Monday, September 29, 2008

Cooking with candy!

Remember when I ate those dark chocolate cacao nibs? Well, I still had a bunch of those things left so I decided to make oatmeal dark chocolate cacao cookies!


Funny thing about me is, although I have an insatiable sweet tooth I rarely bake because there's no way I can eat an entire cake or pie or batch of cookies. I get bored of them and then they go bad. But I hit upon a solution to my problem: I could bring them to work! Those people will eat anything; they'll be all over free food like a rat on a Cheeto.

These turned out very good, I like having oatmeal in cookies, it makes them filling and fools people into thinking they might be a little healthy. Here's the recipe I used:

  • 1 cup butter, softened
  • 1 cup packed light brown sugar
  • 1/2 cup white sugar
  • 2 eggs
  • 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
  • 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 3 cups quick-cooking oats
  • 1 cup semisweet chocolate chips (I used the cacao nibs)

  1. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F (165 degrees C).
  2. In a large bowl, cream together the butter, brown sugar, and white sugar until smooth. Beat in eggs one at a time, then stir in vanilla. Combine the flour, baking soda, and salt; stir into the creamed mixture until just blended. Mix in the quick oats, walnuts, and chocolate chips. Drop by heaping spoonfuls onto ungreased baking sheets.
  3. Bake for 12 minutes in the preheated oven. Allow cookies to cool on baking sheet for 5 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Sea Hag gets all political (again)

I made this on Saturday:


And Sarah Palin lost 10 'favorable' points (according to the Diageo Hotline poll) in 3 days.

Coincidence?

Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Candy-cation! Day 7


In a roll of Fruit Mentos, the strawberry-flavored ones would be the Queen Mentos, and the rest would be the Worker Mentos. Seriously, the other flavors are there just to preserve your dignity so you don't shove the whole tube down your throat in like six seconds. Of course, I have seen that they make a strawberry-only roll now but I have (so far) successfully avoided them like a recovering pot addict will stay away from a Dave Matthews Band concert.

But oh! I gave up years of Strawberry Mento sobriety when I saw a roll of Strawberry Yoghurt Mentos. Strawberry! Yoghurt! Is that the metric spelling of 'yogurt' or something? Am I supposed to pronounce it yog-hurt? Anyway, I couldn't resist. I'm not made of stone, you know!
These were pretty good, I think think the ones I got were at the end of their fresh shelf-life but I still scarfed them down pretty quickly. They kind of tasted like a strawberry milkshake, like a sweeter, less-intense regular strawberry Mento. By the way, the UK version of the Mentos website has hot girls in bikinis all over it, and the US website is hella-lame. Maybe British bikini babes are attracted to that extraneous h.

On my last day in St. Maarten I saw this little German kid asleep at the beach and he was wearing awesome candy shorts:


It was a good way to end my Candy-cation.

And so ends my nearly two-month long boring-ass recap of Candy-cation. Huzzahs! Now we can move on to other things.

Friday, September 05, 2008

Candy-cation! Day 5 & 6


I loves me some Kit Kat bars, so I was pretty stoked to see the alternate versions of Dark Chocolate and Chunky, which had peanut butter in it. I really wish they would get more creative with the Kit Kats in the U.S., I mean, all we get are the regular 'four-fingered' varieties and the giant 'one-fingered' ones. I love the Kit Kat terminology! You totally need to check out that shit on their web site. Did you know that Kit Kat bars are the number one selling candy in the U.K.? And that they have a ton of different-flavored varieties in Japan, including Iced Tea, Green Tea, Caramel and Salt, Cherry Blossom, Orange, Apple, Melon, Red Bean (ewwww), Cantaloupe and Gold? Oh, but we get our own special flavor in the U.S.: Kit Kat White Creme, which is made with vegetable oil based candy coating rather than pure white chocolate. Yum yum!

The Dark Chocolate Kit Kat was OK, you could taste the dark chocolate but it wasn't very good quality chocolate. It's probable the lowest concentration of cocoa allowable to be called 'dark' chocolate, really. But it wasn't bad. The Chunky Kit Kat was a 'one-finger' bar, and I love those. It reminds me of that scene in 'Honey I Shrunk The Kids' where the kids find the Oatmeal Cream Pie. That would be so cool. Anyway, the peanut butter flavor wasn't terribly pronounced, but I've never been a huge peanut butter fan anyway so that was just fine by me. Don't get me wrong, peanut butter is tasty and all, but it's like, me and peanut butter have tried to date before but we decided that we were better as friends. It wasn't him, it was me. I needed time to go find myself and it just wasn't fair to peanut butter. Plus I didn't want to be tied down to just one sandwich spread.

Thursday, September 04, 2008

Sea Hag gets all political and stuff


Separated at birth?


GOP Vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin:














And that woman who played the therapist from 'The Sopranos'?










Cindy McCain, wife of GOP presidential nominee John McCain:













And that woman I hate from Food Network, Sandra Lee?