ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

So the last couple weeks haven’t been friendly to my waistline, but I’m hoping all that will change starting right after Thanksgiving.  Oh my god, I have to chase after the wagon and claw my way back on.  

This past weekend we drove down to central Kansas for my husband’s grandparents’ wedding anniversary celebration, which was Sunday afternoon.  And let me tell you, you haven’t seen a truly riotous shindig until you’ve been to a party where octogenarians comprise the majority of the attendees.  His dad’s wife had arranged for three large sheet cakes to be delivered, which arrived and were set up by the staff at their retirement community.  Then the staff, who ostensibly were supposed to hang around and help serve this stuff, vanished without a trace.  So my husband and I began cutting pieces of cake and pouring punch and were generally mistaken by a lot of kindly old people as the hired help.  Many of them thought we were directly responsible for the refreshments.  I had no idea who had made the cake, but I was given three compliments from guests who enjoyed the cake, and accepted all of them without mentioning the fact that I had nothing to do with any of these things other than I was hanging out and tossing it on plates.  

They had a terrific turnout and like a million people showed up, and the unexpected perk of the whole thing was that I had never seen so many walkers all in one place.  I never realized how many kinds of walkers there even were.  There are the basic ones with just a simple framework.  Then some of those have a wire basket, or sometimes a nice little quilted caddy thing hanging from them.  The best one I saw was pretty awesome and it had brakes and everything.  The lady had plenty of storage room and had a puzzle book, a banana, and a potholder in her basket.  Rock and roll!

Then yesterday was my company’s holiday potluck party, at which I led my team to victory playing a holiday themed Jeopardy! game, helped design a prizewinning turkey sculpture out of a pinecone, construction paper and pipecleaners, and won a door prize of a bunch of Hallmark gifts.  I made the Smitten Kitchen chocolate peanut butter cake, which comes from the book Sky High: Irresistible Triple Layer Cakes, for this event and it went over well.  But it was so rich that nobody could stand to eat much.  I had almost half the cake left by the time I went home.  I managed to pawn off a huge hunk on the security guard on my way out, and then called my husband’s coworker who lives near us and got him to tell me where he hides the key so I could leave another half of that in his fridge.  

This cake was amazing.  But you can only eat a small piece of it at a time.  It’s extremely rich chocolate cake to begin with, so rich that I substituted applesauce for the one whole cup of oil the cake itself called for (and nobody could tell!) and then the icing was cream cheese, peanut butter and powdered sugar, TOPPED WITH a half pound of chocolate melted with more peanut butter, some Karo syrup, and half and half.  

Like, shit!  I think this was easily the unhealthiest thing to come out of my kitchen in the last two years.  I highly recommend having this cake with some Edy’s 1/2-the-fat Vanilla Bean ice cream to cut the sweetness a little while you’re eating it.  It is a unique dessert experience.  Our friend told me he thought it was restaurant quality.  Rock and roll!  

Then yesterday I developed a new crafty obsession after seeing this post on Craftster.  Then I scrambled through my e-mail trash to find the Borders coupon I threw away the other day and I went up to the Borders on Metcalf and searched until I found the book the person had used to make their sock creatures.  Then I took it home and looked at it and today I used one of the work socks my husband donated to my scrap pile earlier this year and I made some kind of creature.  I completely made this thing up as I went along and I don’t know yet what I think of it yet.  

That’s some leftover cake next to my creature.  

We went out to Target tonight and I bought some colorful socks to take with me and play around with when we go up to Iowa this week.  It’s nice to feel crafty again, even though it meant breaking my moratorium on purchases of craft supplies.  I’ll live.  Rock and roll!