cutie pie clarification

perhaps i was misleading in the last post... i didn't get another bunny. no worries. bunkins is the only bunny in my eye. i was tempted though because she is quite the cutie pie!

gf for the bunks?

i found this adorable netherland dwarf bunny up for adoption in annandale, va on craigslist yesterday. sometimes i worry that bunks is too lonely. however, he loves people and pesters us quite frequently so i think he's ok. also i'm not quite down with caring for 2 things (my parsley garden died a while back). isn't she absolutely adorable?

happy chinese new year

really it's happy asian new year, since many asian folks celebrate the new year of the lunar calendar. my people believe you should get new shoes for each new year to stomp on the enemies of the past year and start the new year on new footing. well, shoes can get expensive, especially if you have expensive taste like me. so socks it was!

now remember, i don't know how to knit and my first 6 attempts at that military cardigan failed miserably. luckily (if it can be considered as such), my former math student emma was home during winter break to have foot surgery and was stuck at home. emma is a fantastic knitter. and i have a fantastic moving vehicle. so, with some offers to pick her up and deliver her to free $1 happy hour sushi in exchange for true knitting lessons, we had a deal. so far i have knit 6 pairs, with plans to complete 2 more... here are the 3 different varieties of wool.aren't the kids' socks cute? i felt bad that bunks feels deprived of attention when i craft (he pokes my leg constantly to be pet), so i even offered him my ball of yarn. however, bunks doesn't understand what to do with yarn, so he opted to sun himself next to it instead. hehe and when i got back from spending the new year in hawaii, julia and i agreed to continue our snowpocalypse cook/bake fest. so, on monday night we made calzones (i still haven't mastered working with yeast, so the dough was again fairly dense, though not as much as last time) and i baked a lemon chiffon cake for dessert! i liked this cake more than the angel food cake because it was not as sweet yet equally fluffy. also, this cake was different in that only 8 eggs were used instead of 11!i was supposed to mix a lemon icing to top the cake, however i've been so exhausted from jet lag and too many tutoring sessions that dusting each slice with a little confectioners' sugar has done the job quite well!tonight i must start cutting fabric to make dad's bday shirt. jimmy and i return home next weekend to celebrate. it's a big deal that i finish. must. finish. on. time!!!!

and the snowpocalypse continues...

this week started with a short lull in the snowfall. bunkins even took it upon himself to survey the snow situation outside. he estimated about 20 inches (the bunny is quite adept at math)!! however, on tuesday we got a blizzard with 55 mph winds and an additional foot of snow! i am currently on day #5 of snow days and missed work!! i can't say bunks is a fan though, as he tends to sleep peacefully while julia and i are at work so us being at home translates into sleepless days for the little buns. since restaurants weren't exactly open during the blizzard, julia and i continued our cooking/baking fest and made a pizza from scratch. 2 pizzas actually because i messed up in halving the recipe! (**blush**) here's the dough rising, although not all that much because i realized too late that i didn't halve the water added, so i had to add the rest of the yeast and the other ingredients later, which didn't let the rest of the yeast dissolve properly. here is one of the pizzas all ready to go into the oven! giant didn't exactly have much stuff left. people bought out all of the produce by the 2nd time i went to the store this weekend, so we had to rely on an old yellow pepper, broccoli that we had bought on the 1st trip, and turkey pepperoni. and here is the other one, ready to eat! we were definitely fans and will be making this again, but hopefully with a properly halved batch of dough. last night i started baking goodies for my trip to hawaii this sunday. here are the oatmeal, fruit and chocolate chip cookies. they are from the same recipe as the new years cookies i made this past break, although with proper ingredients! unfortunately they turned out much more crumbly, but still tasty. next up will be gingersnaps and banana bread! cross your fingers that the hardworking folks at dulles airport will clear the snow and ice out in time for my flight to take off! bunks is finally starting to experience the cabin fever that is plaguing the humans in this abode. his lack of sleep is wearing on him to the point where he has now taken to plopping his tired self right in the middle of the cage, something he never does! he usually opts to lie down on that bare spot on the left side of the cage. he's also starting to shed again because the heater has been blasting automatically to combat the blizzard winds that are outside. ok snow, time for you to go away now!

what to do in a snowpocalypse

so the world is going to end, but in dc only. why, you may ask? the weatherpeople have predicted anywhere from 1 to 3 feet of snow for this weekend. i think we're currently at 2 feet, although i can't be sure since it is so windy out. julia and i were planning to go to philly to celebrate our friend martha's bday before she returns to snowy nh, but unfortunately we're stuck. so, we decided to spoil ourselves with lavish meals. to see the general mood around town, visit http://snowpocalypsedc.com/. hehe

to start off the potentially snowed-in weekend, i baked a quiche thursday night. 2 weekends ago, marcus, julia's bf, baked a quiche for us but he used a pre-made crust. tsk tsk. since he swore that a quiche was easy to make, i figured i couldn't mess it up. however, i wasn't in the mood to roll dough, so the crust looks like poo, and i missed the part in joy of cooking where it says to sautee the vegetables beforehand. oops. so after quiche came out, it was a little soggy. i poked several holes in the quiche and used paper towel to wick out a lot of the moisture. phew. "spinach, yellow pepper, and enoki mushroom" quiche, saved! last night, julia and i cleverly avoided the massive lines at the grocery store by going at 9 pm when everyone else would be snowed away! (we can access our grocery store by walking underground, hehe!) people bought out the weirdest things: lemons (???), biscuit dough, bagged salad (but not heads of lettuce! lucky for bunkins!), chocolate chips... anyway we got our ingredients and julia made pasta with peas, cheese and crab meat. it was tasty! i made angel food cake. lan's hand mixer saved my life! the recipe called for 11 egg whites and i was supposed to beat until the mixture was 5 times its original volume. FIVE! here it is midway through the baking process, nice and fluffy and beginning to brown: and here it is unmolded with sliced strawberries all ready to go. i had 11 egg yolks left over and didn't want to waste them, so we googled "what to do with leftover egg yolks" and found a recipe for zabaglione on chowhound.chow.com. so ridiculously appropriate! zabaglione is an italian custardy mousse dessert made from wine, confectioner's sugar, and egg yolks. it's very rich, but goes really well with the lightness of angel food cake. here's how we served up the cake: happy birthday martha! we celebrated you in spirit! one week till chinese new year. must get busy!

birdy mobile for maureen's baby!

ok folks, stop with the babies already! maureen, a former colleague from my teaching days, is having her baby shower tomorrow. i'm going to take the chance that she doesn't see this post, because i do not believe she is an apothecary follower. yet. elizabeth, another former colleague and sidekick whom i never see anymore (!!!!), kindly informed me that maureen is decorating the baby's room in a jungle theme. even though i had already decided on making her this mobile once i heard she was preggers, the birdy theme was perfect. having sworn that i would never make birdies again, here i was, making 11 more. all birdies have striped bellies this time and coordinating solid-colored backs. you think mobile making is easy? well, if the mobile maker sucks at physics (physics and math are not related!!), things get a little complicated. look out below!!! erin, my crafty durham friend, had to talk me through fulcrums and torque before i finally straightened out this chirpy number. the branches are made from burned bamboo stalks that i got from michaels (note: same bamboo as from around the mirror of the guest bedroom, just darker!) and the twine is actually what came wrapped around the bundle of bamboo stalks! once i got my balance together, i hot glued the twine steady. the birdies were sewed onto the bamboo. here's the baby's view from below: it's a good thing a package came from anthropologie for me today because the box fit the mobile perfectly! since the box came in the mail, i found it appropriate to rewrap it with brown craft paper and then address the front as if i really were mailing it to maureen's baby. it'll be her first care package, that cost 562c in postage!! hehe. my address is in the upper left. the blank after "mini" is her last name and the blank between "1" and "lane" is maureen's maiden name. virginia land is made up, because i can't remember which city is hers. hehe, admit it: i'm clever.

apple pie and rugalach

last weekend, mom and dad visited. both are fruit lovers, so we loaded up on apples from the korean store and i baked them an apple pie! the recipe called for sprinkled cinnamon on top, before going in the oven. however, the oven burned the cinnamon, so note: do not put cinnamon on before placing a pie in the oven. with the leftover dough, i made rugalach, but without the cream cheese that is usually used in rugalach dough. both aesthetically unappealing, yet tasty.

baby kimono and bloomers for madeleine's baby

i am having blogger upload this post at 3 pm while i attend the baby shower of a colleague because i am so excited about what i made but didn't want madeleine (an occasional follower of this blog) to see it before the shower!

madeleine, a crafty lady indeed, is pregnant with a baby girl and seeing as i had half a yard of pink and red striped fabric (for the purpose of making christmas birdies, although i never ended up using it), i figured this would be the perfect use of this cute print! i just ran out of enough pink to do the sleeves, so i used one of my red pillowcases from ikea's clearance section (2 for $.99) that i never used. (while these pillowcases do not match anything in the house, i figured they'd make good fabric!) to make the trim of the neckline and the ties, i had to make about a yard of 1/2 inch bias tape, which is a nightmare to make without the fancy bias tape tool. however, with my new trusty iron, nothing is impossible!! (with my old iron from the 80's, nothing was possible because there were only 2 settings that still worked: luke warm and extremely hot)

the bloomers were the most thrilling part to make because the legs were shirred with elastic thread (my first attempt at shirring)!! so easy, as all you have to do is use the elastic in the bobbin instead of regular thread. i contemplated making a drawstring, but time ran out (chinese new year is in 4 weeks and i have 7 gifts to make! ahhhh), so i just made a bow with some leftover bias tape and sewed it on to the middle.i'd definitely make these again as they were so small and cute (i love small things)!! both patterns were from heather ross' "weekend sewing" book: lucy's kimono and ruby's bloomers.congrats madeleine!

welcome back, sewphie!

my dear little sewing machine has been healed (!!!) for the small sum of $106 (boo!) from a timing/timeliness issue. i prefer to call it the swine flu, to be honest. because of her near-death experience, i've decided to christen her: sewphie. hahahaha, i'm a dork! and to celebrate, i baked another loaf of banana bread with chocolate chips and walnuts! (i spared you all from yet another picture, since i bake this a lot.)

ignore the current mess on my desk. i'm trying to find a new one that's shallower (my arms aren't exactly long) with a hutch on top (for sundry items) and desk drawers (for my plethora of office supplies). this is my dream armoire desk from pbteen.com. i love that the doors can close away the messiness! wouldn't it be grand if life were like that too?or this one, also from pbteen, which comes bunny-proofed with a socket built into the desk drawer! ($1398!!!!!)however, i'd settle for this desk (in all white) from ikea for only $109. i only wish it had more drawers. hopefully i will find it on craigslist before i buckle and get it from the store.dear readers: please start saving for a pbteen armoire desk for me. it's only $1299 and my bday is in august. you've got time!

coconut pecan topping, finally!

while the cream cheese frosting provided a tasty stand-in for the devil's food cake, i was dying to make the coconut pecan topping that "the joy of cooking" recommends (remember it from the german chocolate cake?!?!). so, yesterday after work, i trekked to giant in dc's 2 degree weather and 12093102 mph wind and got 2 cans of evaporated milk (just to make sure that i'm not lacking evaporated milk ever again). must say, i hate cooking. even making this topping was fairly detestable. it's the state of idly standing over a stove and stirring that drives me nuts. anyhoo, i took no short cuts (ie. i premixed everything before cooking this time, unlike last time when the egg yolks cooked prematurely and left clumps everywhere) and ended up with a nice small pot of topping!!so tasty with the cake! (and alone!!!)

God's greatest gift to mankind:

a hand mixer!!! (yes lori, note the caps hehe. Godmother would be horrified if i didn't!)

for christmas, lan graciously gifted me a spiffy kitchenaid architect series hand mixer! wahoo! she pitied me for all of my old school hand beating, hehe. last night, i put said hand mixer to work. (note: this is the first time i have ever used a hand mixer. it was thrilling!) on devil's food cake. recipe said to mix butter and sugar on medium high speed for 2 minutes until fluffy. well hello, fluffy! that's what it means to look fluffy? i never knew!

i'm pretty ocd, so prep time was still longer than for a normal person. however, i do have to say, it was much shorter than my usual prep time. oh, and might i add that i actually read the section on greasing a cake pan and it said to only use solid vegetable shortening and not butter, cooking spray, margarine, vaseline, hair grease, etc. well what do ya know? the cake didn't stick to the pan at all!
this is what's left! haha, no i didn't eat it all by myself! it was very moist and light! frosting was supposed to be coconut pecan topping, the same as for german chocolate cake. of course, i ran out of evaporated milk. so i made a quicky batch of cream cheese frosting. the coconut pecan topping will be made tonight!i hurried my butt up and finished lan's bookmark sunday night. finally. christmas presents are done. on january 3rd. (last year i finished in march!!! late of course!)

the fruits of elfy's sleepless labor

sorry, fans, for leaving you in the dark on what i was doing on all those late nights i spent before christmas! i left my camera's docking station at home and thus couldn't upload pics while i was on vaca in ct!

first up: the rest of lan's family's gifts. lan and robert's joint gift was a framed cross stitch of baby elephants, like the one in the rents' kitchen, along with a picture of ryan and long. in the middle i cross stitched "gege didi," or "big brother little brother" in chinese. (admittedly, i 1st wrote out the characters on the mat with a sharpie. however, my chinese writing is so sketchy that it wrecked the look of the whole project and thus i cut out the writing and cross stitched the characters because, from previous attempts, i have learned that my stitched chinese is better than my written chinese. what kind of chinese person am i?) i cut my own mat from a "classic columns" posterboard, since the photo mats that michael's sold were gigantic. since the frame was huge and i didn't have much holiday wrapping paper, i wrapped the gift in the holiday comics from the washington post! applause for my cleverness! everyone got a cross stitched bookmark as well. an impala for ryan (to continue with the running theme), a killer whale for long (to continue with the swimming theme), and a koala for robert (not sure what theme this was... hehe). lan's is currently still under production. sorry, but this elf ran out of sleep! i also baked some chocolate chip, walnut, banana bread for the whole family. it came out so beautifully for once!next, i made mom a second pair of pjs, this time in flannel for the winter. the print was super cute and had snowmen and penguins! here's a close up of the ribbon detail on the draw string of the pants: for the top, i used a matching cotton shirt i bought from the gap ages ago and wore maybe twice (don't worry, i don't always gift old clothes to people!) and added a kangaroo pocket again (my mom is a huge fan! she says they're perfect for storing her glasses!). up top i "freezer paper stenciled" a cute penguin icon that erin, my friend from durham (!), helped me find online, but with my own edits. i am the biggest fan of freezer paper stenciling these days!barb, jimmy's gf, also got a pj set. now barb loves pigs. according to jimmy, she hopes to one day own a bunch of pigs and be a crazy pig lady. during my black friday joann's trip, i found 2/3's of a yard of flannel that had pigs, farmhouses, and oink! all over. just enough to make a pair of pj shorts! i had a hard time figuring out how long to make the inseam since barb is far leggier than i am, so i chose 4". (i would have chosen 3" for myself, as i am short and less modest. hehe)for the top, i used another of the $1.99 target tshirts mentioned here and again ripped off all the sequins. using the scraps from the shorts, i added pleats down the middle of the tshirt to make a faux button placket and ruffles on both sides. jimmy found the top to be too bib-like, but HELLO! has he not seen the plethora of bib necklaces and bib-styled tops that have flooded the market these days? at least barb and mom were fans!and now, for the big guns project of the season! i stole one of dad's old dress shirts on my trip home at thanksgiving and ripped out all the seams so i could use it as a pattern. i kept a list of the order in which each seam was ripped and then sewed the new fabric together in the opposite order. all the ends of the fabric were tucked into each other and hidden, thus making my replication of it more complicated than andrew's ducky shirt. however, it fit dad perfectly!! (note: he refused to change into dress pants for the modeling picture and thus the sweatpants that he was sporting made him look like he has the middle-aged bulge! ha!)on the back, i had to add 2 long darts just like the ones my mom put into his old shirt (he's super skinny). i felt that the shirt was a bit long on him, but he claims that the longer length helps keep the shirt tucked in better. i think i'm going to make him more for his bday in march... shhhh!and finally, mom begged me to bake something for dessert for new years, so after scavenging around the kitchen for ingredients, i made some oatmeal fruit cookies with vanilla chips. there was minimal sugar, of course, since dad is a health nut. they were shockingly tasty and i ate my fair share before i left ct! unfortunately, the holidays weren't all good news. my sewing machine has pooped out on me and won't sew zig zags anymore. right-justified sewing doesn't work either. i'm going to take it in for repairs tomorrow, so cross your fingers that it won't cost too much!

stop by the actual blog to check out the layout (for all of you who get my email updates)! i ditched the lighthouse background, since lighthouses have nothing to do with crafting or bunnies. i'd love to put a cool banner up top, but that's just too techy for me. if someone wants to create one for me (ahem, jimmy!), i'd be thrilled! happy new year, everyone!