CuriousJayne

We hosted Jen’s going away party last night, so I made a pineapple upside down cake. I got the recipe from Amy Sedaris’ lovely book about entertaining, which is highly recommended. I also made salsa, donuts and cheeseballs. I made a lot of cheeseball so that I could reshape the leftovers into a new ball for another party (as per Amy’s advice), but there wasn’t any left.

I knew the party was a success when this happened:

I’ll miss you, Jen!

Last night I went to Hank and Heather’s holiday extravaganza complete with a white elephant gift exchange and fire pit. The highlights of the night were Jason stealing back his own gift (a Burt Reynolds triple feature DVD) and Hank yelling “don’t step on the hibiscus!” when the boys started roughhousing outside. I walked away with a pretty sweet basket of candy and movie passes which was pretty good considering there was a fart machine, a calendar of babies dressed up as fruit and a Burt Reynolds triple feature in the mix.

I wanted a winter dress for the party, so I chose this blue patterned dress at goodwill and cut it down to my size. I finished it minutes before we had to leave so I didn’t even have time to hem it. Here are two awkward pictures of me wearing it before and after.

I also made pumpkin cheesecake bars, which were lovely. Jason was especially fond of them. They are easy to make and are highly recommended. The recipe can be found here.

We all know that you could deep fry a fetus and it would probably taste ok. And deep frying buttermilk dough tastes pretty good too.  Andrea bought me a deep fryer for my birthday, so I’ve experimented with a couple of dough recipes, but my favorite uses the premade buttermilk biscuit dough in a can.  There are recipes for this method online, but it’s actually super easy, I wouldn’t even bother. All you need is a can of buttermilk biscuits and a few inches of oil in your pan/deep fryer.  Heat to 350 and use tongs to place the pre-cut biscuits in the oil.  Flip them after a minute or so and then take them out when they are golden delicious. You can top them with powdered sugar, sugar, glazes or whatever you feel like. I used nutella and a sugar/cinnamon mix. If you’re feeling really fancy, you can even cut holes in the middle to make them real donuts and then you can fry the donut holes too.