Easter Baking

Scrape! Scratch!

I never did find out what the scraping sound was that woke me up at 4AM. It sounded like mice in the walls behind my bed, but it could have been squirrels on the roof or raccoons playing with each other on the porch. I searched all over the house and found nothing out of order. I finally said "the heck with it" and passed out again until around 9:30.

Thanks to sleeping in again, I didn't get to doing the laundry until around 11:30. Dad was watching 50s and 60s sci-fi on the Fox Movie Channel. He made me a nice spaghetti-and-meatball lunch. After we ate and I put my clothes in the dryer, I went for a walk around the neighborhood. I stopped for a while at the Oaklyn Library and took out three DVDs I'd been wanting to see (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Kit Kitteredge: An American Girl, and Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day) and the newest Hannah Swenson mystery, Carrot Cake Murder.

I finally got home with the laundry around 2:30. I was about to put on Disc 2 of the Pennies From Heaven soundtrack LPs when I jostled the music room coffee table and knocked over that big red vase with the daffodils. What a mess THAT was! The carpet got soaked. The Winnie the Pooh Easter book next to it got wet, though thankfully it's a hardback and there wasn't much damage done. One of the daffodils broke and is hanging on its stem. The vase itself never left the table and is perfectly fine. I soaked tons of paper towels and one terry cloth towel mopping up the mess. The terry cloth towel and the table cloth were hung to dry. The carpet, at this writing, is STILL wet.

Spent the rest of the afternoon baking after I finally got the laundry put away. In honor of the upcoming Easter holiday, I decided to try a recipe for Easter Cookies from one of my British baking cookbooks. I used Smart Balance Butter Blend and substituted the last of my bag of Craisins for hard-to-find currants. I rarely make roll-out cookies outside of Christmas. They take so long to do and are so messy! After my Molasses Roll-Outs were such a big success, I decided I'd try a roll-out recipe I'd actually get to eat. I over-browned a few, but most of the cookies came out very well, spicy and not-too-sweet.

I watched Kit Kitteredge and Miss Pettigrew while I baked and made a simple dinner of cole slaw, steamed asparagus, applesauce, and the last leftover baked chicken leg. I really loved both films. They actually made for a nice double-feature. The two movies are both female-centric comedies set in the 1930s and based after popular books, with wonderful sets and costumes and excellent casts. Abigail Breslin shines as spunky would-be reporter Kit in the former. Amy Adams and Frances McDormand are equally good as the title character and the flighty singer/actress who hires her as her social secretary in the latter.