i don't love poetry, but...

俳

haiku: poetry
that my un poetic heart
can truly love

balance-shmalance

I've been struggling lately with that enigmatic concept: balance. I hate it. It doesn't really make sense. How can I maintain this balance-thing when I don't even understand what the term means?

The visual I have is one of those old-fashioned scales where you have the things you need to accomplish portrayed as little weights. We carefully place them on the scales in such a way so they maintain an even keel. (Sorry, mixing my metaphors there.) So we can keep placing more or more on as long as we keep them 'in balance'? And when is it unbalanced? When the weights fall off? Or when it's just barely off horizontal? Does anyone really know?

What about the idea that we are one of those circus performers that balance all sorts of things upon our chins? (cue calliope music) They must be placed just so in order to keep them from tumbling down. We are also limited by the length of our arms as to how much we can place upon the pile. (Unless we have help, but I really don't want to go any deeper in this analogy, if that's okay with you.) It sure seems awful precarious, doesn't it? Is that really how I want to live?

In any description of balance, there is an accompanying element of instability. If I misstep, will it all come tumbling down? And won't my neck get sore keeping it in that position all...the...time?

I'm exhausted just reading about it. How can people really aim for this as their goal?

I've decided that being a world-class cagola player or a side-show extraordinaire is not what I want to strive towards. Especially since I'm not the best at choosing which things are most important to place on my balancing piles in the first place. So I've made this agreement with God: I give him the multitude of odd-shaped pieces that I'm failing to balance on my own. He then picks out which ones are just right for the day and as I go along, He's right there beside me, carrying them Himself, letting me know what's important. I go to bed at night with peace. And that's a big thing for me.

Now don't get the wrong idea. I suck at this, too. I often forget to ask for His help (or maybe I'm "too busy" to stop for a ridiculously short few minutes) and then I'll spend the afternoon engrossed in Pinterest (which I love, but isn't really the best use of my time usually), kicking myself when the kids are still working on their school while I'm finishing dinner at their bedtime of 8 o'clock. But luckily I've got a God who believes in second chances (or third...or fourth...or thirty-fifth...) And being a crappy God-relier (yeah, 'relier' is a real word, I looked it up) is 1000x better than balancing the world and her seven continents on my chin.

(Dang it! I just spent the last 20 minutes looking at Pinterest because I checked to make sure the link worked right. Grrrr...that site is a giant time-sucking lamprey eel...of awesomeness!)

the green-eyed monster

If I ever check out this one friend's wall on facebook I can't help but feel jealous and insecure. She's beautiful, successful, has way fewer kids than me (so her life is obviously easier than mine (that was sarcasm, if you didn't know)), is skinnier than me, has more money than me...I'm sure I can come up with more.

It's ridiculous, I know. It's juvenile, I know. It's like she makes me feel like I'm back in high school again with all those "Am I good/cool/skinny enough?" thoughts. I hate it. I have actually outgrown those insecurities. (Thank you, God!) But for some reason this one person drags it all back up again. The crazy part is that I'm completely aware of how skewed online personas can be, since most people only report the rosy everything's-going-good stuff. I know that everyone has crap they have to deal with and everyone has different strengths. We really can't compare ourselves since God made us all with unique purposes. That knowledge is all up in my head, but when she's on the screen, I can't feel it in my heart. So what to do?

Right now it's blaringly obvious to me that I need to get some Divine help. If anyone can get this ridiculousness sorted, it's Him.

And why did I even post this for the world to see? Ummm...the good answer is "If it just helps one person, it's worth it." Yeah, right. But the real answer is, "I just had to get off facebook because of her and I'm tired and should be in bed and felt like posting some honest/transparent stuff."

Nitey nite.

anonymity.

I flirt with the idea of doing a completely anonymous blog. (My friend said she was toying with the idea and that got me started thinking about it.) A blog that is linked to an unknown email and which has no outward connection to me at all. It would be a faceless voice in the blogo-void. I could say anything I wanted about anyone and no one would know.

In having a known blog I have to use restraint in posting. I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. I think twice before blabbing all about this funny thing to happened to the people near and dear to my heart. But an anonymous blog? No such restraint would be necessary. No one would know who was typing, nor would they know who it was about. Ah, the bliss.

But that got me thinking more. What good would this do me? And the more I thought, the more I realized that it would be more harmful than anything, at least for me. It might be freeing to type whatever I want, but self-control and restraint are two virtues that most people, especially me, need to exercise. And if I'm spilling my guts to the interwebs that can do nothing to help me, will I really want to repeat the whole thing to God who can actually do something about it? 

So my answer is no. No anonymous blogging for me. But it was a nice thought while it lasted.

The Assembly of Decadence...er...I mean...an Opera Cake

The Daring Baker challenge this month was Opera Cake. (Recipe morphed from the recipes in Dorie Greenspan's Paris Sweets and Tish Boyle and Timothy Moriarty's Chocolate Passion.) It is a decadent, super rich dessert traditionally flavored with chocolate and coffee. As per their prerogative, the hosts, Fran of Apples, Peaches, Pumpkin Pie, Shea of Whiskful, Lisa of La Mia Cucina, and Ivonne of Cream Puffs in Venice, declared that dark flavors/colors were outlawed.

Sooooo...I chose almond and white chocolate! Did I say decadent? Let me just describe the layers:
1. joconde (cake made from almond meal)
2. almond-flavored syrup
3. white chocolate-flavored buttercream
4. joconde
5. almond syrup
6. white chocolate buttercream
7. joconde
8. almond syrup
9. white chocolate mousse
10. white chocolate/almond glaze

Since they say a picture is worth a thousand words, I figured I would just make a little video for you. 37,000 words worth of video! (Credit for the pictures is split between me and my eldest daughter. And yes, that is a couch in the background. The assembly was done in the living room. What can you do when it has the best natural light in the house?)

cheesecake pops *or* no catastrophes for once

This month, Elle at Feeding My Enthusiasms and Deborah at Taste and Tell hosted the Daring Bakers' Challenge of Cheesecake Pops from the cookbook Sticky, Chewy, Messy, Gooey by Jill O’Connor. Basically, frozen balls of cheesecake, dipped in chocolate, on a stick. My husband was ecstatic! (He's a cheesecake nut.)

This was definitely going to be a challenge as I had never attempted a cheesecake in my life. My friend, Bethany, and I decided to undertake the first part of the task together: Make the Cheesecake. (This is her first month as a Daring Baker, hooray!) Armed with five pounds of cream cheese, we began. It was nice to bounce ideas off another live person during a challenge as opposed to just reading other's posts with their tips/comments. The cheesecake came out beautifully and was probably one of the best cheesecakes I've tasted.


All in all, the whole recipe was pretty painless (good recipe Jill O'Connor!) and, unfortunately, that makes for a pretty bland post. The most crazy parts were having to cut the top crust off the cheesecake so harder bits weren't in it and rolling the balls with my hands since the cheesecake refused to be scooped.

After the cheesecake cooled, I molded the balls. After the balls froze, I needed to dip them in chocolate. And here's where I got creative: I made carmelized sugar decorations to give them a "gourmet" look. Believe it or not, they were super easy to make.

You take about a cup and a half of sugar and over medium heat melt it until your pan is filled with a puddle of brownish goo. Cool the outside of the pan with a plunge into cold water (careful not to get any inside with the melted sugar) and stir until it thickens just a bit. Once you've got it here you need to work quickly before the caramel stuff hardens into something akin to enamel. Use a spoon and drizzle the goo onto wax paper. Get crazy with it.

Once you've got out as much as possible, put the pot into the sink and fill it with water. (If you let it soak, changing the water every 10 minutes or so, the sugar will dissolve completely on its own. Good luck trying to clean it any other way.) The sugar will harden and you can break it into decorative pieces. If you're way better than me you can drizzle specific shapes. I just went for the "general chaos" method.

Caution: Once the sugar has completely melted, quit cooking or else it will get a burnt marshmallow taste. (Can you guess how I know that?) Personally, I'm quite the fan of burnt marshmallows, but no one else in my family cares for them too much. Also, the flavor overpowered the entire pop so we had to eat the decoration and pop separately to really appreciate the cheesecake.

After I made the caramel thingies I proceeded to dip the balls, then quickly smoosh a decoration onto it. It was fun. But since our little town didn't have lollipop sticks, I had to use bamboo skewers. This gave it quite a kitchen-weapon sort of feel as I let the dipped pops harden by stabbing the skewers into a block of styrofoam. I quite enjoyed it.

But nothing was enjoyed quite as much as eating those little suckers. Talk about the perfect amount of cheesecake. More than a bite, but not too much that those little thoughts of "this is a lot of cheesecake" creep into your mind. For the next three days or so, after lunch and dinner we'd all reach into the freezer and grab a pop. So good. So delicious. So now a part of my go-to recipe collection.

All in all it took three days, start-to-finish. But it could have been done much shorter than that. The nice part was that it didn't have to be. Of course, leaving the cheesecake pops sans chocolate in the freezer for a week might develop odd flavors, but it's not like bread where you have a specific window of time for the work to be done or it's bye-bye end product.

Here's the recipe and it comes highly recommended by me (my comments in red).

Cheesecake Pops
Makes 30 – 40 Pops

5 8-oz. packages cream cheese at room temperature
2 cups sugar
¼ cup all-purpose flour
¼ teaspoon salt
5 large eggs
2 egg yolks
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
¼ cup heavy cream

Boiling water as needed

Thirty to forty 8-inch lollipop sticks

1 pound chocolate, finely chopped – you can use all one kind or half and half of dark, milk, or white (Alternately, you can use 1 pound of flavored coatings, also known as summer coating, confectionary coating or wafer chocolate – candy supply stores carry colors, as well as the three kinds of chocolate.)

2 tablespoons vegetable shortening

(Note: White chocolate is harder to use this way, but not impossible)

Assorted decorations such as chopped nuts, colored jimmies, crushed peppermints, mini chocolate chips, sanding sugars, dragees) - Optional

Position oven rack in the middle of the oven and preheat to 325 degrees F. Set some water to boil.

In a large bowl, beat together the cream cheese, sugar, flour, and salt until smooth. If using a mixer, mix on low speed. Add the whole eggs and the egg yolks, one at a time, beating well (but still at low speed) after each addition. Beat in the vanilla and cream.

Grease a 10-inch cake pan (not a springform pan), and pour the batter into the cake pan. Place the pan in a larger roasting pan. Fill the roasting pan with the boiling water until it reaches halfway up the sides of the cake pan. Bake until the cheesecake is firm and slightly golden on top, 35 to 45 minutes.

Remove the cheesecake from the water bath and cool to room temperature. Cover the cheesecake with plastic wrap and refrigerate until very cold, at least 3 hours or up to overnight.

When the cheesecake is cold and very firm, scoop the cheesecake into 2-ounce balls (Mine were about the size of a large walnut but they only weighed one oz. I think it was the perfect size though. Two ounces would have been pretty darn big.) and place on a parchment paper-lined baking sheet. Carefully insert a lollipop stick into each cheesecake ball. Freeze the cheesecake pops, uncovered, until very hard, at least 1 – 2 hours.

When the cheesecake pops are frozen and ready for dipping, prepare the chocolate. In the top of a double boiler, set over simmering water, or in a heatproof bowl set over a pot of simmering water, heat half the chocolate and half the shortening, stirring often, until chocolate is melted and chocolate and shortening are combined. Stir until completely smooth. Do not heat the chocolate too much or your chocolate will lose it’s shine after it has dried. Save the rest of the chocolate and shortening for later dipping, or use another type of chocolate for variety. (I melted the whole amount at once and working quickly, having enough time to dip them all while the chocolate was still dippable. (Yeah, that' s a word I just made up. I had a bit leftover that I mixed with some almonds for some chocolate-covered almond bark stuff. Don't let good chocolate go to waste.)

Alternately, you can microwave the same amount of chocolate coating pieces on high at 30 second intervals, stirring until smooth.

Quickly dip a frozen cheesecake pop in the melted chocolate, swirling quickly to coat it completely. Shake off any excess into the melted chocolate. If you like, you can now roll the pops quickly in optional decorations. You can also drizzle them with a contrasting color of melted chocolate (dark chocolate drizzled over milk chocolate or white chocolate over dark chocolate, etc.) Place the pop on a clean parchment paper-lined baking sheet to set. Repeat with remaining pops, melting more chocolate and shortening (or confectionary chocolate pieces) as needed.

Refrigerate the pops for up to 24 hours, until ready to serve.