Cooking with Sara: Pumpkin Praline Cake

I mayyyyyy know full well what I'm doing when I post a photo like that one above.  A shiny, perfectly dripping drizzle of homemade caramel sauce?  I mean, c'mon, that's just not playing fair! And yet, I post it all extra-large size anyway.  Devious, that girl Sara.

Pumpkin Praline Cake on From Blah to Ta-Daa

Aside from the pretty caramel drip photos, I do want to show you my new cake stand!  It's vintage milk glass, and I paid way too much for it at an antique store.  I bought it and another gorgeous stand to go with my plain-Jane Martha Stewart cake stands for the wedding last weekend.  I'm head over heels in love with both stands, and I'm already scheming ways to get my other stand into a recipe post.  (And figure out why it's got a mysterious brandy cup?  That's another story for another day, and I definitely need your help with it.)



Cooking with Sara: Chocolate Truffle Cakes

This yummy little recipe posted last week to the food blog, but I was so busy posting Savannah photos here that I didn't get a chance to share it with you.  It was part of that haul I made for a wedding last weekend, and I'm hoping to get the others recipes posted during the next few weeks or so.  Assuming that I can muster up the motivation to make them again.  I'm partly traumatized by the whole experience, so please don't hold your breath.

Anyway, back to this recipe! If you like brownies (and what sane person doesn't?), you really need to scoot your tush over there to check out the recipe.  With only one tablespoon of flour, it's almost entirely chocolate, with a little sugar and butter thrown in for good measure.  And to tell you the truth, I love it way better than the brownie recipe I've been swearing by for years.  It has the crackly, lightly crusted outside of a brownie, but with a gooey chocolatey center.  My oh my, it's just so, so, so good.  Trust me on this one.  

And scoot!:

Chocolate Truffle Cakes on From Blah to Ta-Daa!

Weekend Scrapbook 7

This is pretty much how I looked for three solid days.  Well, ok, that's a lie.  By the third day, my hair was definitely more frazzled, and I probably wasn't quite so smiley.  But in the kitchen, wearing an apron, utensils scattered, and recipes hanging from everywhere is pretty accurate.

And this is the end result!  Friday was my last Sarandipity hurrah, when I did the cake and dessert table for our friends' wedding.  I made four different mini-desserts: Cheesecakes with strawberry sauce, chocolate truffle cakes, red velvet cakes, and pecan lace cups with key lime filling.

The lovely bride!

And groom :)

After putting up with my stress and chaos for three days and jumping in to save the day no fewer than six times, Bo is still smiling.  He's such a keeper.

Weekend Scrapbook 6

We pretty much stayed at home this weekend.  Which, honestly, is something I always welcome.  The more I'm home, the more I'm available to tackle all the things in my house that scream at me for my attention.  And while this blazing heat is blessing me with some time off from Sarandipity, I'm feeling more and more able to conquer my house, instead of being swallowed up by it.  So, this weekend, I scrubbed half our house.  It's utterly boring and tedious to talk about, and I'm certainly not going to post before and after photos (the horrors!), but it was more necessary than I realized.  

I was trying to explain to Bo last night why I'm feeling so averse to watching tv or movies that are anything but Girly.  I said that not only am I living in a masculine world with my 8-5 job and with my running on fumes, but that our house was in such disarray, that it didn't feel like my own.  I quickly lost his attention while I tried to explain that a sense of home is so important to feeling feminine and that I'd lost it somewhere in all the clutter and dusty baseboards.  But, as I spoke, I really took to heart the words I was saying.  I hadn't actually realized until that moment that having a home I am proud of is one more piece of the femininity puzzle.  

With my struggles with balance and a penchant for over-committing, I've noticed that my femininity is one of the first things to go out the window.  I figure it's off traipsing through our mini-forest with my patience, leaving dark eye circles in exchange.  My friends always describe me as a girly-girl, and I think it's so funny.  I was brought up to be a tomboy, and for a while my favorite pre-date screening question was to see if I owned more power tools than the boy asking me out.  (Usually?  Yes.)  So, while I do wear makeup and girly clothes and sparkly accessories, it doesn't often reflect how I feel.

But this weekend, I cleaned and I baked.  Sans ruffly apron, but still.  If you came over to my house right now, you'd find clean shiny surfaces, chocolate truffle cakes, scented candles, and most importantly - a contented me.

Lifestyle Choices

If someone were to ask you what your ideal lifestyle looks like, how would you answer?  I'm not talking pie-in-the-sky descriptions involving winning the lottery or inheriting piles of money from a deranged great aunt.  No.  What I mean is this - Realizing that most of us must work at some kind of job, how would that fit into your life and how would your life fit around it?

I've been doing some deep thinking about what my life looks like right now and how I'm spending my time.  As one might guess, I'm plain burnt out.  And while a tiny part of me feels like a failure for having hit this point, a very large part of me thinks, "How could I not be burnt out by now?"  I'm putting in 6-day work weeks that include 60-70 hours of work.  Which, of course, requires that everything else get pinched back to almost nothing.  When I'm working 6 days a week, there isn't a lot of time leftover for:  Laundry, cleaning, cooking, grocery shopping, running, sleeping, friendship, reading, writing, playing piano, and sitting still.  You get the picture.  It's certainly not rocket science here.

So, I'm reevaluating my goals and plans for my life.  Up until this point, I'd been filled to the brim with "baking, treats, company-building, one day gonna have my own bakery" talk and intent.  But now?  Now, I'm not quite so sure that I want all of that.  The baking and the treats, absolutely.  Those will always be as much a part of my identity as my curly hair.  But the rest is seeming to come at a cost that I'm not so comfortable paying anymore.  And when I think forward to how I want my life to look in a year or two years or five years, I'm feeling a lot of discomfort about the fit.

How can I possibly maintain this schedule while planning for children?  While having children?  This kind of workload doesn't fit with how I picture that phase of my life.  It doesn't fit in at all with the lifestyle that I have in mind.

The quick answer would be for me to cut back.  That's always been the answer - Quit taking on so many orders.  But if I'm doing honest math, I can only take on one client per week in order to achieve a semblance of balance.  Which requires a whole lot of telling people "no."  With my current workload, I'm already turning away an average of two orders per week.  So, hmm.  Giving myself rules in order to cut back could work for the short term.  Would it work for the long term?  Will that help me create the lifestyle I want?

I don't have any answers, and I'm not allowing myself to make any definitive choices just yet.  I'm still trying to evaluate how and why I got to this place and what a long term solution might look like. What I do know is that this place I'm in isn't where I want to be.  I need to make some changes in order to fit work in with life.  And, after all, there's nobody in charge of my life but me.

Weekend Scrapbook 2

Can you believe I took that picture with my cell phone?  Can you believe I had been carrying my phone in a ziploc, squished into the front of my sports bra, while running and getting completely soaked by sweat and humidity?  Sorry, that's a little gross.  But I strive to be open and honest, and hey, I'm certainly not perfume and roses even half the time.  Anyway, Rory and I ran twice this weekend on the Greenway - a set of forested paths about a mile from our house.

The paths mostly follow a creek and are paved except for the footbridges that cross over marsh and wetlands.  What you're staring at is a forest cloaked in 97% humidity.  Oh, yes.  That air out there was heavy.  My clothes were completely drenched, and it should be noted that running in humidity like that is exhausting.  It just saps all endurance and wears you out in no time flat.  Running a slow three miles in that feels like a fast five miles in cooler and dryer weather.  Which probably explains why we saw almost no one either day.  But I'm not complaining; it's really nice to have forested paths all to ourselves.  One of my favorite sounds is the hushed rhythm of footfalls in nature.



Rory gets tuckered out in the oppressive humidity too, so I stopped to let her take a mid-run swim break.  Actually, I had planned to stop to let her get a quick drink, but she ran and jumped right in and then swam around. 

Flowers?  Lovely.  Wet dog?  Not so much.

Bo has been dutifully tending to our back yard and patio garden, and these Zinnias are just one of the blooms thriving out there.  I haven't lifted a finger with anything regarding our backyard except to get inordinantly excited over picking out seed packets.  Which he then planted and grew for me.  Such a spoiled life I lead.

Of course, I then oblige when he asks me to make cookies. Cookies with more chocolate than usual.  Cookies made with my fancy-dancy Sarandipity melting chocolates.

I may or may not have eaten cookies for dinner last night, and nothing else.  Whoops.

Word-full Wednesday: A Review That Makes My Heart Burst

(click-zoom to enlarge the print)

The Sarandipity Sweets listing on Yelp

Cooking with Sara: Coconut Macaroons

It's Thursday!  Which means it's my day to cook for the food blog!

As promised, here is the link for this recipe!

Coconut Macaroons on From Blah to Ta-Da

These little treats are pretty easy to throw together, but taste amazing.  (They're also gluten-free if you're of that nature.)  Definitely include the lemon zest in the recipe; it adds another level of yum. I'm so, so glad that Marnie convinced me to keep it in.

Tomorrow I'll be posting the recipe from our Peanut Butter Balls.... :)