Some days just call for ice cream.

The whole enchilada!  Every Itchy & Scratchy :

Like many of you, these were the sprinkles (or Jimmies as the East-Coasters call ‘em) on the cupcake when it came to the Simpsons.  A hyper-excited mix of Tom & Jerry/Spy Vs. Spy that made me laugh in a very basic (and highly enjoyable) manner.  Oh yeah, and there was the Poochie episode, which should be mandatory viewing for anyone affiliated with the world of marketing……

Anyway, I decided that sugar cookies were the way to go, and that just plain sugar cookies would be boring, so I sniped some M&Ms and sprinkles (or jimmies, as my friend insists they’re called) from the cupboard to spice things up.  I ended up making about half the dough into plain sugar cookies, tossed a handful of sprinkles into half of the remaining batter, and pressed M&Ms into the tops of the rest.

They turned out a little crunchy, but with six of us and it being oh-dark-thirty, we pretty well demolished them.

Now, I could call these Valentine’s day cupcakes — but then I’d be very late, right?

These were part of the series I posted earlier, but left out a few photos, so thought I’d give you a little more. I adore these cupcakes. Who needs an occasion for cupcakes, for your sweetheart especially.. that’s what I thought.

To wrap up our fashionably fashionable posts I wanted to share a link to the North Dakota State University Career Center page.  I have to give NDSU credit.  Not only are they good at football but they also give some really solid and practical advice to their students about the ins and outs of career searching once they leave campus for good.

The Career Center even has a page dedicated on how to dress for interviews and career fairs.  The advice is broken down into men and women with academic departments weighing in on how various outfit choices would be perceived within their specific field.  Even if you’re not actively looking for a job I think it’s interesting to read other professions’ take on clothing choices in the working world.

NDSU Career Center Dress for Success

Hats off to you, NDSU!!  (For the record, I’m still a Jimmies fan!)

Positive Thought of the Day:

“When you can’t do something truly useful, you tend to vent the pent up energy in something useless but available, like snappy dressing.” -Lois McMaster Bujold

Strict harvest restrictions designed to protect the bay’s crab population have pushed the ratio of females to males, also known as Jimmies, to nearly 3-to-1, said Tuck Hines of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. Hines, who plans to study how that may affect the population, was one of a number of scientists who spoke Tuesday in Edgewater at a seminar hosted by the center to announce funding for bay fisheries research.

Maryland and Virginia imposed harvest restrictions in 2008 that focused on protecting female crabs and the once-dwindling population has since rebounded, although females now greatly outnumber males.

“So, there are not very many males around and those males are mating repeatedly,” Hines said.

Females mate only once and then can produce six to 10 broods in lifetime, typically four to five in the Chesapeake Bay, while males mate with multiple partners. However, it’s not clear how the population is affected when the number of partners increases for male crabs, Hines said.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Chesapeake Bay Office co-hosted the seminar with the Smithsonian center.

Other grants announced included research by Chris Dungan of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, who is studying a virus that infects soft-shell clams. The soft-shell clam was an important commercial species with yearly harvests of a half million bushels until Tropical Storm Agnes devastated the industry in 1972. The harvest rebounded in the 1980s until a parasite infected the opulation, dropping harvests to under 2,000 bushes a year, the DNR said.

(Copyright 2012 by The Associated Press.  All Rights Reserved.)

Brushes

Have a variety of sizes of brushes on hand for cookie decorating. Keep brushes
intended for food use separate from other paint brushes.

Concentrated Flavors and Oils

Add a touch of flavor without effecting the consistency of your dough or icing.
Add flavor by the drops, as these are much stronger than extracts.

Coupler and Tips

Couplers fit into your pastry bag and enable you to change most decorating tips
without preparing a new pasty bag. Standard size, angled (used for hard to
reach spots), and large (used for larger tips) are available.

Decorating Tips

There are hundreds of tips available to achieve different looks for piped icings.

Dragees

Dragees are gold and silver little balls used as sprinkles. The Food and Drug administrations
advises using them as decoration only.

Edible Glitter

Edible glitter adds a shimmery, textured touch to any cookie. The glitter needs
to be sprinkled on while the icing is wet, or spread piping gel on dry icing, and
sprinkle the glitter on top. Available in gold, silver, white (great for snow!),
plus many colors.

Food Color Pens

Use food color pens as you would ordinary pens to add fun and dazzling color to your cookies.
These pens are filled with food color, making the ink edible. Draw, color, outline or write
on most icings which form a crust.

Food Color

Food color is available in four concentrated forms: liquid, paste, gel and powder.
I prefer paste, gel or powder. Liquid color is not as concentrated and will take
much more to achieve a bright color, and it may effect the consistency of the icing.

Luster Dust and Petal Dust

These dusts come in a variety of colors. In the dry form, use them
for subtle color. The dusts may be mixed with alcohol (white spirits) or lemon oil
for painting. Add just enough alcohol or lemon oil to achieve a paint consistency.
Luster dusts produce a shimmery, sheen finish and are available in several colors
including shades of metallic gold and silver. Petal Dusts are used to achieve deeper
hues with a matte finish. Simply use a food brush to decorate any icing that is
dry.

Mini Decorations

Edible sugar pieces in a variety of sizes and themes. Simply ice a cookie and place
one sugar decoration for a quick decorated cookie.

Paint Tray

An inexpensive paint tray is ideal for filling with food color and water to create
an edible “watercolor” paint for accenting cookie icings.

Pastry Bag

Pastry Bags are available in many sizes. I prefer a 10″ or 12″ lightweight bag for
easy handling. Also available are disposable pastry bags which are inexpensive and
great for easy cleanup.

Parchment Cone

Parchment cut in a triangle allows you to create your own disposable pastry bag.

Quilting Tool

This tool is used to give a quilt-like finish to fondant covered pieces as
well as a variety of uses when hand molding.

Angled Spatula

Stainless steel icing spatulas are wonderful for icing cookies. Available in straight,
angled or tapered.

Sprinkles

There are so many sprinkle choices now to add special decorations to cookies: hearts,
lips, bears, flowers, Halloween bats, pumpkins, Christmas trees, and more. Also
available are traditional jimmies, dragees, non-pareils, sanding and coarse sugars.

SPRANKLES

Birthday Sprinkle Nails

For this look I used the ORLY Rubberband Base Coat, 2 coats of opaque, matte white polish  –Essie in Blanc– & topped it off with Sephora by OPI Spark-Tacular! This shade is very similair to the glittery (and appropriately named) Deborah Lippmann Glitter Nail Color in Happy Birthday, but about half the price.

Fun birthday fact: Princess Grace Kelly & I were both born on November 12 in Philadelphia, therefore it’s my destiny to become a princess. My beau better start working on his knighthood

Off to do birthday things! <3

Making your own fondant is really the way to go, in my opinion. I don’t have much experience in tasting store bought fondants, but I have tried them on wedding and party cakes and the flavor is usually pretty bad. I made marshmallow fondant, and it was a quick and easy process. Rolling it out was also a breeze. I used a 2.5″ round cutter by Ateco to cut the discs out.

All of my taste testers, and the birthday girl and mom loved the flavor of the fondant. It’s relatively inexpensive to make and I believe it to be a fun experience.

Billy’s Vanilla Cupcakes
Martha Stewart

1-3/4 cups cake flour, not self-rising

1-1/4 cups unbleached all-purpose flour

2 cups sugar

1 tablespoon baking powder

3/4 teaspoon salt

1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, cut into 1-inch cubes

4 large eggs

1 cup whole milk

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

1 container (1/4-1/3 cup) jimmies sprinkles

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Line cupcake pans with paper liners; set aside. In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, combine flours, sugar, baking powder, and salt; mix on low speed until combined. Add butter, mixing until just coated with flour.

In a large glass measuring cup, whisk together eggs, milk, and vanilla. With mixer on medium speed, add wet ingredients in 3 parts, scraping down sides of bowl before each addition; beat until ingredients are incorporated but do not overbeat. Stir in jimmies.

Divide batter evenly among liners, filling about 2/3 full. Bake, rotating pan halfway through, until a cake tester inserted in the center comes out clean, 18 to 26 minutes.

Transfer to a wire rack to cool completely. Repeat process with remaining batter. Once cupcakes have cooled, use a small offset spatula to frost tops of each cupcake. Decorate with sprinkles, if desired. Serve at room temperature.

Yields: 24 cupcakes

Marshmallow Fondant: Cake Central

Where I grew up, you had to make your life choices early. Phillies or A’s. Bond or Freihofer. Jack & Jill or Good Humor.

From the get-go, I was a Jack & Jill guy. It was an easy decision. I never liked the Good Humor kids. They were the rich and spoiled brats, the sons and daughters of fathers who wore ties to work. That’s why the Good Humor guy always looked like the captain of the Love Boat. He had a military hat, a starched white uniform, and his hair was perfect.

The Jack & Jill guy, his name was John, wore a white t-shirt. So what if it had a few chocolate stains on it. He was a family man who, just like the good bartenders in the best taprooms, knew our names and our favorite treats.

It amazed us how he could reach his whole arm into the freezer, without even looking, and pull out the ice cream we asked for. And what ice cream it was. The chocolate éclair was a birthday party on a stick. The strawberry shortcake was dessert for a king. What did the Good Humor guy have? Banana popsicles. Feh!

My favorite Jack & Jill specialty was The Rocket. It was so Space Age. Ice cream in a long, round tube. Ice cream that shot up and pushed out like Gemini 3. We will put a popsicle on the moon before this decade is out.

Ice cream was the tonic of our youth. In the heat of the summer, it made us cool, it made us happy. The more ice cream, the better. The more elaborate, the better. And, when we wanted to top off our treats, when we wanted to take frosty and flavorful to the next level, we turned to jimmies. Jimmies were the cream in the coffee, the icing on the cake. There wasn’t a kid alive who didn’t love jimmies. Except for my cousin Morton. Morton grew up in Brooklyn. On a visit to our humble home, Morton once asked our Jack & Jill guy if he could have a cone with sprinkles. “You’re not from around here, are you kid?” the Jack & Jill guy said with great disdain.

In Brooklyn, and other foreign lands, places where they called sundaes “frappes,” places where stepball was stoopball, they thought calling them jimmies was wrong. In fact, they thought calling them jimmies was racist.

One of life’s great urban legends is that jimmies was a word derived from Jim Crow. Why? Because, before they came in every color of the rainbow, jimmies were brown. There are those who claim that some people call the brown ones jimmies and the rainbow ones sprinkles. We have gone to war over less. So here, finally, to save civil strife, is the true story of jimmies:

In the 1930s, in the little town of Bethlehem, PA, a man at the Just Born candy company came up with a topping he called chocolate grains. Somebody, one of those marketing types, told the man he needed a catchier name for it. The man’s name was Jimmy Bartholomew. Can you see where this is going? The company’s founder then registered “jimmies” as its trademark. End of story. By the way, for you conspiracy theorists out there, Jimmy Bartholomew was a white guy.

So where did “sprinkles” come from? Sprinkle is what you did with jimmies.

I used to ask John, the Jack & Jill man, especially on those boiling hot days, how he held back from eating his whole inventory before he got to Calvert Street. He just smiled and gave me a wink. “Oh,” he said, “I have a free Fudgsicle every now and then. Would you like one, kid?”

“No thanks,” I told him. “I’m a Rocket man.”

I was in charge of vego-options for the BBQ, because well…there were only two of us.

Coincidentally enough, everyone snagged a piece of the Portobello Sliders

I used bone-suckin brand BBQ sauce. Half with Rudi’s gluten-free buns (which smelled exactly like Micky Dee’s buns), and half with whole wheat dinner rolls.

The dinner rolls might be avoided next time. I wasn’t digging the bun to ‘bello ratio. Nothing that taking the top off of the bun couldn’t fix!These were delicious, and everyone was raving over them. I think I’ll opt for a mushroom instead of a veggie burger next time too!

Ah yes, the donuts. The tower of mini donuts.e most fun part.Sprinkles, jimmies : whichever way you word it, they make the donuts look more authentic.
The unlucky soldiers who didn’t get to be showcased on the tower of donuts.

I  made two versions : gluten-free and regular.

Lightly Spiced Vanilla Donuts (makes about 24 mini donuts)

• 1/2 c Flour
• 1/2 c Cake Flour
• 1/2 c buttermilk
• 1/2 c sugar
• 1 egg
• 1/2 t vanilla
• 1 T butter
• 1 t baking power
• 1/4 t cinnamon
• 1/2 t salt

Spiced Gluten-Free (and Lactose-free) Donuts (makes about 18 mini donuts)

I was told these tasted faintly like gingerbread

• 1/2 c sorghum flour
• 1 T coconut oil
• 1/2 c sucanat
• 1.5 T applesauce
• 3 T almond milk
• 1 t vanilla
• 1/4 t salt
• 1/2 t baking powder

1. Combine dry ingredients and wet ingredients separately
2. Add wet to dry and mix
3. Be sure to only fill the batter about half way in your mini donut pan (its much easier for them to puff over in the mini pan!)

I added 1 T of chopped peaches to a half dozen of the g-free donuts to mimic Ashley’s  (Those were the absolute moistest — only a made up word can accurately describe it)

As far as topping go, I did a little bit of everything

• 1/2 c chocolate chips and 2 t heavy cream
• 1/4 c confectioners sugar and 1 t heavy cream (or almond milk for the lactose-free)
• Some then dipped in sprinkles, toasted coconut, topped with chocolate covered sunflower seeds…

What do you call them, Jimmies or Sprinkles?

x

Casey

There is nothing, and I mean nothing, quite like a pistachio cone with jimmies galore (sprinkles). & there is nothing in this world better than a pistachio cone from Cobies, my favorite burger/ice cream joint on the Cape.

We kicked off our vacation (& National Ice Cream Day, thanks President Reagan!) with a healthy serving of the sweet stuff. If only I could eat like this every day!

Thanks for stopping by!

-HerMoveableFeast-

I used the What’s the Scoop  exclusive A Muse Studio stamp set.  I started with A Muse Studio sugar cardstock in an A2 size  (4 1/4″ x 5 1/2″) as my base and then stamped the ice cream cone three times on a square of sugar cardstock using  A Muse Studio French Roast ink, zapped it with a heat gun to set the ink, colored them with Copic markers (your favorite pink, yellow and green shades – but you can use whatever colors you love) and then using my Quickie glue stick, added the most amazing A Muse Diamond glitter to the top of the cones.  Love this glitter, but ask my friends, I love glitter when creating cards and think of it as the jimmies on my ice cream.  I then used foam mounting tape and poped up the ice cream cones to A Muse Studio grass cardstock and adhered to the sugar cardstock base card.  So, how quick and fun is this card to make?  All products used on this card are from A Muse Studio and you can check out my web site for more details and to find the products. 

So, what is your favorite flavor of ice cream?  Happy summer and enjoy your ice cream and don’t forget the jimmies.

One vacation morning the warm sun came up and – pop! – into her bed came very tiny and very hungry Kids A – E.

They started to whine for some food.

On Monday they ate through a bag of Twizzlers.  But they were still hungry.

On Tuesday they ate through two Primo pizzas.  But they were still hungry.

On Wednesday they ate through three boxes of Tastykakes.  But they were still hungry.

On Thursday they ate through four cheesesteaks.  But they were still hungry.

On Friday they ate through five Blizzards from Dairy Queen.  But they were still hungry.

On Saturday they ate through blue chips and guacamole, cupcakes with jimmies, salt water taffy, WaWa hoagies, a bag of pretzels, tacos, hamburgers, chili dogs and a blueberry pie.  That night they all had stomachaches!

Sunday comes afterwards.  They ate through one nice dinner that Mommy made from the South Beach Diet menu (pistachio-chicken salad) from whole food ingredients and after that they felt much better.

The kids weren’t hungry anymore and they were fine and still fit (because kids must have holes in their stomachs).  But not the Mommy.  Because she wasn’t a little Mommy anymore.  She was a big, fat Mommy.

So she put her skinny clothes away in a drawer and she stayed inside for almost 90 days.  And she pushed play on every one of those days and by the end…

She was a Super Fit P90X graduate!  The End.

This picture is from the summer of 2009. I do not look anything like this currently in the summer of 2011. In fact, I think I recently ate that very bikini and maybe even some of the children in this photo.

*********************************************************************************************************

I did, in fact, complete 60 of the prescribed 90 days of the super-hard P90X program two years ago.  The family photo above is my after picture.  I just got bored with it and did not keep it up.  And you don’t get to keep a super fit body without working at it every day (trust me – I’ve tested that theory).

The Beachbody people who produce the program are now talking up their new P90X2 DVDs, which are due out soon and I am getting excited about them.  But I haven’t worked out seriously in more then two months.  That fact, plus my very bad vacation eating habits have led to a plethora of mom tankinis, caftans and casual hiding behind towels and beach chairs and kids.

So I have decided to stop whining and covering up and I’m going to start working out and eating better.  I have a new friend who has decided to train for Savannah’s Rock-N-Roll Marathon in November (http://rfbr262.wordpress.com), and if an old man can do that then surely a spring chicken like me can do a few push and pull-ups.  Right?

And a very sincere and heartfelt shout out to Eric Carle for creating one of the best children’s books ever for me to parody in my story above.  The Very Hungry Caterpillar is a classic in our kids’ library right next to Goodnight Moon, Big Bird’s Very Busy Day and the newly minted Go The F**k to Sleep.

Wish me luck for tomorrow…