If You Give a Mouse a Cookie...

I was planning to be productive today, I swear. All I had on my agenda was cleaning and lesson planning. That was it. For its part, the cleaning went great. We scoured the house from top to bottom, and it ended up looking better than it has in weeks. I paid special attention to the kitchen since it's spent most of the last month looking like it's been hit by a tornado.

After we finished, we realized that we were almost completely out of food, so we took a break to go grocery shopping. I happened to make an offhand comment to J about wanting to make some special hot chocolate tonight after dinner. This hot chocolate comes in incredibly hard chocolate wheels, which then have to be broken apart and blended with hot milk in a blender. It's delicious, but a PITA to make.

J half-jokingly commented that if I wanted hot chocolate we should probably buy a new blender since our current one was on its last legs. Seeing as how I'd owned the blender since college (and it had been a hand-me-down from my aunt before that) I didn't argue with him. We took the groceries home then headed back out to Linens N Things for a blender. Just a blender.

Well, if you're anything like me, you can't walk into Linens N Things without seeing at least a dozen household gadgets that you simply must have. I can usually resist the temptation to buy most of these things, but today I saw the ONE gadget that I'd secretly been pining for since I'd first seen it on an infomercial last year.



Bake and Fill cake pans!!!

If you haven't seen the infomercial, the purpose of these pans is to make cakes with more than one filling. For example:



They are possibly the coolest cake pans ever, and I've been sorely tempted to call the 1-800 number and order a set for myself on more than one occasion. Now, here they were right in front of me. Naturally, I grabbed J's arm and proceeded to tell him what a fabulous product this was and that I absolutely MUST have one. J, who knows better than to argue with me when I'm like this, told me to toss it in the cart, and, for good measure, to get the miniature set too. You know, just in case we ever need to make 10,000 filled cakes at the same time.

Well, since we were now buying these amazing cake pans, we obviously needed some cake mix and frosting. Back to the grocery store!


(pay no attention to the Snausages--we decided it wasn't fair for us to get treats if Jasper didn't get to have any)

By this point our whole schedule for the day was shot. It was late afternoon and I hadn't done an iota of lesson planning. Still, I wasn't about to let a little thing like my job get in the way of trying out my new toys. I proceeded to spend the next TWO HOURS in the kitchen, baking. I didn't get to my lesson planning until after 7:00, but I did end up with all of these goodies:


(for those of you wondering just WTF I baked, the ones on the left are miniature Funfetti cakes filled with vanilla pudding, the one in the middle is a Devil's Food cake filled with yellow cake, and the cupcakes on the right are just cupcakes.)

Oh, and my nice, clean kitchen? The kitchen I spent so much time scouring this morning? It once again looked like it had been hit by a tornado. A tornado that likes to bake.



Guess this means that I'll have to spend another morning cleaning it very soon. And then I might need to go to the grocery store to pick up a few things...