyway, since I am the bland choice, I do not actually want to keep these copies of Cosmo around to cherish for all time so lately I’ve been coming up with ways to recycle them in an artistic manner. I’m used pictures/words from them for collages and things before, but I wanted to do something that would knock a good chunk out of the stack. Unfortunately, a lot of the ideas I want to try involve a glue gun, but then I found this tutorial on how to make a tabletop Christmas tree by folding pages. Yay! Easy enough to accomplish while watching Arrested Development!

Okay, so it's more like a Christmas cone, whatever

This did require folding every page, so it took awhile, but other than that it was super easy.

The covers were a little harder, that's why there's a slight gap in the back

Just in time for my book club’s holiday party tomorrow!

So I got home and rummaged around in my sock drawer till I found two socks I don’t ever wear anymore:

Those are weird, tiny dogs on the ankles. And obv they don't match since my socks never do

This project definitely took way longer than I thought, even though I was following “one of the easiest monsters”. A lot of the instructions were less clear than I would like, and I ended up making a lot of really dumb mistakes towards the end, like attaching things inside out. I think my main problem was that my socks were too thin and stretchy, they were really hard to hand sew, and a lot of hand sewing was required. So this may actually fall apart in a week, we’ll see. However, all the parts I got to use my sewing machine for were awesome!! It has a bunch of cool settings and features that I am just getting used to, since I learned on my mom’s old machine. Here is the finished product:

I have a bunch of purple tulle randomly, so I gave her hair and a scarf!

Here are where those two dogs ended up:

A leg tattoo...

And a tail tattoo!

Classy.

Side bonus of this project: I get to teach true science facts.

Basically, I was sitting on a plane with crayons and a Planet Earth coloring book and realized that if I was going to color everything in it true to life, I would never get to use the many different shades of purple, and would pretty much run out of brown. Lame. So I decided to take it to the next level, and then share my unique vision with the world. I assume I will eventually acquire non-Planet Earth coloring books, but I’m okay making up alternate science facts for now.

Updating at midnight apparently whenever Tumblr feels like it, hopefully daily, 7 days a week. You’re welcome.