Happy Lunar New Year! &..The English Patient Book Review

Have a happy happy Lunar New Year everyone...

I was going to post about the Clementine Cake I made a couple weeks ago but...it's almost 3am! Uhoh. It's not going to be a good day tomorrow...I mean, later today. I will post about the cake (which was delicious, by the way) later on then.

The Most Amazing Brownies Ever. Period.

My friends DEVOURED these brownies. They ate a double batch at one party. Then they polished off a triple batch at the next. We were sugar high for the next hour, but that was alright, because these were amazing. Hard to stop at just one piece.I researched a long time to find a good butterless brownie recipe. Actually, I've only ever tried one recipe, and every time I want to try a different one, I can't bring myself to do it because I miss these ones so much, and if you're gonna bake a sweet treat then why wouldn't you go for your favourite? I've been meaning to try black-bean brownies for a while now, so hopefully one day I'll get a little tired of these and bake up a batch of those!
My sister, who really rarely eats a lot of sweets, LOVES this. She keeps telling me she'll get fat, the skinny squirt.

New Year's Resolutions

Here we go...

1) Do 6 laps on lane 8 on the track in 15 minutes. I've slowly slowed down over the course of the last three months, which is sad because I'd built up to 6 laps in 16 minutes or so... :( I don't like winter. It is not a good season to be out in the weather.

2) Drink two extra glasses of water than I usually would.

3) Get to bed at 11:30pm. No more 1am homework parties.

4) Get into UBC! Wheeee

5) Bake some of this stuff:
Lemon Olive Oil Cake
Ice Cream Scones
Sweet Potato Bundt Cake
Chocolate Puddle Cookies
Oven-Baked Fries
Lemon Meringue Pie
Chocolate Silk Pie
Blueberry Pie
Carrot Cake

...bake my sister some birthday cupcakes. And cake pops. She likes the pretty stuff.

6) 1 book/month. Start with Wuthering Heights.

7) Practice speaking French because God knows I've forgotten half the language. Maybe I should sign up for Explore again this year...

8) Get my driver's license. Immediately.

9) Start swimming again.

10) Check out some new restaurants. Stop going to Earls and Hmart and Whole Foods to 'eat out'.

Stuff I Did Over Winter Break

1) Baked:
Chewy Chocolate Cookies
Brownies (my friends' favourite)
Clementine Cake! Yummy.

2) Created my first cookie recipe! Cheerio Raisin Bites

3) Finished a couple books

4) Received about a ton of presents. BAKING EQUIPMENT! YIPPEE! I predict many a baking storm coming our way.

5) Went out to eat. A lot. And had so much cake. Urgh...

6) Jump-roped 3000 times in half an hour and near about killed myself the next day at taekwondo class. Did this thing twice and have plans to go out and do it again TODAY. Ow.

7) Turned 18. Omgosh old.

8) Cleaned my desk. It promptly went back to its original state after about a day.

9) Watched probably more than half of the 85 episodes of Family Outing*. Worked out my ab muscles a lot by laughing, chuckling, chortling, and choking.
* Korean TV show

10) Tried to do physics and math. Failed this.

11) Went boxing day shopping and wanted to jump off the escalator. Wouldn't have hurt myself anyway, there were just too many people crawling. all. over. the. mall.
No more of that, I say.

12) Bought some new clothes and shoes. Hate shopping now with a passion.

Quite an eventful two weeks. Most restful I've had in a few years, anyway.
Looking forward to the new year! Yay!

The Thirteenth Tale- Book Review (brief)

I always get annoyed with this kind of book. The kind that start out slow, then suddenly accelerate, and run along quite smoothly for a a while, and then crash and smoulder at the end. Yeah. I didn't even read the last couple of chapters because I was so disappointed. The middle of it was good because there was a lot of mystery and creepy stuff going on. I liked the stories of the past MUCH better than the seemingly whiny voice of Margaret, the girl who sets out to write the biography of a famous dying writer. Really? It just seems too unlikely that a writer as renowned as Vida Winter (fictional character in the book...) would choose a complete stranger to write down her life story. Oh well. Anyway, I liked it when Vida was the one talking, because Margaret just constantly whines about her dead twin. Which sounds bad, but she just goes on and on about it. That's all she cares about, apparently, apart from books. And I wouldn't mind that that much either, except then she goes and SEES her sister's ghost. It was just...too, well, unbelieveable. I'm usually a fan of ghost stories, but here, the ghost story seems forced, and an afterthought. Or maybe I just don't get the 'gothic' genre. Which is what this book is, from what I hear.
I would give this 2.5 out of 5, based solely on its ability to pull me in during Vida Winter's parts. Otherwise, I wouldn't like it at all.
Now, onto bigger and better books!

BBC Book List

I absolutely love book lists. I love that I can go down the list and check off the ones I've read and highlight the one's that pique my interest. But it also makes me feel lazy...I mean, how many years have I used the excuse of 'no time' as a measly excuse for not reading? I guess since whenever I started to be overwhelmed by the amount of studying I had to do. I've noticed that I only ever read books during the summer now, and even then, I tend to be impatient and flip to the back before I get through the first three chapters. BAD HABITS DIE HARD. I'm too impatient with books. I haven't read an entire book through from cover to cover since a very long time ago.

Acting happy and cheerful when really you're just plain FURIOUS inside is the worst kind of feeling in the world. It's a mixture of anger, pettiness, helplessness, and guilt. I'm angry at whatever made me mad in the first place, but also at myself for not being able to either let go of it or find a solution. I feel petty and feel like picking on everything about everyone, and don't feel like doing any favours for anyone. I feel helpless because I know there's a limit to all this, and that sooner or later I ought to stop being angry, but mostly because there's that steel cage of "happy girl" that I can't seem to bust out of. And then there's the guilt; the guilt that comes from letting out a bit of the monster seething underneath the surface to those closest to me; they usually get the brunt of my anger.
And then there are the days when those kind of people are the ones making you feel like a disaster zone inside, and those are the days that everything is intensified.
Today is just one of those days.
Stupid.

More Peanut Butter Cookies...

I definitely wasn't as much of a fan of these cookies as the other ones...these were just too brittle and hard to be classified as good PB cookies. To me, a good PB cookie is soft but a little crunchy from the tiny sugar crystals, and is chock-full of creamy peanut-buttery goodness. My sis described this texture as "suffocating" but I say PSHHH that's what peanut butter's supposed to be like! Well, I'm someone who eats a spoonful of PB in the morning with my banana, so I guess if you don't like PB and its natural texture too much then you won't really like these cookies. I don't know. All I know is that these are PB cookies that TASTE PB.

Oh. Wait a minute. I thought I was still talking about the cookies I posted about earlier today. Whoops!
These cookies here were alright, but rather dry for my taste. I also didn't have any crunchy PB on hand, so that may have made a big difference in the texture of the cookie. The PB I used was also organic and had no sugar added (only thing in there was peanuts!), so if you use some other brand the cookies will probably turn out sweeter.

Erm. I'm not sure which pictures are which...before or after baking?? These didn't really turn brown at all for me.

Peanut Butter Cookies From here

Ingredients:

1 cup white sugar
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup crunchy peanut butter
1 egg
½ cup uncooked oats1 tbsp vanilla extract
All you have to do is mix everything together and then spoon them on the cookie sheet. Bake at 350 degrees for 8-10 minutes.

Except...I decided to just squish the dough up into dense little balls. And I wanted to make them into peanut butter blossom-style cookies. But no one told me that you had to wait until AFTER the cookies were baked and hot to push a chocolate chip into them! So I did this before, when the dough was cold, and I was very puzzled as to why the cookies all crumbled into a big mess as soon as I pushed down on them. Fun stuff. Next time, I might do this with another recipe, preferable one that doesn't use oats since I think that made the dough even crumblier.

Peanut Butter Cookies- Flourless and EASY AS HECK

Alright. These cookies are IT. They have a nice sugary crunch, are soft and creamy like actual PB, and only require 3 ingredients, which makes them sooo easy to mix up and pop into the oven. Took me less than half an hour to have them baking and making the house all lovely-smelling. I love PB cookies...I've gotta figure out how to make a good PB-chocolate cookie soon because I loooove Reese's pieces. Favourite chocolate bar ever. Mmmm.

Here are some pictures:

A Day Like This...

a day like this calls for cookies and and greek yogurt with tons and tons of ooey-gooey honey. greek yogurt is my substitute for ice cream. i figure, if i'm eating something to feel good, why the heck would i eat something that feels good at the moment but horrible after the last smooth, cold, creamy spoonful makes it down my throat? i can get all that from yogurt.
and today? yeah. i need some of that today. something to help me forget what's going on around me, something to help me figure out how to feel. properly. because right now everything's a muddle. a big, huge mess.
not good.
hopefully that half-container of greek yogurt'll help some.