Weekend Wind-Down #75

Yesterday afternoon, Missy and I headed out to SANDY CREEK PARK to attend the burton + BURTON COMPANY PICNIC. It was a chance to hang out with our co-workers and their families outside of our regular work environment. In these tough economic times, I guess it's lucky that our company can even afford to host a company picnic, though on a much smaller scale than previous events (they gave away televisions and iPods at last year's picnic - things can change a lot in just a year). Missy brought along her COOKIE MONSTER CUPCAKES to enter into the dessert contest...















There were lots of different contests, most of them geared towards little kids...Missy entered the HULA HOOP CONTEST and practiced a bit before the competition...

WORK 6551 from Raoul de la Cruz on Vimeo.

Unfortunately, Missy didn't practice enough and ended up getting eliminated in the first round. Oh well...

WORK 6561 from Raoul de la Cruz on Vimeo.

Even Maxine, the owner and president of our company, showed off her impressive hula hooping skills...





FAVORITE MOMENT OF THE PAST WEEK?
MISSY - Making our Cookie Monster cupcakes!
RAOUL - Making the cupcakes was pretty fun I guess...

WORST MOMENT OF THE PAST WEEK?
MISSY - Losing the dessert contest!
RAOUL - Not even placing in the dessert contest.

FUNNIEST MOMENT OF THE PAST WEEK?
MISSY - Seeing how the cupcakes turned out different than what I imagined.
RAOUL - The cracked-out Cookie Monster cupcakes we made!

WORD OR PHRASE OF THE PAST WEEK?
MISSY - "Snake charmer"
RAOUL - "Crack attack!"

FAVORITE MEAL OF THE PAST WEEK?
MISSY - The Indian Feast at The Grit.
RAOUL - The super nachos, two nights in a row at Willie's.

FAVORITE GAME AT THE COMPANY PICNIC?
MISSY - The hula hoop contest.
RAOUL - Crack attack!

THREE THINGS ON YOUR SHOPPING LIST FOR THIS WEEK?
MISSY - Lettuce, rice, pizza.
RAOUL - Apples, orange juice, ginseng.

PERSONAL SOUNDTRACK FOR THE PAST WEEK?
MISSY - Beirut, A Hawk And A Hacksaw, They Might Be Giants, Alternative Kitchen Garden podcast.
RAOUL - Built To Spill, New Order, Vampire Weekend, The Cure, Best Coast, Anti-Pop Consortium, Grizzly Bear, The Wolfgang Press, My Brightest Diamond, Beirut, Santigold, Swag Surfing mix on Mad Decent podcast, Studio One Funk compilation on Soul Jazz Records.

Snuggle Bunny Monday

Oreo in her blanket., originally uploaded by sugar-cookie.

Here are some cute Oreo pictures. It is Oreo in three parts. She is playing in her little blankie!

Party Monster

Saturday night, Missy started baking CUPCAKES for the dessert contest at the company picnic the following afternoon. Her idea was to bake up a batch of cupcakes that she would decorate as miniature COOKIE MONSTERS eating miniature CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES. She mixed up some batter to which she added in chocolate chips and folded in fluffy egg whites which she whipped up with the help of her trusty KitchenAid mixer...

















While the cupcakes baked, Missy started in on the BUTTER CREAM ICING. She added blue and red FOOD COLORING until she got the shade of blue she was looking for (or something close to it). She applied the icing to the cupcakes after they had cooled off, and then we stashed them in the fridge to let them set up over night...







Sunday morning, we took the cupcakes out of the fridge and started decorating them with faces. We practiced our technique on a batch of "test cupcakes". The folks on ACE OF CAKES make cake decorating seem like it's a fairly easy task, but it proved to be a lot more difficult than we had hoped. To our chagrin, most of the Cookie Monster faces came out looking really stoned or else really demented...I totally got a kick out of that. Missy, on the other hand, was hoping they would come out looking a lot cuter. After Missy dotted all the eyes, I went in and added on all the mouths...



















We took miniature chocolate chip cookies and cut them half. Missy crammed the halves into some of the Cookie Monster mouths. We weren't entirely sure if it was the desired effect we were looking for but we laughed and rolled with it anyways. Win or lose, we had fun with our attempt at cake decoration...







I secretly wished that the MULTI-EYED CUPCAKE in our test batch would come haunt me in my dreams...

Sketchbook Sunday

Behold...the original concept sketch that I did for the header of the RANCHO COCOA blog. I think I was thinking of an actual image of Nilla posing with a mug full of hot cocoa, floating in star-filled outer space, with "Rancho Cocoa" spelled out on Nilla's body. The background of the rest of the blog was going to be black with white borders and white lettering throughout. Needless to say, we abandoned that idea. The overall design that Missy finally came up with for the blog is way better than anything I had in mind!

Mo' Money, Mo' Problems

No money...know problems.