it's friday!

It's Friday! The start of a bad day. I just want to crawl back in bed, not ready to face the world. Another day of work that I do not want to deal with. I have gels to run, precipitations to do that I most likely will not get to, primers to resuspend, testing of new primers, and more isolations. Arg. And to top that, dinner get-together tonight that I am no longer in the mood for. It's just one of those days that I wish I had my headphones and can listen to music all day - that or just not go to work! My mantra for the day will be: must not bite anyone's head off. Roar...

sucky weather at home

So far I have been traveling home every weekend and this weekend was the most cloudy and gloomy of them all! To pass the time, I baked and cooked, and of course, knitted! My first panel of the afghan is progressing so slowly! I wish I was a speedy knitter and be able to finish the afghan in a matter of weeks, instead of months, or even years.

Here are some yummy baked goods that I have created this weekend.

The first pictures is actually a blueberry cupcake that I made a month ago.

And this is a little Calzone Cuppie. I found the recipe on Vanessa's Contessa. She has the most creative cupcake recipes that I have seen. This is basically a mini-pizza, yummy and delicious!

And here I made two types of cookies, a regular chocolate chip and a chocolate chocolate chip cookie, both with white chocolate chips inside! It was my first time baking homemade cookies from scratch and they turned out decent in my opinion, especially the double chocolate one. It was actually less sweet than I would have expected.

Unfortunately, not all of my attempts were successful. My Chicken Tikka Marsala did not even taste remotely close to any tikka Marsala I had ever eaten. Bleh. Hopefully I can breathe some life back into the recipe and nail it on the second try! My beef satays on the other hand came out unexpectedly scrumptious! The marinate that I used was so tasty, and I did not even use a recipe for it - tons of eyeballing and tasting. It was a very tummy-filling weekend and I'm ecstatic that I brought some of my mom's homemade wontons back to Davis with me. Delightful flavors in every bite!

favorite blogs

Lately I have become quite fascinated with food blogs, in particular, baked goods! Seeing all the beautifully imagery of cupcakes, cakes, and cookies makes me want to drive to the nearest grocery store and try my luck at recreating them. And since Halloween is creeping up, I was looking for something along the theme and I stumbled upon this gorgeous creation at bakerella.com. It is the spider and chocolate cookies! If only it did not require colored icing, which means that I will have to go get me some food coloring of sorts - annoying since I will not need a lot of it. Someday, hopefully soon, I hope to be able to create beautiful sugar cookies with icing, and layered cakes with delicious creams in between! I would love to be able to bake all day and just learn the art. Too bad not a lot of people in my family like sweets which leads to my brother and I consuming most of the goods and packing some pounds along the way.