Saturday, July 27, 2013

Crunch Time

So this is what I had for breakfast this morning...

Very well-done Cinnamon Apple Pull-Apart Bread

I had a looong day yesterday. I ran 7 miles on the Monon Trail while my daughter danced. I LOVE running on the Monon! It's beautiful plus it's shady and paved and no cars. It was a great run. I even made a quick grocery trip afterwards before picking up my daughter. Then it was back to baking.

My house was just crazy yesterday. My husband was working from home and took over my kitchen table for most of the afternoon. Both girls were back to school clothes shopping online and kept wanting me to look at stuff. I FINALLY had some time to myself after supper.

So... the Cinnamon Apple bread was the last thing I made last night. Everything was going well until there was 15 minutes left on the timer. Then, I decided to lay down on the couch and relax a little until the oven timer went off... and I totally slept through the timer! I have never slept through any kind of alarm before. I guess I was really tired. Anyway, I woke up some time later wondering why the timer hadn't beeped, walked into the kitchen, then stared at the oven in horror when I realized the timer had already gone off. I was sick. Then I went to bed. It was 1 am.

For some odd reason I popped out of bed at 6:15 am today. I made my bread again.

Much better!


Then I remade the Honey Pecan Bars. Baked my sugar cookies to decorate and made Brickle Blondies as my dairy cookie. I also tried to remake my Honey Oatmeal bread because the top of the one I made yesterday was misshapen. For some reason though, the bread wouldn't rise a second time in the pan. I finally gave up on it because I just didn't have time to mess with it and took the misshapen loaf. I also remade my caramel corn.

New rule in my house: if any of the children need my help for a fair project or ANY project, they have to ask me to do it a week before it's due. In the middle of all my baking madness today I had to run to Walgreens to pick up the photos my younger daughter wanted to enter in the fair then run to Hobby Lobby for the mat board I had to cut. All the entries were due by 4 pm. It takes an hour to drive to the State Fairgrounds. I decided I was leaving the house at 2 pm today with whatever was done. So, at 1:30 pm, I am cutting mat boards and dry mounting photos for my daughter. I've got caramel corn cooling all over my counter. I have raw honey oatmeal bread dough still sitting in my bread proofer. I have a tray of Brickle cookies sitting on top of the proofer because I've run out of flat surfaces in my kitchen. There are old newspapers covering my entire kitchen table because I couldn't locate my cutting mat for my mat cutter, then I had to spray dry mount adhesive over everything. Oh, and I still have to type my Brickle cookie recipe since that was the dairy recipe I picked last minute. Forget about decorating my cookies! I decided that one wasn't going to get done. Essentially my kitchen looked pretty trashed. I pulled out of the driveway at 2:15 pm with Brickle cookies still cooling in the back of my car.

We got to the fairgrounds at 3:15 pm and it was anarchy at the Culinary Arts check in. I left my daughter in line and checked in our Photos and her Art, then went back to Culinary Arts and found that the line hadn't moved at all. We finally got out of there at 3:50 and the Culinary Arts check in line was still going up the stairs out of the building when we left.

I got 8 out of 9 items to the fair today. Not too bad. One year I had to leave an entire cake that I'd been working on for 2 days at home because I ran out of time for the final layer of icing. I ran into several people I know that compete every year still standing in line behind me when I left so at least I'm not the only one that is totally crazy on check-in day. I'm looking forward to reuniting with my kindred spirits at the fair on the 2nd!


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