I’m not sure how this all started, but every year I make Rachel a special cookie “cake”. It’s nothing more than a large chocolate chip cookie which I then frost in some sort of semi-creative manner. The most recent one was this weekend and I thought, what the heck, let’s upload ‘em for all the cool kids to see.

2005

Rachel and I had just finished reading The Hobbit. Along the way she grew fascinated by the runes and so we learned them. (The Hobbit runes are easy since they map directly to English.)

That’s when I decided on this design. The center says, “Happy Birthday Rachel”. Then around the edge it says, “One Cookie to Rule Them All.” I proudly displayed the result to her. My then nine-year-old daughter stared a bit, then flatly said, “You misspelled it.” “Huh? … Oh dang it, you’re right.” Extra credit points to anyone out there who catches it:

2006

We’re also big fans of Homestar Runner. If you’ve never seen it, it’s a funny animated web comic. Here’s the main character. I had to cheat on the eyes. They’re just paper:

2007

In October of 2006, we went to Party Pig to buy all sorts of Halloween-related gear for her birthday. In May. Yep, she wanted a Halloween Party that year. All her guests dressed up and we invited Jack Skellington too:

2008

The difficulty I had piping in Jack the previous year made me try fondant this year. Unfortunately, I spent so much time trying to get the materials prepared, I ran out of time to put the actual cookie together. The theme this year was “spa” and that’s supposed to be a woman with a towel on her head, cucumbers on her eyes, and wearing a green mud mask. It didn’t come out at all like I’d planned. (Story of my life. ) Check out that crappy piping!

2009

Last weekend I got to spend a little more time with the fondant and the results were much better. In fact, it was the exact same fondant from last year: I had a big wad of it leftover and so I kept it in the freezer.

Rachel had a roller skating party this year, and when I asked her how she wanted her cake decorated, she said simply, “Put a roller skate on it.”

Great. Hmmm… I did a Google Image Search and found this. I converted the image into four colors: white, pink, purple, and black, then printed out templates for each piece. After that it was just a matter of painstakingly cutting out pieces of fondant which stay frozen for only seconds at a time before they turn into goo. After a couple hours, though, I had the result. Not bad:

Can’t wait till next year…

Two hundred and ninety five days ago, when I embarked on this latest quest, my main goal was to get blood sugars back to reasonable levels. This was when I decided to focus on low glycemic foods and not worry so much about calories.

It didn’t take long, however, (two hours?) for me to realize that, yeah, calories are probably important too. As much as I like to eat all sorts of crap I shouldn’t be eating, there were two items I needed to deal with in particular. Namely:

1. Peanut Butter
2. Cashews

I went an amazingly long time without peanut butter. This might not sound like a big deal to most of you, but the rest of you know exactly what I’m talking about. We’re the type who can hold our breath longer than we can go without peanut butter. Unfortunately, peanut butter has an exceedingly high caloric density and that’s not good for someone with my condition. I swear I could eat an entire family sized jar of the crunchy stuff in a single sitting. I’d even need two spoons since I’d easily wear out the first one three quarters of the way through.

But if you think this sounds bad, then just wait until you hear about the cashews. This innocent looking can to the right is known as “Planter’s Cashews Halves and Pieces” though it should just come right out and say “Evil Halves and Pieces.” This 46 ounce container is a single serving of nuts, to the tune of 7,820 calories. Oh sure, it says it’s supposed to be 46 servings. But come on. If that were true I’d pop open the top and see 46 little packages inside. All I see inside this can is 46 ounces of unfettered nuts.

(Unfettered Nuts would be a good band name.)

I went a bunch of months without touching the things, but last Friday found an unopened jar in the pantry. I opened it. The good news is, I didn’t eat them in one serving. The bad news is, they’re still there, taunting, taunting, taunting me.

What’s a boy to do?

You probably know the song Love and Marriage by Frank Sinatra. In fact, there’s maybe even a fifty-fifty chance you know it without ever having seen Married: With Children. It’s a classic song, but in our house, it goes something like this:

Soup and sandwich
Soup and sandwich
Go together like … something witty that rhymes with soup and sandwich…
This I tell you, brother.
You can’t have one without the other.

Ignore the fact that I’ve yet to find a word that rhymes with sandwich. (I thought “orange” was bad enough.) Also ignore the fact that sometimes I pronounce it “thoup and thandwich” for reasons I won’t go into here. What’s important is that soup and sandwiches do go together like horses and carriages, especially if the soup is “tomato” and the sandwich is “grilled cheese.”

This isn’t something I particularly liked (or even tried for that matter) when I was a kid. So unlike most of my pizza and cheeseburger ramblings, this isn’t a taste combination I can claim to have loved my entire life. (There probably isn’t a kid alive who actually likes tomato soup, so this isn’t exactly an earth-shattering revelation.)

But this I tell you, brother, I’m sure glad I discovered it after getting all growed up. It really is one of natures perfect pairings.

The perfect sandwich uses American cheese. This fake stuff made out of I-don’t-know-what melts cleanly and uniformly, creating the perfect weld between two slices of white bread. The outsides of the bread should have been slathered in I Can’t Believe It’s Not Margarine and cooked quickly on a hot, non-stick pan.

The tomato soup should be of the Andy Warhol variety and prepared with milk instead of water. (Why water is even a rehydration option is beyond me.) Use a whisk to mix it and take care avoid burning. It heats up very quickly.

The proper eating technique is to dunk the sandwich into the tomato soup. You might find this extraordinarily similar to last week’s Toast and Hot Chocolate post. (And by now you’ve probably divined one of my most cherished eating paradigms.)

If you’ve tried this, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, set aside some time this Saturday. You won’t be sorry. In the meantime, I’m going to work on fixing the song.

Go together like a scratch and hand itch.
Go together like a ball and grand pitch.
Go together like a cut and planned stitch.
Go together like a boat and manned hitch.
Go together like a broom and tanned witch…

Hmmm… I’m getting there.

Everybody has a perfectly decadent little treat that they save for rare occasions, such as a birthday, the installation of a new pope, or a sunrise. It’s something you want to indulge in, but you know you shouldn’t—mostly because Oprah told you not to.

I have several items in this category, of course (pizza and Cheez-Its notwithstanding), but one of them you may find a bit unusual: toast and hot chocolate. While this sounds innocent enough, believe me, it’s far from it. Think of it like the cute little bunny from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Toast and hot chocolate is no ordinary rabbit.

The drink clocks in at perhaps 150 calories. So far, so good. Now for the toast. To do it right, each slice of toast must have one coat of butter and one coat of jelly. The butter tempers the overwhelming fruity assault of the jelly as well as giving each bite the wonderful, overall, buttery taste that improves everything from movie popcorn to M&Ms. At this point we’ve added at least another 150 calories into the mix.

Per slice.

And that’s the problem. I can eat fifty-seven slices of toast without even thinking about it. Each one is folded over, dunked in the hot cocoa, and consumed in less time than it takes a doctor to sign an insulin prescription. I inhale them so fast it gives the Hoover Vacuum research lab pause. Slice after slice, loaf after loaf, until the call goes out on Wall Street, “Buy Wonderbread stock!”

It’s not pretty, I tell you. Fortunately, I’m pretty good at keeping this particular craving at bay, having it only at the most rare occasions. Which reminds me. Does anyone know offhand how old Benedict XVI is?