5:00 Fridays

It's no secret that I love coffee. Coffee ice cream is even my favorite flavor. One of the reasons I grind my own beans is that it just smells so dang good. I love the sound of peeling the foil off a new canister of beans. I stick my big fat nose right into the top and inhale. Deeply. Then I do it again with gusto. This is quite possibly what heaven smells like. I'd wear coffee perfume if I had it. I've found that a dab of real brew isn't so effective. And it can burn. Ouch!

I never understood the point of mixing a perfectly good cup of coffee with a perfectly good shot until I tried this:


Coffee Fit for a Nut

1 steaming cup of coffee
1 shot of hazelnut liqueur (Frangelico is one brand I bet you recognize.)
1 shot of creme de cacao
whipped cream (Not Cool Whip or the canned variety! Use the real deal.)

If you have one of those tall glass mugs that restaurants have, go ahead and use it. I prefer things more homespun so I just use a big ole mug my brother got as swag from TBS about a century ago. Pour the hazelnut liqueur and creme de cacao into the mug, add hot coffee. Top with generous amounts of whipped cream. Garnish with a cinnamon stick that can double as a stirrer. If you want to be little miss fancy pants, add some chocolate shavings to that puppy. Your friends will ooh and aah...but that means you'll be stuck making drinks for everyone all night. I'm a DIY kind of gal when it comes to mixing drinks.

If you really want to make friends and influence people a la Dale Carnegie, serve your coffee artistically. See how lame your coffee skills (and mine) are compared to Micheal Keen's. If you master this, you'll be all the rage. Maybe you'll even be hired out to work the party circuit. Cha-ching!

Since this drink is technically brown, it would be perfect for our weekly neighborhood Brown Liquor Night!

Wordless Wednesday: Shaded

Ace of Cakes Cake Bakery Flops

Alternate Title: Let Them Bake Cake!


There's nothing like a little Food Network to bring a family together. Other than Phineas & Ferb, it sure beats the other crap on TV that is fit for kids' consumption (not to be confused with the consumption of kids, which would just be plain creepy and disgusting).

I happen to love food. I could watch the Food Network 24/7, and for those times that I am holed up in bed with a fever, I do just that. But let's be real, no mother with a fever gets to hole up in bed; no rest for the weary as they say. I don't know who "they" are, but they sure do know what they're talking about. If there's one thing I want to impart to my sons, it's a love of food. I want them to see that food is about so much more than sustenance. It's tradition, culture, adventure,

The boys like to watch the Food Network Challenge. We don't much care about the wacky burger recipes or food styling competitions. Bring on the cake challenges! The next best thing to eating cake is watching the pros making cake. It's good fun to see the extreme decorating and smoking, spinning whatchamacallits. We teeter with tension when it's time to move the cake to the judging table. We all hiss at the mere sight of sugarcraft hall of famer Kerry Vincent. She's like the pinch nosed Simon Cowell of Food Network Cake Challenge.

The one show we all love best (though Mac Daddy would still put anything with Giada in it at the top of his list), is Ace of Cakes. I've been a huge fan since before Duff, Geof, and Mary Alice were household names. I can't bake worth a lick so I live vicariously through the team at Charm City Cakes. What I really want is to share a whole mess of 5:00 Fridays with the crew and laugh until my jaws ache. I also really want to chow down on all those carved off bits of cake (The waste is criminal! All that lost cake...sigh.). Bird, Deal, and I gasp whenever we see those carved off hunks of delectable cake brushed into the garbage. Cake!

Bird and Deal like to pretend to make and decorate cakes. They use Kapla blocks, LEGO, cardboard remnants. Then Deal grabs the toy mayonnaise squirter from the toy kitchen and pretends it's frosting. He conjures up all kinds of wacky odds and ends to manufacture his own brand of gum paste. Bird was doing his homework the other day and asked me how to spell "fondant." The boys love to play Ace of Cakes. Bird is always Duff (the boss, no surprise there), Deal assumes the role of Geof, and I am Mary Alice despite my whining to be Elena since our names are so much alike. Mac Daddy is always Ben, particularly fitting on Sundays when he hasn't shaved all weekend. Whenever we see a dalmatian Deal is relieved that Duff isn't around because he apparently has a fear of dalmatians. And yes, Deal even mentioned this to the fire chief on a recent field trip to the local station.

I have been thinking about getting the boys some sort of Ace of Cakes present for Christmas. Perhaps this. But not this.

Now take a moment to click on those links or the rest of this post won't make a lick of sense to you. Go on. I'll wait.

<Insert Jeopardy music here.>

Jeopardy waiting music sound bite

I find it pretty disappointing that Duff, a tough yet affable guy who bakes cakes for a living, is supporting a product so clearly geared toward girls. Does he really want to limit his brand like that? Does he really want to turn off (and away) all the boys who finally have society's permission to explore the kitchen? For starters, the company is Girl Gourmet. The colors, while not treacly pink, are decidedly girly and definitely not unisex. Bird and Deal would have loved this toy, but the packaging would be a big pee-ewww (best said with your nose plugged for full effect). And sure, being the liberal progressive mom that I am, I should go ahead and buy it. And I just might. But that's not my point.

I'm wondering why such a toy is targeted just to girls in the first place. As if the pink irons and dishes and brooms aren't bad enough. The toy aisles are clearly demarcated by a gender line these days. Girls engage in domesticity while boys flirt with violence. Do you have any idea how hard it was to find a gender neutral play kitchen and accessories for my kids? And pink tools in the aisles of Sears and Home Depot and Lowes?! Don't get me started. Alas, I have already started. Who's sponsoring the time travel back to 1952 trip here? Is Dr. Laura lurking around the exhibit booths of the Toy Fair, saddling manufacturers and buyers with subliminal messages of feminine obedience and servitude? Girls should be encouraged to do more than cook and clean, no? If anything, boys could use some bolstering in that department. I live with three of them. I should know.

The Problem with Reading a la Bret & Jermain

The problem with Bird learning to read is that I ca no longer wear my favorite T-shirt that my friend Will brought me from a Flight of the Conchords concert (never mind that he bought the shirt in a youth size for his son and in his Newcastle stupor he didn't realize that the shirt looked like this).

5:00 Fridays

Funny how all holidays are colored with signature hues. Green and red for Christmas, despite the Ballard Designs and Pottery Barns of the world trying to trick us into adopting purples and blues and pinks. Red, white, and blue for Fourth of July. Brown for Arbor Day. Green for my Half Birthday, I mean St. Patrick's Day. Naturally Halloween conjures up spooky images of black and orange.

Store aisles have been festooned with the color combo since, oh, July (and what a clash with the red, white, and blue!). While the Halloween imagery used to teeter somewhere between cute and creepy, it has turned plain macabre in some places. There seem to be dead dudes with bad hair all over the Target aisles, and even the grocery store has one too many severed hands served up in a candy bowl to make me want to shop for food., at least not meat.

If you people want the creep factor exponentially revved up from years past, who am I to disappoint? These 5:00 Fridays libations are for the over-21 set anyway. If you have nightmares just hum "Love Will Keep Us Together" by Captain & Tennille like I did when I was a kid and got spooked by things that went bump in the night.

Today I bring you an unique concoction from our friends across the pond who speak with a lovely lilt and use the word "mate" as a noun.

Blavod Black Vodka Screwdriver (in the spirit of gory Halloween and revenge, let's pretend that this particular screwdriver bored its way into the brain of the asshole who just made snide racist comments about my friend's adorable little children yesterday...note the use of "bored," yet another homonym!)


2 shots Blavod black vodka
3 ounces pulp free orange juice or tangerine juice
corn syrup or honey
red food coloring

In a shallow dish, mix a couple of tablespoons of corn syrup or honey with several drops of red food coloring. Dip the rim of a highball glass into the mixture. It will drip down the sides like oozing blood. Add ice cubes and orange juice. Slowly pour the Blavod black vodka on top so the orange and black colors are layered. Serve with a straw or swizzle stick. This cocktail is best stirred before drinking, but the layered look packs a punch for Halloween presentation.

Boo!

Halloween, Dirt & Noise Style

I happen to be a big fan of Halloween. I love eating candy, dressing up in costume, being spooked, eating candy, dancing to the Monster Mash, snacking on candy corn mixed with dry roasted peanuts (a deliriously divine treat that my friend @turnaroundart turned me onto!), carving pumpkins, eating candy.

I also happen to look good in orange so I embrace any chance I get to sport it. If I keep on eating candy I just might look like a pumpkin myself one of these days. That'll save me money on my costume I suppose.

The boys of course love Halloween for all the same reasons I do. Mac Daddy hates Halloween for all the same reasons. He detests dressing up, could care less about spooky movies (He flat out laughed at Blair Witch Project whilst I peed in my pants.), hates candy corn, thinks dancing to Monster Mash is dorky, and is painfully uncreative when it comes to carving a jack-o-lantern. Meanwhile I buy pumpkins at every turn and even planted a kitschy scarecrow in our yard. Our table is bedecked with sparkly black and orange place mats, candy corn shaped candles, and plastic spiders. I listen to the Monster Mash station on Pandora and read Halloween stories in creepy voices with much ballyhoo.

I sounded every single one of my 41 years when I proclaimed to the boys that we'd be making our own costumes this year. Their mouths hung agape. And Mac Daddy laughed. Then these preachy words came out of my matronly mouth: "When I was a kid no one bought costumes. We used our imaginations and creativity to make stuff up. We were green without even realizing it. No one wasted money on costumes, even if that meant dressing up as a hobo or the unknown comic every single year of grade school." I must have spoken with authority because no one questioned me...though they clearly questioned my sanity. And for the record, I am the least crafty person I know. Luckily the boys are too young to know how ridiculous they might look, and by the time they figure it out, they will hate me for many more reasons (like the bowl haircut Bird seems to sport in every school picture).

I do hate all the high fructose corn syrup that cannot be avoided without paying an arm and a leg for carob bars or other such crap that the children would toss out with the razor bladed apples and arsenic laced popcorn balls. I wish there were some viable alternatives (stupid tombstone shaped erasers and skull emblazoned super bouncy balls aside). I suppose next year I could serve the fair trade natural stuff and rig up a fake gory arm and leg with a sign stating "I paid an arm and a leg for this candy."

Or I might just put up a sign that says "I paid an arm and a leg for healthcare. Can't afford candy."

In the mean time, I'll be dressed up as Rizzo and trawling the hood for candy. Bird will be a ninja warrior, and Deal will be his own super hero known as Super Deal. Mac Daddy will be dressed up as a corporate cube dweller who works for Da Man.

Wordless Wednesday: OUCH!