Downright Domesticity

In the last few weeks, I went from having a lot to do to having some free time on my hands. I finished up four classes, turned in the grades for the classes I was teaching, stopped seeing clients at Texas Tech, and got released from my calling. Right now, I am working a few hours a week at the Employee Assistance Program seeing clients, and collecting data for my dissertation. And, in between, I am working on a few things for publication, as well as getting ready to take my qualifying exams in August. But, for some reason, I still feel like I have a lot of extra time on my hands, probably because I am avoiding doing some of that stuff that I should be doing. And, for some unexplained reason, I have been feeling domestic lately. Those of you who are domestic every day may think I'm a jerk for talking about it like it's a hobby. Sorry.

Anyway, I got the urge to make a few things I have never made before. The first was rugelach. I am a big fan of Pioneer Woman. She is a witty blogger, and she does all of the things I aspire to do, from photography to cooking to being married to a cowboy. One of the things I love about Pioneer Woman is that she brings other food bloggers to her ranch and cooks things with them. Then she posts about them on her blog, and they post about her on their blogs, which makes it feel like all the people who have well-known blogs are good friends. It also reminds me of my childhood. When I was young (probably about four or five) I was a big fan of the reruns of the Monkees. My first celebrity crush was on Davy Jones. At the time, I had no concept that the show had taken place 20 years earlier. That reality check didn't come until a few years later when the Monkees put together a reunion tour and I saw how old he really was. I also remember watching a lot of Brady Bunch episodes, and the greatest day of my young life was the day that Davy Jones guest-starred on the Brady Bunch and Marsha got to KISS him! This event only served to further support my fantasy that people on live in an alternate universe in which they all know one another and hang out, and that, if I could get inside the TV, I could join them. Anyway, for me, as an adult, Pioneer Woman having Bakerella over is basically the same thing.

Last month, she had Deb, who writes the blog Smitten Kitchen, out to the ranch, and the two of them made, among other things, rugelach. Rugelach, not to be confused with arugula, which is a vegetable, is a type of Jewish cookie made out of dough rolled with nuts, cinnamon, dried fruit, and chocolate. Using Pioneer Woman's cinnamon roll dough, Deb made some rugelach that looked so good, I had to try it. Here's her recipe.

I bought jars to hold my sugar and flour. Look, I'm more domestic already.

This is the only counter space I have in my whole kitchen. Here it is with my rugelach dough rolled out on it. This rugelach had raspberry jam, brown sugar, white sugar, cinnamon, butter, golden raisins, chocolate, and pecans. 

I rolled it up and put it into muffin tins to bake.

And when it was all done, I iced it with cream cheese icing. This was the result. As for the taste, as it turned out, that was a lot of stuff for one pastry. While I like raspberry jam, and chocolate, and golden raisins, and pecans, and cinnamon-sugar, and cream cheese frosting, it was a lot to eat together. Plus, some of it leaked out of the dough while it was baking. However, I took them with me on a date, and my date and his parents raved about them. I wish I was making that up.

It turns out the cinnamon roll dough recipe makes a ton of dough. After cutting original dough recipe in half, I made a batch of rugelach and still had half the dough left. So I made Pioneer Woman's orange rolls, also.

Look how much I got out of a quarter batch of roll dough!

Don't hesitate to make these. However, I am going to warn you right now, in case you have never made any of Pioneer Woman's recipes: you will use more butter than you ever thought humanly possible. So make them, but then do what I do and try to get rid of them as fast as humanly possible. Again, my date and his family went crazy for them.

I also bought sewing machine that weekend. It's pretty rare for me to find a pair of pants short enough to wear off the rack, and in the last year, I have probably spent close to the price of my sewing machine getting my pants hemmed

So I bought a sewing machine and went to work hemming two pairs of pants and my new temple dress, which I bought in December and have been wearing since then with masking tape holding up the hem. I worry when I hem pants that I will hem one leg and not like the length, and then hem the other leg a different length, never be able to match them up, and end up with a pair of John Stockton shorts. Fortunately, that didn't happen.

Then, this weekend, we had a baby shower for Rebel, and she requested chocolate cupcakes with chocolate frosting. I made Bakerella's recipes for chocolate cupcakes and chocolate buttercream. Then, I saw Bakerella's cupcake tower and bought one to display my cupcakes and cup pies. And, for some reason, I thought it would be funny to decorate them with plastic babies. So this is my tribute to Bakerella and Cakewrecks.

I try not to think too much about why a baby would be sitting on an enormous brown swirl wearing nothing but a strange mohawk.

I really like the cupcake tower, though. I have a feeling I will get a lot of use out of it.

Whew! That was a lot of domesticity. I am also working on flowers for someone's wedding, but we'll make that a subject for another post. Now that I've baked everything I've ever had an urge to bake, I need to get back to the less fun parts of my life, like my job.