Baking is HARD!

I am not a baker; that has been proven! But the idea of baking sure sounds nice. The house smelling of fresh bread & sweet treats. Always having freshly baked cookies or a piece of pie if your mother-in-law or next-door neighbor stops by (see cute snowmen picture!). Martha Stewart makes it look so easy! Her cookie lady is a cookie gangster (*more on the cookie gangster to come...)!

I tried to make a Pecan tart at Thanksgiving, and the crust had little holes in it, so the filling went through the crust....filling was everywhere. It tasted ok, but was not pretty!

I made sugar cookies from scratch this Christmas holiday...the dough alone takes forever! Chill the disks for 2 years (typo, but I'm choosing to leave it)...roll out, chill another hour, cut shapes, chill 30 minutes, preheat oven, bake! Geez!! I tried doing this on a Saturday when we had people coming over so I had to stop- midway through, and needless to say it took me two days just to get the two batches of dough completely cut out & baked into sugar cookie trees & snowmen! And don't even think about those intricate cookie cutter shapes- Rudolph will lose all of his antelers, legs & tail by the time I am done with him.

Then for the icing... I read online about how to make royal icing from scratch. I bought the piping tips, the meringue egg whites and the sprinkles, and for some reason my cookies are still sitting in tupperware unfrosted. Part of this can be blamed on the fact that I have been sick, and don't want to get others sick by icing cookies while I am ill, or it could also be the fact that it's a huge pain in the butt!

*Cookie gangster: Martha's cookie b*tch made these snow globe cookies and thinks we can too. She's crazy!

A few weeks ago, I did make a banana bread loaf with some leftover bananas that I didn't completely F up!

It didn't have to chill for 3 hours, didn't involve pie crust or cookie cutters, and we ate every last bite. You can basically just dump all the ingredients into a kitchenaid mixer, hit the magic button & throw it in a loaf pan. 45 minutes later- banana bread!

Just so I know that I'm not the only "BakeTard" in the world, here are some pics from CakeWrecks' blog, which makes me

laugh!

Reindeer poop cake anyone?

Or maybe a Christmas elf to take home for the kiddos?

They ran out of dessert!

My mom & I attended KRLD's 82nd anniversary party last night at the Dallas arboretum.  We really enjoyed ourselves- great catered food, full open bar, notable speakers, pretty flowers & a great place to people watch!  One of the highlights for me was the avocado bar: They served up a half of a Haas Avocado still in the rine sprinkled with salt and drizzled with olive oil.  Then you choose from a variety of toppings to "stuff" your avocado like black bean & corn salsa, shrimp and cucumber ceviche, pineapple pico, bacon!, sour cream or habanero cream.  While the concept was amazing, the habanero cream was freaking HOT!  I can stomach hot food (thai food, super hot salsa, etc), but for your average eater, I know they had to be turned off.  This stuff had a serious kick & definitely should have come with a warning.  But, I really liked the idea.

After all the salty and spicy food, we were craving some dessert.  We went to the dessert station & they had run out- no plan B, just plain out!  My mom & I were joking that we would throw some butter & cinnamon sugar on some tortillas & come up with something!  They were still serving dinner, so people were not happy that they ran out that early.

Bummer...