blue artichoke

Yesterday's baking went much better than Monday’s. The failed cookie dough that I refrigerated overnight baked up into normal-looking cookies, though still a bit moist in a sticky sort of way, not an underbaked sort of way. Weird. But the best part of the day was that I learned how to make my own powdered/icing/confectioners’ sugar! I swear I bought a bag of icing sugar a few months ago when all I really needed was a tiny bit of what I already had in a nice canister, carefully labeled “Powdered Sugar” on the shelf over the fridge. Was it a box or a bag of icing sugar I bought? I wish I could remember, because one of the recipes I planned to make today needed 2 ½ cups of icing sugar, and I had only ~1 ½ c. in my carefully labeled canister. Doh! Where could the extra bag-box be? I looked in the cupboard in the wall (There’s an odd 3-4’ door in the top half of the wall in the living room; behind the door is a nook, with shelves. In here I keep my overflow supply of icing sugar). None. Dang. I already ran out to the grocery store once today because I ran out of molasses and cinnamon. I looked in my book o’ cooking substitutions and it suggested 1 cup of icing sugar is well represented by 1 cup of granulated sugar plus 1 T. of cornstarch, blended until powdery. Genius! It was still quite granular, but powdery enough to do in a pinch.

I also made the fifth of the Ten Gingerbreads of Christmas. This one included lots of spices and cocoa. It’s good. Really good, but not as good as the First Gingerbread of Christmas and in a different way than the understudy (the Fourth Gingerbread of Christmas). It’s difficult to describe in words. It’s nod your head as you chew good, but not stab the hand of the one who tries to take the last piece good. Does that help?

In the midst of all the baking and chewing, my landlord came by to take another gander at the ol’ fridge to verify my report of continued dripping water and steady freezer temperature. We took out all the food in the freezer, took out the false bottom and back, used a hair dryer to melt the sheet of ice that probably shouldn’t be there, nodded and agreed that something was indeed wrong and put it all back together again. I thumped the side of the fridge for good measure. We’ll go through this routine again, probably this afternoon.

Getting to Know All About You: Seen any good movies lately?