Candy Corn Cookies. Sort of.

Make sugar cookie dough.  You're on your own for this bit.

Divide into about a third (which you make yellow), kind of more than a third (which you make orange) and kind of less than a third, which you leave alone.

Role each bit into a same-lengthed tube, and then stack those tubes into an off-looking hot dog.  It is best to do this on some sort of parchment.

Bring up each side of parchment and press, to make a toblerone bar of dough.

Toss in fridge for a while until you remember it's there again.  Unpeel sides to reveal Pyramid of Flavor.

SLICE Pyramid of Flavor.

Because you have yellow sugar lying around, sprinkle the yellow bit with yellow sugar (if you have it lying around).

Bake.  Be sort of annoyed at the way they puff out on the sides and look more like beehives than candy corns. 

Google this problem.  Chuck the next batch in the fridge after slicing, because that's supposed to help with the spreading problem.  Be sort of annoyed when they only bee-hive slightly less. 

One-up the google by putting the next batch in the freezer after slicing.  No way is this good for my pans, yeah?  Going from freezer to oven?  Anyway, be sort of annoyed again when this continues to not work.

Since they're puffing out on the sides, press the sides of the last bit of Pyramid concave-like, and then slice, and then freeze, and then bake. 

Sigh.

The house didn't burn down and nobody died.

'Tis the season for pumpkins and parties, and we had many people over last night to partake of these things.

There were both beers and sharp knifes in abundance

so you knew there'd be blood, and you might've guessed it was going to be mine.  Hand-carving aside, the pumpkins all turned out pretty swell.

Hold on...there.

Mine is the badass second from the left with the missing toof. 

Boo's and my decorating efforts earlier this month did not go unrewarded.  People took family photos with the various decorations

and used them to terrorize each other

and small babies.

Even Sam Skellington got a piece of the action.

Those who went out dancing after or who rode their bikes to our house were forced to abandon their pumpkins to our mercy.  Our stoop is extra-festive as a result.

Bring on the small childrens.

Disaster-cakes!

I like to save my high-time-expenditure baking risks for family gatherings, because if I am going to take this long to do a thing, I want as many people around to eat the results as possible.

Bakerella made high-hat cupcakes, and they were beautiful, so I wanted to make high-hat cupcakes.  Good thing I had all day, because things went wrong from the word Go.

The cupcakes for the recipe were tender and fluffy, but fragile as all hell.

Those sorry bastards aren't going to be able to uphold any sort of hat.  So I threw together some brownie rounds for a sturdier base.

Hello, you dependable darlings.

And then I spent twelve minutes beating egg whites and sugar over a hot stove.

Deliciously worth it.  That frosting gets piped onto the rounds in the highest poo-frosting-spiral it will support.

The brownie rounds weren't terribly level, so many of them fell over.

But making eighty jillion always ensures that you'll still have an army left

even if half of them meet their sorry deaths on the way to the freezer.

Ok and so they hang out in the freezer solidifying for however long you feel like waiting, and then get dipped in melted chocolate.

Disaster-cake! 

Verdict:  Too much work, y'all, unless you are really trying to impress someone, or you have as many people to feed as you have disaster-cakes to make.  Because between the brownie (or whatever) base, the meranguey frosting, and the chocolate, these babies are too sweet to eat more than one of.  Diabeetus to go.

Thanksgiving weekend, you are so foody.

The weekend began auspiciously, with ferry donuts.

Ferry donuts!  You are so alluring.

And then we went to boo and Darren's for dinner and dessert (and second-dessert), and then I made disaster-cakes for Thanksgiving (about which more  later).

And then we put socks on the dog's ears (obviously).

And then we had dinner at my parents' place and everyone ate heartily.

And then we had dinner at Joel's aunt's place and there are no pictures because we were busy eating luxuriously and squealing over the house-renovations (there is a bar fridge in the bedroom). 

And then we ran 10k to make up for it all.

Turkey Trot!

Ahem.

Dear gals who sat behind us,

If you are looking for a light-hearted romp for your girls' night out, do not go see a movie about a guy buried in a box by terrorists.

Even if that guy is Ryan Reynolds.

Thanks,

Everyone else in the theater.

Other people's lives are boring.

Joel and I went to an improv festival on Saturday because improv is usually cheap and always mostly hilarious and a little bit bad.  The first of two acts was exactly that, and the second was The Life Game.

The Life Game is an improv act where a member of the audience is brought on stage and an interviewer asks them questions about their life which is then fodder for improvia.  In Joel's and my collective mind, this was going to be a sort of Where were you born, what was your first pet's name and what do you have in your pocket right now?  Go!

Alas, so much not that.  It was like sitting in on someone's therapy session.  The interviewer asks questions like, What are you most proud of?  What was your parents' relationship like?  Have you ever been in love?  And he says some things, and she's all, Hmmmm.  Wow.  And then there's dead air for eight seconds.

Every so (not) often (enough), the 'director' interrupts the interview all, Now I want to set up a scene where your dad is coming to pick you up from your mom's for the weekend.  And then two actors try to reproduce scenes from this guy's life.  Like, exactly.  The director interrupts every three lines to be like, Is this how it would be?  What can they do to make it more like how it would be?  So basically, how can we make this less funny, and more like your actual life.

We spent most of the way home trying to think of ways this Game could be interesting to watch.  Like, if the director was better.  Or if the interviewer asked more hilarious-inducing questions and fewer soul-searchers.  Or if the emphasis was on amusing the couple hundred audience members who paid to get in and be amused, rather than on verisimilitude.

Improv is not supposed to be life-like.  Right?

This is my best life.

Every day promises to be the last nice day, so it feels like a misdemeanor not to spend it at the beach.

Also, Dominoes had medium one-topping pizzas on for $4 yesterday, so we bought five.  I'm not cooking again for a week.

Sisterday Adventures!

I know my sister's only been to visit, like, twice, but I feel as though sisterdays are taking on a delicious pattern, probably because we do most of the same non-location-specific things when I come to the mainland.  Y'anyhoo, sisterdays in Victoria tend to begin at John's Place, where the bread is entirely too soft and buttery for anyone's well-being.

Thence to Russell Books, to handle and sniff the wares and discuss our future libraries, which will look a lot like this but with more rolling ladders.

And thence to the mall, where we talk each other out of buying things we already own several of (blue cowl-necked dresses!  The same dress, but in red!  Coats that end at the elbow and do nobody any good!) before buying grey tights and BA jackets and dead-child-bride dresses.

Always and eventually we end up baking something tasty.  The Pioneer Woman's 'Muffins That Taste Like Donuts' allegedly taste like donuts.  Which...inasmuch as anything that you dip in butter

and then into cinnamon sugar

is going to taste like a donut, these taste like donuts.  DONUFFINS! 

If you eat five of them you will feel sick.

Then we strew the Halloween decorations (more about which later and elsewhere), played several rounds of Bananagrams, and (lacking Clue) watched The Emperor's New Groove until we fell asleep.  Sisterdays are exhausting!

Thanks for making the eight-hour round-trip out here, boo, and for drawing a zombie on Sam's pumpkin's face, and for giving me back my sunglasses so I'm not stuck with the one-armed ones.

See you at Thanksgiving.