The Longest Week...

This has been an incredibly long week... and it's only Wednesday. I've put in 11-12 days and I'm freakin' tired. Monday was Open House for the school, and of course I had a doctor's appt that afternoon. I waited for two hours for a 3 minute appointment. I was literally seconds from walking out of the patient's room and never coming back. My appt was at 3:30, and I had to be dressed and really in my classroom at 6:00. Didn't seem like an issue until I walked out into the hallway at 5:15 to tell the nurse that I was about to leave if I didn't see the doctor right then. I still had a 15 minute drive ahead of me, my room wasn't ready, and I had to call Drew so that he could meet me with clothes and dinner. In the end, I didn't have any prospective families visit me. Not-a-one.

Yesterday was a good busy because we had a children's book author/illustrator come to our school last night to read to us. She brought her books and read to us, then taught us how to draw her characters. It was so much fun. I hope that I can meet her again.

Since my last post, I've also tried cutting Drew's hair. Not pretty. Well, it's just a buzz. Better than really long.


Also celebrated Drew's birthday - yay! He really wanted stupid-looking bunny slippers, and now I'm lucky if he takes them off to go to bed. We also went to METRO!, a decent "city" style restaurant in Roanoke. It's not Philly, but it's a whole lot cheaper. It's Asian/American fusion. We'll certainly be going back. We rate it Nom nom nom out of "Om nom nom nom."

Let's see... Oh! I've been checking out my professional development options for the summer, since we have two universities within 20 minutes here. I'm really interested in doing a 3-course autism certificate. Anything with special education is really valuable these days, plus I've been doing so much research on my own. I'm sure to have many more children in my career on the autism spectrum. I'd really like to do something in grad school with reading, but this is my best opportunity for something substantial to put on my resume. I won't be here forever.

Ouch

This a burn that I earned last week as I was trying to figure out a good chocolate cupcake base for the strawberry ganache "Rolls-Royce" recipe. That was almost a week ago. This picture was taken tonight. It hurt for two days before it blistered. The things I go through for a good batter! And it was all for nothing. The cupcakes looked like dried up lava gooping everywhere. i was so freakin' mad. At least I figured it out the next day. I tell you, those are the best cupcakes ever made.

New Fondant Facination

Okay, it's too much work to upload these photos to Facebook, this blog, and my website... so just check out the website, mmkay?

www.freewebs.com/nomnomcupcakes

Starburst Flowers

These are made out of Starburst candy. And yes, I can make one in less than 7 minutes, Kat and Scott! :)

PB&J

These are the peanut butter and jelly cupcakes. They have grape jelly in the middle of the cupcake and peanut butter frosting on top. I was excited to use my new 1M tip for decorating them. The flowers I made out of fondant. I used Wilton for the purple and made my own for the pink. The Wilton smells so icky that I wouldn't want people to put it in their mouths. The home-made stuff is good, though.

All About the Taste

Coconut cupcakes - Based on Ina Garten's famous recipe! Made from scratch with coconut flake in the batter. Topped with a homemade cream cheese frosting and rolled in more coconut. I don't even like coconut that much, but I can't get enough of these cupcakes. They're worth the $10 in ingredients and one or two hours (?) of time it takes to make these babies. Yum!

Elmo

Due to the many requests, I have created an Elmo!