Tag: mirror glaze

Happy Friday! The kids have been on February vacation this week, and we’ve been surprisingly busy with various activities, parties, unavoidable whatnot, and of course snow. Snow snow snow. And food. Here’s what we had: 

SATURDAY
Leftovers

Just a regular shopping day, with regular leftovers, supplemented by taquitos. I was pretty happy to have leftover vindaloo and rice from last week. 

When I went shopping whole chickens had been advertised @99 cents a pound, but when I got to the store, there was only one small bird left. I asked the meat guy if he had any more in back, and he said they had all gotten snapped up by people hysterical about the coming snow. So we complained a bit about people who live in New England but still get hysterical every time there’s snow in the forecast, and I guess he was so enchanted by my kvetching that he wanted to do me a favor, so he grabbed a big organic chicken and went out back, and when he brought it back, it was labelled 99 cents a pound. Score! I was only recreationally kvetiching, but it’s nice when it pays off sometimes. 

SUNDAY
Chicken ranch wraps, Storitos

Sunday after Mass, I ended up going on a bit of a wild goose chase. The original plan was that Damien and I would have a lovely Old Parents’ Day Out, toddle up to Brattleboro and visit the restored camera shop, get some tasty lunch from a Greek food truck, and stop by the convenience store that I’ve been told has a good selection of bulk Indian spices.

But poor Damien was sick and exhausted, so I went by myself, got sneered at by fancy camera people, was fairly grossed out by the spice store that was overpriced, grimy, and didn’t even have cardamom, and belatedly realized that ONCE AGAIN, I’d fallen for the old hippie trap. This town always promises it’s going to be a funky and whimsical hodgepodge of quirky graffiti, multi-culti eateries, and cozy used book stores. Just, you know, fondly preserved architecture all layered in jubilant palimpsest with glassy art galleries and fanciful urban updates. It always seems like it’s gonna be such a good time.

In reality, it’s all glum homeless men shuffling down the sidewalks and artsy people who don’t have time for you. And that is pretty much it. All the graffiti has been copied off Etsy, and instead of normal air, it’s just pot smoke, absolutely everywhere. SO much pot smoke. Bleh. The hippie trap! I fell for it again. I did meet a nice dog, though. 

Anyway, determined to at least get my money’s worth from the parking meter, I sat in my car with the seat warmer on and prowled through Facebook marketplace until I found a Polaroid camera, and drove off to get that. Nearly four hours later, I finally got home with the dang camera, and oops, I forgot one kid had a thing at the library, so we had to go right out again. But have I mentioned the car has seat warmers? Actually both cars do, but my car has been humbly waiting under the snow for a new fuel pump.

Seat warmers is one of those things that felt like unthinkably futuristic luxury to me when I was growing up. Finding out a friend’s mom had seat warmers was like finding out they were secretly a rajah or something. That, and skylights, and built-in microwaves, and the Barbie Dream house with the little hot tub that has a rubber bulb and, when you squeeze it, it makes bubbles in the water. I also had one friend who had a split level home with carpeted stairs, and I always felt like I was stepping into an alternate reality where everyone is a billionaire. Like, WHAT, you don’t have to open the front door by ramming it with your shoulder, and then immediately trip over a wood stove that’s draped with wet mittens? Instead you have some kind of FOYER? And a LIGHTED DOORBELL? With BOSTON FERNS? I was living amongst sultans, emperors, dwellers in a sumptuary futuristic wonderland. My friend Dena even had a waterbed!????!!!!

Anyway, if you are wondering if my new HRT is making my brain work better, no. However, sometimes when I gabble on and on about pointless things, people give me a chicken, so write that down.

Anyway, on Sunday, only a small group was home for dinner, so I just roasted up some chicken breasts and served them on wraps with lettuce, shredded cheese, and ranch dressing. I also got a cheesecake order and made a cheesecake. And that was that. 

MONDAY
Ina Garten roast chicken, steamed broccoli

Chicken time! I went with Ina Garten’s lovely, easy recipe, skipping the thyme and fennel. So basically plenty of butter, kosher salt, and pepper, and you stick some entire heads of garlic and lemons up in there, throw some vegetables around, and roast it without even touching it or basting or anything. It’s SO easy, tasty, and juicy, and comes out well every single time. 

While the chickens were resting, I steamed up a bunch of broccoli, and it was a yummy meal. 

I pulled out some of the garlic, because I like eating garlic, and weirdly it had turned blue in spots? I have no idea what that’s about. I did eat it. 

I think it was Monday that we got the first big snow dump of the week. This is snow that fell on top of several feet of previous snow, and we’re all kind of over it. Because we live on the highway, our road always gets plowed, so we weren’t stuck in our homes like some people, though! Some of my family in Rhode Island, who got way more snow than we did, had to manually shovel little tracks thrugh their streets so they could leave their homes! And they are vegetarians, so no one even gave them a reduced chicken. 

TUESDAY
Kielbasa, brussels sprouts, red potatoes

Tuesday, Corrie and I went out to buy party supplies. We went to uhhhh five stores. She’s crazy, I’m crazy, I don’t know. Anyway, we got the party supplies and got home and two of the kids were like, when are we leaving? For indeed I had forgotten I said I would get them to a thing and also another thing, I forget what. So we did that, with seat warmers. And eventually came home again. 

Dinner was a sheet pan meal of kielbasa, red potatoes, and brussels sprouts. This is a fairly divisive meal in the family. Some people are bananas for it, and some find it repulsive. So I split the difference and make it whenever I want to, but feel bad about it. I, myself, am in the bananas column, though. It’s so beautifully simple, and so beautifully salty. Here’s the recipe: 

Jump to Recipe

This recipe actually calls for cabbage, but you can just swap in brussels sprouts cut in half, and it’s even easier. You cook it for a while, then slop on the sauce and cook it a little longer, and boom, hot meal with a protein, a starch, and a green veg.

This is a meal that cries out for some kind of hot, chewy bread, like beer bread or hot pretzels, but I felt accomplished enough to have made dinner at all.

Yum. 

The older kids helped Corrie make her desired ice cream pies for Wednesday. It was a bespoke amalgamation of graham cracker crust, black raspberry ice cream, mint chocolate chip ice cream, twin snakes (which are gummy worms with two flavors, or something), and Skittles, all frozen together. 

Oh and I made the piñata, which was supposed to be a dragon egg shape. The kids basically grabbed me by the shoulders and made me repeat the words “there is no earthly reason to get papier mache involved.” So I just cut two ovals out of cardboard and attached their edges together with more cardboard (so basically an oval box), and then taped brown and gold scale shapes all over it, and everyone agreed it was a very fine dragon egg piñata indeed. Lucy and Irene mercifully agreed to make the desired treasure hunt, so I was off the hook for that. 

WEDNESDAY
BLTs, Pringles, ice cream pie

Wednesday was Corrie’s Actual Birthday, and also I got another cheesecake order, and also I had a rather intense interpersonal meeting, and then spent the rest of the day cleaning (?) I think? It’s a duck blur. But Corrie had requested BLTs for her birthday dinner, and no one was mad about that.

Clara came over, Corrie loved all her presents, and we had a good day. Lucy and Irene were away in Boston seeing Conan Gray, and I have been reliably informed that he did, indeed, wear his little sailor suit. 

We got more heavy snow, but the kids were spending the night in Boston, so I was glad they weren’t on the road. I’ve been spending about half my time in migraine town (thanks so much for that, Anthem/Blue Cross Blue Shield), and honestly even looking at the snow was more than I could handle much of the week. I mean everyone feels that way at this point. We better not have a drought this summer! 

THURSDAY
Calzones, fruit, birthday cake

Thursday was the party. The original plan was to invite lots of people for the party, then allow a select few to stay for a sleepover. But February vacation is a tough time to throw a party, because many people were sick or away on trips; and it turns out people don’t really do sleepovers anymore? Which I absolutely see the sense of.

So three kids came over and had a stay-late, or, I forget what it’s called. But they had their party and then stayed on to have dinner and have the FUN part of the sleepover, which is lying around drinking soda and eating candy, running around and yacking and getting into little fights while your parents hide in the other room. But nobody had to have a miserable night being too cold or too hot on someone’s floor, and no parents had to worry that their kids were in a house full of guns and vicious animals and sex offenders. So the guests stayed until about 11 and then went home, and it worked out great. 

It was a vaguely Dungeons & Dragons-themed party, but I never did work up any enthusiasm for imaginative snacks or decorations. Luckily Corrie had plenty of ideas. She made fancy labels, and the snacks were: Bugles (dragon claws), candy robin eggs (dragon eggs), punch (dragon blood), ginger ale (ale) and root beer (beer). The original plan was to twist brown packing paper into vines and transform the house into . . . I don’t even now what, an underground cavern with vines or something. But I was so tired, so we just taped up some gold foil tablecloths from the Dollar Store, and voila, it looked Different And Fancy. Good enough. 

The treasure hunt was set up so that the pinata was the prize at the end. I couldn’t find a baseball bat for the pinata, but a candle stick worked fine

I had been so proud of myself for remembering to reinforce the cardboard around the hanging part, so it didn’t immediately rip itself apart under its own weight and fall down. But instead, the zip tie it was hanging from broke, and it fell anyway. Luckily, these girls like stomping on things

so they got their candy! 

Dinner was calzones, which, happily, all the guests liked. I made twelve. 

They look dumb with the little food label on top, but I don’t know how else to keep them straight. Mine was olive, with a little ramekin of warm sauce, yum. 

Anyway, the kids are old enough that they entertained themselves, and I was just on standby. The one thing I did spend a lot of time on was the cake. She had initially requested a Kuo-toa cake, which I was not enthusiastic about. But we eventually settled on a D20 cake. For reasons I can’t explain, I persuaded her to let me try to make it three dimensional, rather than just piping a design on top of a flat cake. 

So I actually baked the cake on Wednesday. I used two hexagonal pans in different sizes, and put one on top of the other, then cut the top layer in angles. 

Then I just sat there staring at it for a really, really long time, trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do next. 

I ended up carving up the scraps and building up the angled edges into equilateral triangles that reached the edge of the bottom layer. 

Then I sat there staring at it for a really long time again. I made some marks with a knife, and also some chalk, which, chalk is edible, right? Anyway, my kids have all eaten a lot of chalk.

Then I just did a bunch more carving and shaving and piecing together, and I mixed up a big bowl of very thick frosting (butter, powdered sugar, vanilla, and milk) and basically spackled it all together. I came up with something that looked . . . convincingly geometric. 

 

At this point I realized that, for the result I was likely to get, I could have made things a lot easier on myself. If I had this to do again, I would bake a dome cake plus a large sheet pan of cake, and then cut the sheet into a bunch of equilateral triangles, then cut the dome into facets and stick the triangles on it. But my specialty is learning on the fly about things I hope never to do again.

Anyway, I ended up with this

and then piped the thick frosting into the cracks until it become one continuous surface. Then I stuck my finger in a cup of milk and smoothed the frosting out as best I could. I don’t usually bother with a crumb coat, but I had cut this cake up so much, it was half crumb at this point.

I also wanted to make the different planes of the shape more pronounced, because what I had was less of a icosahedron and more of a really bumpy hexagon. ANYWAY, I ended up with this:

So I jammed this in the fridge to chill and harden up a bit. This was on Wednesday. 

On Thursday, Corrie and I made our very first mirror glaze. I kept finding recipes with ingredients I have never even heard of, so I went with this recipe from Chelsweets. It only has five ingredients: White chocolate, sweetened condensed milk, unflavored gelatin, sugar, and gel food coloring; and you can work with it at a lower temperature than most recipes. I made a triple recipe and I think that threw off the heating times, but it still worked out more or less as she described.

We made four bowls: Blue, dark pink, lavender, and white with gold flakes. I wish I had skipped the lavender, because it just diluted the other colors. I also didn’t pour it correctly. But the main thing is, Corrie was absolutely delighted with the results. She threw some black sanding sugar over the top and declared it perfect. 

It was cool! It really did resemble one of those marbled resin RPG dies. So I let it sit for a bit, then trimmed off the drips and let it chill for a while longer. Then I piped lines and numbers on it. I thought perhaps I should put “11” on the top face, since she was turning eleven, but this suggestion was shot down with scorn, because it is a D20, so obviously it has to say “20” on top. Okay with me!

As I have repeatedly lamented, I have shaky hands and I’m not great at piping, but this turned out better than I hoped. I got a little confused about which way the numbers should face, but nobody noticed but me. 

The drawback of using white chocolate in this mirror glaze is that it loses its shine a bit after a few hours, but, again, I was the only one who thought so. I was afraid the glaze would continue to flow and travel right off the cake, or that the gold flakes would all drift down to the bottom, but that did not happen.

And she loved it! 

I actually liked the flavor of the glaze. It tastes mainly like sweetened condensed milk/white chocolate, which is a flavor I, a degenerate and uncultured swine, happen to enjoy. One of the guests said she loves Corrie’s parties because the cakes are so cool, which made me feel good. Then she corrected herself and said that the main reason she likes Corrie’s parties is because of Corrie, and THEN because of the cakes, and that made me feel even better. These kids are all right. 

The big kids got home safe and sound in time for cake. Then that evening we got some hard and scary medical news about someone I love very much, so I would really appreciate your prayers about that. I will tell you, this week, this month, and this year have been . . . difficult. Dih. Fih. Cult. For health, for relationships, for work, for finances. Many many opportunities for trusting in God. Which is what Lent is, so there you go. 

FRIDAY
Quesadillas, chips and salsa

We ran out of oil this morning, because of course we did; but Damien was finally able to see a doctor, and there’s even a possibility I’ll get my migraine meds this weekend. Tonight we are having quesadillas, and then on Saturday we are going to the CIRCUS, which I bought tickets for a while back. It’s hard to believe this post started with a gifted organic chicken and ends with a circus, and yet it’s still full of me just basically kvetching, but there you go. You think I’m kvetching here! You should hear what an earful God gets. At least it’s not snowing. I think it’s gonna snow tomorrow, though. 

Oh, I forgot to share my calzone recipe. Here you go!