Ready to go...

I finished sewing the binding on the second Linus quilt tonight:



Also, I e-mailed Quilt Asylum and yes, they are still a drop-off point, so I'll be taking these with me to turn in when I go down there tomorrow. They're smallish quilts (like, 36" by 48"), but maybe they will be just the right size for some child who needs them.

I'm really looking forward to the trip tomorrow. I think I really did spend too many weeks (too many weekends) over the fall working or staying home or just hanging around town. I probably need to plan some kind of "fun day" at least once a month.

Also, you know how I said I wondered if I'd cook more as I got my kitchen clearer and better organized? I have been this week, and I think I will continue. It's so much easier to cook or bake when you have enough space, when your counters aren't all occupied with canned goods or clean pots and pans you haven't put away yet.

For the first time ever, I baked something from the "Small-Batch Baking" cookbook I have. This is a cookbook designed to make quantities small enough for one or two people. A lot of the recipes use non-standard "pans" (many of the cakes are baked in cleaned-out 14 ounce cans; I keep hoping sometime to find a child's baking set with cake pans that small. Surely they exist; I had one when I was a child). So I've always been a little put off baking the actual cakes. But there are also cupcakes.



I altered this recipe just slightly; it called for two egg yolks but I decided to try one whole egg instead. (I read somewhere that much of the time one whole egg = two yolks and I didn't feel like separating the eggs and then figuring out what to do with the whites later on). The cupcakes worked, but the egg-for-egg yolks substitution may have led to them being slightly dryer, I can't tell.

(The local cupcake bakery place closed up. I'm disappointed but not terribly surprised - they were a very "specialty" item, they were kind of expensive, and they weren't better that what you can bake at home).

The frosting on these is the peanut butter frosting from the book, and it's really a very good frosting - I'll have to keep it in mind for other things. (For example, the plain cake-like chocolate cookie recipe I have)

I had one of the cupcakes after taking this photo; the other three will stay in the fridge and I think I can eat them up over the next several days. (Though in the future I might only frost one cupcake at a time and freeze the extras...often when I want a piece of cake or something I really only want ONE piece, and the leftover cake kind of sits around)