I charge thee...

I have but a simple message for you all on this fine, fine evening: if you have not yet experienced the wonder of sliced, frozen banana, it's high time.

The specifics are these:

• You must slice, then freeze. No one wants to make unattractive noises and flail upon realizing that biting off a big chunk makes your teeth very very cold.
• You must eat with your fingers. It's just banana slices. There's no reason to bring silverware into this.
• The experience really is heightened if you think of yourself as a three-year-old while eating. I mean, if you're picking up banana slices and smiling to yourself about how delicious they are, don't you just get that popsicle-on-a-playground feeling? And aren't all playgrounds built for three-year-olds?

Now hop to it. No time to waste. Those bananas are calling your name.

Everything's coming up roses.

Not too terribly long ago, I had to meet with the dean of the conservatory at Wheaton to switch from being an arts and sciences kid to being a conservatory kid. And in this meeting (I'm skipping a lot of steps of this story here), I was essentially double-dog-dared to find a pit conductor in the Chicago area to follow around, admire, badger with questions, and just generally stalk. All of this by spring break (which is fast approaching, I've realized). So beauty of beauties, I did, with much help from various faculty in getting email addresses, setting things up, all that. All this to say, last night, I spent a solid six-and-a-half hours at Drury Lane Theatre in a nearby little suburb for their current production of Gypsy. And it was supah fun.

There were two shows last night, one at 5, and one at 8:30. For the first, I sat with the other pit-dwellers on my own little bench with the heavily marked-up score, borrowed from the assistant conductor. And I wore cute little headphones that fed a little bit of everyone in the band, a little bit of all the people on stage, and a lot of the double bass (since his balance control box was the one I was hooked up to). And this was when I learned that the people playing in this pit (a) cannot see a thing going on onstage, and (b) cannot see the conductor except via a tiny screen clipped to the stand. Exciting times.

But not as exciting as the second show, when (brace your collective internet self) I sat on the podium next to the conductor. Who was also playing keyboard. And cuing everybody everywhere. And turning a million tiny knobs and pushing a jillion tiny buttons and flipping a kazillion equally heavily marked-up pages. This wasn't exciting only because I could see the spit flying from the actors' mouths, or because some actors stood five feet away from me to address "Mister Conductor," but because of a little something that happened during intermission. I was just minding my own business, getting comfy in my very prominent chair for Act 2, when a teenage girl walked up to the pit, held out her Playbill, and said, "Could one of the two of you please sign my program and date it?" at which point I snerked and turned to the conductor, saying, "Pretty sure she means you." But 'twould have been mighty funny if I had signed and dated her program. As if anything would have gone differently at all had I not been there.

In any case. It was a lovely evening. And he even invited me back to come see the show from the house tonight. And I get to bring a friend. Tickets? Totally unnecessary. We're just meeting him in the lobby, and he'll walk us in. Oh, don't mind me, just being chummy with important people in the real world.

Insanity, baked.

I'll cut right to the chase: Wheaton has bizarre things called raids whereby your hall stays up very late and puts on a themed event for the other halls on your floor. There are loud raids and silent raids. Loud raids involve waking up the people on the other halls and forcing them to watch you sing and dance and play silly games. Silent raids involve being very quiet, decorating the other halls and leaving cute little (often edible) presents for them to wake up to at reasonable hours.

And this is all relevant BECAUSE my hall did a little silent raid last night. And as you would expect, I was in charge of the cute little edible presents. And as you would expect, I went a little overboard. Because when you have to make 200 cookies, why wouldn't you do something as elaborate as possible? I mean, it's Valentine's. It's all about being elaborate.

Yes, I know, the quality's awful. But when you just made 200
cookies, you don't exactly feel like finding a real camera.

If you couldn't tell, these were a lot of work. But they were also fun. I got to be super-sneaky -- aside from separating eggs, softening butter, and actually baking these guys, all of this happened in our floor lounge, which is definitely not a kitchen. And I got to do all sorts of fun fractions to figure out how many parts to cut each log into during the slicing phase. And making royal icing means getting rid of excess royal icing, which translates roughly to roaming our hall asking if anyone wanted "frosting à la carte" (which they did).

And even better, I was able to make cookies to my heart's content and know that they would all be eaten, no pushing or shoving required. It was delightful, except for the waking-up-this-morning-after-only-five-hours-of-sleep thing. Small potatoes.

BCC, round 1.

So many developments! Mother of all mothers responded to my plea for sample buffalo chip cookies, which I happily received, photographed, measured, analyzed, and ate. Here is what I noted:

• These are big cookies. On average, they're about 2 1/2" in diameter and 1 1/4" tall at their thickest point. Think dome-shaped. (Actually, now that I think about it, they could theoretically be half-spheres, but the likelihood of that actually happening is on the slim side. For sure.)
• These are dense cookies. There's so much stuff in them that's not actual dough - chocolate chips, corn flakes, coconut, toffee chips, pecans, and oats - that these cookies end up being very, very heavy.
• These are weird cookies. They're not quite crunchy, not quite soft. They crackle when you chew them (thanks, cornflakes), but they don't crumble when you bite into them. 
• These are sneaky cookies. You don't taste every ingredient at once (particularly looking at these little toffee chips). And the oats? You have to hunt for them. There aren't very many. Chocolate chips, on the other hand, are everywhere.

With this in mind, I tweaked some random internet buffalo chip cookie recipe, and this is what I got, ingredient-wise:

2 sticks butter
1 cup light brown sugar
1 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
1 1/2 tsp. vanilla
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
2 cups flour
1 1/2 cups oats
2 cups cornflakes
1 1/2 cups chocolate chips
3/4 cup Heath bar pieces/toffee chips
1 cup pecans, coarsely chopped
3/4 cup unsweetened coconut

OK, now looking at that list, you might not see any red flags. Clearly, you don't live in Tinytown, Illinois, where grocery stores decide not to carry unsweetened coconut. All of this led to a little experiment in my bathroom involving me, a bag of sweetened coconut, two bowls, and lots of rinsing, squeezing dry, re-rinsing, and re-squeezing. Yes, you read that right: I unsweetened a bag of sweetened coconut. Dedication right there. (Also, I'm never buying sweetened coconut again because there is some serious funk coating those flakes.)

But I finally got around to making the first batch, and after tasting the dough, it seemed like it might need a little more salt, a little less sugar, some more chocolate chips, and maybe a few fewer cornflakes. Science detour time: sugar makes cookies spread, so I had a hunch that if there really was too much sugar, then the cookies would spread more than they should. And guess what. They did. Science is a winner.

Also, the yield on this recipe is insane. I halved the one I found online to get this recipe, and it still made close to 60 normal-sized cookies. Sixty! Ridiculous! (I mean, my music theory class was happy, but still.)

Flavor-wise, pretty good. I think the proportions of mix-ins are good. Texture-wise, they were a little gooey. (I'm blaming the sugar.) And they browned on top before they were done inside, so I'll have to toy with the temperature a little. But overall, not a bad start.

So for next time: less sugar. More salt. Maybe more chocolate chips. Keeping the cornflakes where they are. Fixing temperature problems.

And I have pictures! Original first, my first attempt second.

deliciousness, half-eaten.

newbies, in abundance.

Resolution.

It's nearly the end of January, and I've just now come up with a resolution for 2012, one that I'm really excited about.

In Houston, there's a somewhat elitist, somewhat sneaky little business that sells take-and-bake meals for busy parents who apparently don't understand the catharsis cooking provides. In addition to these meals, the woman who owns the business made some top secret "buffalo chip" cookies (hereafter BCCs), which she sold for a pretty ridiculous price, especially considering that the base for the cookies was bought in bulk and then embellished. Not cool, Madame Baker. I'm onto you.

IN ANY CASE. This semester, my little buffalo chip cookie, I will figure out your secrets. I will make many many versions of you and force you on my roommate, suitemates, floormates, orchestramates. I will conquer this ludicrous $1.25-a-cookie nonsense. I will discover your recipe, or something close enough to be a stunt double. And hopefully, come semester's end, you, the blog-bearing world, will have access to the fruits of my labor. Because no one should charge that much for a cookie. No one should be able to call "secret recipe" on a cookie that's not even made from scratch. Disgusting.

Here's what I know so far:

• The cookie does not spread when it bakes. It is a tall cookie, a beauty, more like a mound than a disc. 
• Cookies made with butter tend to spread more than cookies made with shortening. Cold dough spreads less than room temperature dough. 
• Alton Brown did an experiment with chocolate chip cookies, changing key variables to make them thin, puffy, or chewy.
• The texture of BCCs comes from some combination of oats, cornflakes, coconut, and chocolate chips, with additional help coming from any number of sources, such as pecans, potato chips, or rice krispies.
• They are delicious.

And now, a poem, inspired by Pippin:

We've got magic to do, just for you
We've got oats and 'flakes to bake
We've got cookies to form, ovens to warm
Apron strings to take by storm
As this recipe we will make


*Note to Mom: Any li'l buffalo chippers you want to send my way will most definitely prove useful as taste-testing subjects. Just sayin'.

Surprise! (snicker, giggle, ha!)

This weekend was the culmination of So Very Much. Way back in October, I told my really great friend Laura that I, so unfortunately, would not be able to go to her senior recital on January 20 because I would be back in Illinois.

Then, when I was invited to the Facebook event for the recital (darn you, Facebook), I had a moment where I wished I could "pull a Jonathan Moore," a phrase which here means "show up to the senior recital of a person a year younger than you who most definitely did not know you were coming," which was exactly what happened to me at my recital last March.  And wishing all this made me think, "What if I did?" Alas, I discovered that I was to play in a concert on the very same afternoon at the very same hour as her recital. It was with the heaviest of hearts that I relayed this news to Laura.

This looks like my heart was heavy, no?

But then, fast-forward to the end of October. Inspiration struck. I discovered that the concert on January 20 wasn't actually a full-blown orchestra concert. It was just a concert featuring concerto competition winners, whom the orchestra was to accompany. Knowing that concerto orchestrations don't always call for a full horn section, a little baby plan was born in my brain. In the few weeks that followed, I was more or less on edge about asking my orchestra conductor, who at the time seemed very menacing and rather uncompromising, if it would please please please be all right for me to skip the January 20 concert in favor of going to my friend's recital. Apparently, it was a good day for him, or someone had given him cookies or something (now that I think about it, we did have cookies at rehearsal that day), because he didn't seem to have a problem with any of it. Scuzzore.

After this was all the waiting. And the secret-keeping. Because at that point, I had a perfectly great, documented excuse for missing the recital, we'd both gone through the disappointment of it all, and I love being sneaky and surprising. So I didn't tell her. Oops. This was especially hard when I would find myself sitting on her bed, and I listened to her lament that she'd chosen THE ONE FRIDAY I couldn't possibly be there. And I had to sympathize without laughing. I'd like to think I gained some acting skills somewhere in there, but one can't be sure. But it was by far the biggest secret I've ever had to keep from someone. It was thrilling.


And once school got back for the second semester, coming home two weeks later was pretty much my motivation for everything. My deepest apologies to all at Wheaton who heard way more than they ever wanted to about all this. I had to tell somebody, and Laura wasn't exactly available. January 19 came, I flew home and called Laura after my "grueling rehearsal for the concert," then proceeded to be jumpy, nervous, excited - the whole bit - for the following sixteen or so hours. Lots of sneakiness ensued, waiting in the car until the coast was clear, slumping in my chair in the back so as not to be seen, and then getting to deliver my favorite surprise ever after the recital. It would have made for great TV. OH WAIT. It did. Keep half an eye on my little Facebook page for a video soon. Because of course you're all as interested in this as I am. Right. Good. For now, photos will have to suffice.

So so much fun.

A first time for everything.

Tonight, I experienced a first. I had my first slip-fall in the snow. There are three things deserving blame:
1. I am not all that graceful.
2. These boots, ooh, they do NOT have traction. Warm? Yes. Fuzzy? Yes. 'Tractive? Nope. Will I keep wearing them? Oh, sure.
3. I was impatient (or something), so I cut across a snowy field when there were perfectly lovely snow-free sidewalks available.

Verdict: it's all the fault of the boot company. I'm ruling out numbers 1 and 3 as irrelevant.