Further Frivolous Commentary on Pink Roller Skates

Another fresh-meat girl has pink roller skates, too. I noticed this during her first practice while I was skating backwards. I was so entranced that I almost ran into someone behind me. Her wheels are the color of raspberry sorbet. Delicious roller skate wheels, nom nom nom…

Effing Delicious Ginger Cupcakes

I found this recipe for Rose and Ginger Cupcakes on the Martha Stewart website. There was a comment that the cupcake-to-glaze proportions were way off. I was quick to take the comment with NO grains of salt because I still have a massive container of Bailey’s frosting in my freezer from my Irish Car Bomb adventure and I’m pretty sick of amassing seemingly endless leftover frosting/icing. So, of course I halved what I already intended to make of the glaze (I was already halving the recipe overall). And if I made these cupcakes again, I would omit the glaze entirely.

The glaze was pink, so it had that much going for it.

I wouldn’t make it with the glaze at all because these cupcakes are best when plain and warm. They had been out of the oven for maybe fifteen or twenty minutes by the time I had distributed my lacking batch of glaze over maybe half of the cupcakes I made (it fell short) and sunk my teeth into one of the plain ones. As interesting and delectable as I found the rosewater taste to be, there is no replacement for the convergence of warm flavor of ginger and temperature warmth of a baked good fresh out of the oven. Unless you’re someone who doesn’t like ginger, in which case I guess there are plenty of replacements.

In the interest of full disclosure, it’s worth mentioning that slashing the glaze-to-cupcake proportion isn’t the only way I detracted from the original recipe. The original recipe calls for 3 egg whites; I put in 2 eggs. Yolks and whites. Technically, it should have been 1.5 egg whites, but it was after a long day and I was experiencing a small lapse of giving any fucks. I used all-purpose flour instead of cake flour for similar reasons.

I also added more candied ginger than was called for: something I would strongly recommend you do if you like ginger as much as I do. The bag of crystallized ginger chips I was using was already open. When I went to measure out the tablespoon that the recipe prescribed, I reinterpreted the measurement to…the whole bag (because I have boundary issues?). Like I said, the bag was already open, but a good 5 or 6 ounces went tumbling into the bowl of the stand mixer. AND IT TURNED OUT FUCKING DELICIOUS.

The glaze, mind you, wasn’t gross or anything. It tasted interesting, and if you’re going to dismiss my testimonies of the awesomeness that is these cupcakes when they are plain, then do so with the knowledge that you’re not going to want to halve anything. You especially won’t want to halve the batch of glaze if you want it to flush out with the top of the cupcake wrapper like in the picture on the original recipe.

HEY, YOU KNOW WHAT ELSE IS PINK?!

This house in San Francisco is pink!

The laces and the wheels on these roller skates are pink too!

So are these high top Converse!

They may have been pinker at an earlier point in their shoe-lives.

As are these strange pickles occupying my avocado wrap!

And these flower petals that are having a dramatic moment in the sunset!

AND! AND! AND!

The cupcakes on the front of this play-microwave!

Irish Car Bomb Cupcakes

HEY YOU GUYS

I agreed to go to my roller derby league’s birthday party last weekend. Big party, 40+ people out of the 70-some-odd in the league were there. I’m not good with parties, but I went anyway. Why would I condemn myself to a few hours of feeling intimidated with the task of solving the Rubik’s Cube of idle socialization?

Because I like my league.

AND

Because it meant I could make, like, FIFTY cupcakes!

Pre-ganache-and-frosting, obvi.

It gets better!

I made IRISH CAR BOMB CUPCAKES!

An Irish Car Bomb is a cocktail. A shot glass that’s half-full of whiskey and half-full of Irish crème liqueur is dropped into a pint of stout and consumed quickly. Irish Car Bomb cupcakes feature chocolate cupcakes made with stout, whiskey chocolate ganache, and Irish crème liqueur frosting. Yes, it’s buh-genius, and you can find recipes for it all over the Internetz. I used the Brown Eyed Baker’s.

My favorite part about making these cupcakes was the ganache. Making ganache is like a magic trick.

One minute it looks like this...

...and the next minute it’s like this! Whoa!

As so directed by to the afore-linked-to Brown Eyed Baker’s instructions, I scooped out the insides of the cupcakes and filled them with ganache (which went over well – a jammer from the A team said that she liked the “surprise”). I later stumbled across a version of the recipe where the cupcake is merely dipped in the ganache without any digging involved. If you’re contemplating making Irish Car Bomb cupcakes and don’t want a sizable Tupperware full of little cupcake caps leftover, you might want to be aware of the dipping option.

Pro-tip: if you want the ganache to look all shiny (it’ll only matter to you, probably,
because it’ll get covered with frosting), don’t fill just one cupcake before sticking
the ganache in the refrigerator for a few hours before finishing the rest.

Maybe the leftovers won’t annoy you like they annoyed me. Not only did I have a bunch of caps, I also had a ludicrous amount of frosting. I am SO over having frosting leftover in my refrigerator, people! EVERY TIME I make cupcakes, I swurr…

Do you SEE this?
This isn’t even ALL of the leftover frosting!

If the ganache magic trick was my favorite part of making the cupcakes, my favorite part of delivering was hauling ass down the freeway listening to RATM’s Renegades with no less than FIFTY cupcakes in the backseat. That’s a moment I wouldn’t mind having replayed to me on Judgment Day. Sweet sassy molassey, I felt like a bad ass. I wonder if that’s how caterers feel while they’re driving a vanload of food to an event.

The one underneath is full.

If the experience will attest, Irish Car Bomb cupcakes are a crowd pleaser (unless there’s a score of people who thought they were awful and I didn’t hear about it – not outside the realm of possibilities since I ended up in a corner for most of the party). When I crashed one of the higher-level practices a few days later (not just because it’s encouraged, but because I have boundary issues), I was asked if I was “the one who made the cupcakes” because they were really good. All I did was follow the recipe. It’s a pretty simple formula for feeling like a bad ass.

How are you with parties?
Any experience with Irish Car Bomb cupcakes?
If you were hauling ass down the freeway with FIFTY cupcakes in the backseat, what would you want to listen to?

Breakfast Enchiladas

In order to accurately execute my parents’ favorite chili recipe, one is required to buy a specific chili mix but not use all of it. Therefore, every time my parents make chili, they end up with a byproduct of little plastic packages of masa harina. My dad feels obligated to find a way to use the leftover masa. It’s a burden on his soul to open the cupboard and endure the stack of accumulated plastic packets staring back at him like a pile of whining, orphan-puppies. Thus, my dad has been trying to incorporate said whining puppies into his homemade tortillas, even though he’d prefer not to, as he doesn’t like the way it gums up the tortilla maker.

Or at least it was a burden on his soul. Until I stepped in, and reassured him: I’ll fix this! I may be a vegetarian, but I’ll find a way to eat those puppies!

Which is how I ended up making these delicious breakfast enchiladas!

I never had breakfast enchiladas before, but I had had my share of unhappy encounters with breakfast burritos. In my experience, breakfast burritos take all the good flavors that usually occur in a burrito and either throw them out the window altogether or have them irrevocably upstaged by egg. Don’t get me wrong: eggs are good. But if I sink my teeth into a burrito and all I can taste is egg, I’m going to be sad.

Hence, there were no eggs in my breakfast enchiladas. If you want eggs in your breakfast enchilada, then mazel tov! But, save for the crepe batter, mine didn’t. Crepes may not inherently be a breakfast food, but they may have been the most breakfast-y thing about my breakfast enchiladas. I figured out the crepe recipe by starting with a masa pancake recipe, then comparing the ingredient list and proportions of ingredients with crepe recipes. Ultimately, it went something like this:

Masa Crepes

4 packets (~1 cup) masa
1 t salt
1 cup milk (actually, now that I think of it, it might be 1 ½ cups)
½ cup water
2 eggs
2 T melted butter
(optional) 1 cup frozen corn

Now I’m going to talk at you like I’m giving directions.

1. Combine the masa and the salt in a medium-sized glass bowl.
2. Combine the water and milk into a measuring cup or something.
3. Dump the contents of the measuring cup into the dry ingredients in the glass bowl and whisk as if real, live, orphan puppies depend on you (until it’s smooth).
4. Beat the eggs a little, then add to the mixture and whisk more.
5. Whisk in the melted butter last.
6. Let the batter sit for 20+ minutes.
7. Add a cup of frozen corn to the batter if you want. I did. I’m not sorry.
8. Heat a skillet until the moment when the water skitters when you flick it onto the surface.
9. Pour ½ cup of batter in the middle of the skillet, tilt and rotate the pan so the batter spreads out evenly. Given the purpose of the crepe in this situation, the crepe doesn’t have to be super daintily thin.
10. Cook for about twoish minutes (you want it to be light brown), then flip and cook the other side for two minutes.
11. If your skillet’s not non-stick, you’ll want to re-oil after each crepe probably. 

Crepe pan action!

I like these last two shots...

...because they look like the culinary cousin of the Blob.
(I mean, clearly I haven’t seen The Blob, but a girl can enjoy herself.)

What I used for the rest of the enchilada:

Rolled Inside:

• cheese (Jack, but cheddar wouldn’t be a bad idea.)
• nuked frozen corn
• sour cream
• one of the savory black bean cupcakes from the close-to-neverending-stash in your refrigerator (or, in the case of someone who isn’t whittling down a huge stash of leftover savory cupcakes: beans, I guess)
• sweet potato (diced, put into an oiled baking dish, and stuck in the oven for 45 minutes at 425 degrees F, tossed every fifteen minutes)
• I didn’t use guacamole, but I would if I did it over again.

Sweet potatoes not pictured (they happened).

Drizzled On Top:

• enchilada sauce (I used this recipe, but it ended up being so unbearably not-temperature hot that I had to Cuisinart it with a can of fire-roasted tomatoes to redeem it.)

If you like to watch stuff like this go down in your saucepan,
skip the store-bought and make your own enchilada sauce.

If you don’t usually like breakfast burritos for the same reason I usually don’t like breakfast burritos, you’ll love these breakfast enchiladas. Also, masa smells like Play Doh, which means it smells like WINNING, which means I’d work with it again in a heartbeat.

Mexican Black Bean Savory Cupcakes with Whipped Sweet Potato “Frosting”

I first discovered Mexican Black Bean Savory Cupcakes in Mount Shasta. No, they weren’t being served at the local café with the psychedelic art on the walls. They weren’t being sold at Berryvale Market nor were they recommended to me by the dudes reading tarot cards on the sidewalk outside. And, to my knowledge, unlike rose quartz, these cupcakes will not open your heart and crown chakras.

…now I kind of want to google “chakra-opening cupcakes”.

I discovered the recipe via an internet search for savory cupcakes. Sophia was out of the room at the time. When she returned and saw the webpage I was looking at, she said something like, “Ooooh-kay…”

Sophia’s skepticism was borne from sound mind, turns out. I wasn’t ready to hear it because I was like, Imma cupcake rebel, I don’t need your sound mindy-ness.

But that’s life’s rich pageant, oui? Deliberately ignoring the sound mindy-ness of trusted peers?

It’s not like these cupcakes didn’t turn out like they were Supposed To. I have all reason conclude that the feat was executed with accurate precision. The only way in which these cupcakes were altered from the original recipe was that I used cow’s milk and real butter instead of unsweetened soymilk and margarine (as you can see by clicking on this link, it was a dairy free website).

Despite my lack of deviation from the original recipe, the recipe did NOT yield 12 cupcakes like it said it would. It yielded more than that, resulting in challenges with storage and how I could possibly consume all those cupcakes (it’s far easier to persuade my parents to eat the cupcakes I make when they’re Of The Traditional Cupcake Palette, so I was on my own with these ones).

Count ’em: not twelve.

Mind you, the cupcakes weren’t inedible, nor was the frosting. The whipped sweet potato frosting was basically mashed potatoes. Aside from the frosting being too soft to be texturally compatible with the cupcake, the flavors in the cake (black beans and chili powder to name a few) begged for something different. Sour cream was the first thing that came to mind, quickly followed by cheddar cheese with green onion. After trying and not being won over by the cupcake-frosting combination as prescribed by the recipe, I ended up scraping the mashed potatoes off. This suddenly made the cupcakes stackable, which made storing them WAY easier.

Since then, I’ve been whittling down the leftover cupcakes in a series of more Mexican combinations. The cakes have been consumed in delicious rice bowls, burritos (I suggest brown rice + red salsa + cheddar cheese to accompany), and, my favorite, experimental microwave-enchiladas assembled with whatever was relevant and readily available.

On a side note, this was my first time using a pastry bag (thanks for the pastry bag, Sophia!). Assuming I’m not making some unknown-to-me, grievous error in pastry bag usage, pastry bags are a pain. They’re valuable tools, but it’s much easier to negotiate with a knife. It’s an experience worth repeating if the cupcakes super-duper call for the effect, but for someone who primarily makes cupcakes for homework avoidance and herself, the pastry bag won’t become a usual suspect in future baking endeavors.

The pastry bag experience also put the common recipes’ lopsided cupcake-to-frosting ratio into perspective. Just by the way pastry bags are, you lose some frosting when you use them.

Definition in legs and rest of body
not given... because they weren’t
the point.

If after reading this post, you have an inkling that you’d enjoy this recipe more than I did, it is by no means my intention to discourage you from pursuing the inkling. Who knows: perhaps the cupcakes will open your crown chakra!

Bubble Gum Boba Milkshake

I was a vegan for a few years in high school, so you’d think it would have occurred to me that there isn’t really a substitute for ice cream. Not an easy one, anyway. However, the following concept was so buh-genius and endlessly awesome (or so it seemed in theory) that I got all excited and didn’t totally think through the possible quality control issues. The formulation of the concept began when I came across this recipe for bubble gum ice cream. The discovery was abruptly followed by the thought that I could make a milkshake out of the homemade bubble gum ice cream and holy shit wouldn’t it be the best thing ever if there was boba in it!!!!!

Those gun books in the background aren’t mine.
The lighting was better in my brother’s room.

Best thing ever isn’t a term I would apply to what I ended up with. It may have been my bad: it’s not outside the realm of possibilities that I underwhipped ingredients during the bubble gum ice cream process. The first thing you’re supposed to do is take a pint of whipping cream and beat it into stiff peaks with an electric mixer. Last time I made baked Alaska, I overwhipped the meringue and it came out looking like Freddy Kruger. Forgetting that egg whites and whipping cream are different substances, I may have gotten overly cautious with the whipping cream.

The next step is to quickly fold in sweetened condensed milk (along with bubble gum extract and food coloring), and put it in the freezer in an airtight container for 6+ hours. I must have under-did the folding because when I tried the ice cream before making a milkshake out of it, there were parts that really, really tasted more like sweetened condensed milk than bubble gum, and other parts where the opposite was the case. This was, of course, no longer true after I made a milkshake out of it.

During pre-milkshake taste-testing the night before, the texture was fine. After I turned it into a milkshake with my mother’s handblender, it got a chance to melt. The texture’s a little off when this ice cream melts, smooshily granular in a way, if that makes sense.

The ice cream was very sweet. I don’t know if the overall intensity could be lowered with ¾ or ½ of a dram of bubble gum extract instead of the whole thing. Having a cold glass of water to chase all the sweetness helped, though. It probably would have been easier to handle in a smaller dose. But regardless of dosage, it would have melted in the same weird way, which was chief spell-breaker for me.

The boba, on the other hand, was great. I love tapioca pearls. The back of the package swears on its mother’s eyes that to rehydrate you’ll need 10 cups of water per cup of boba, which, I’m sorry to say, I did. I’m not just saying this because California’s in the middle of a serious drought: 10 cups of water is gratuitous. If you’re going to do it yourself, I’d say you need five, tops, for each cup of boba.

Because I was so enamored with the concept, I’m glad I gave it a try. If “bubble gum milkshake” sounds like the best thing ever to you, too, I’d recommend going to Baskin Robbins or whoever else that sells bubble gum ice cream and purchase it instead of making the ice cream part from scratch.

We have fluorescent lights in our kitchen,
hence my brother’s room being a better candidate for boba photography.

Have you ever made your own ice cream?
Have you done something unexpected with boba?
When’s the last time you screwed up something in the kitchen?

Pizza Cupcakes

Something awesome happened the other day, and – no surprise – it came in the form of cupcakes (!!!!!).

Like so much tomato sauce, the notion of pizza cupcakes had already been simmering in the back of my mind by the time my mom came home from the grocery store with a big bag of basil. She picked it up off the “chicken feed” table at our local grocery store under the mistaken pretense that it was full of spinach. Mom realized the error all too late, a phrase which here means “a few hours after she got home”, which was accompanied by the realization that it was so incredibly NOT within her power to use the entirety of the basil in a timely fashion. Figuring that the situation could be only be explained by divine providence and was therefore a signal that my pizza cupcake notions were both righteous and of an urgent nature, I stepped in and declared, “NEVER FEAR, MATERNAL UNIT! I will do my basil-consuming part!”

Alas, you see, they were already descending into a less-than-fresh condition.

Mind you, I fell a wee bit short of this undeniably divine basil-appointment. I noticed, while eating the finished product, that the cupcakes could have withstood more of the stuff. This was a conclusion drawn only from a place of duty… because they were otherwise FUCKING PERFECT.

I’m certain, gentle reader, that at this point you’re only DYING to hear how I executed these pizza-cupcakes-of-sheer-awesomeocity! BEHOLD the recitation of culinary protocol!

For the dough, I halved this recipe. After the dough had risen and was appropriately squished into cupcake-innard-receptacle-shapes in an oiled muffin tin, I applied what, at the time, seemed like liberal quantities of chopped basil.

To (most of) the cupcakes, I added diced fresh tomato and a few heaping tablespoons of some jarred mushroom marinara we had in the refrigerator. For similar reasons I used Monterey Jack for the cheese (based on what we had, it was that or cheddar). They went in the oven for seventeenish minutes at 375 degrees, and came out SO FREAKING PERFECT OH MY GOSH. It must have been divinely appointed because they were uh-MAZE-ing.

Into the oven.

Out of the oven.
The two on the right with no tomato sauce are plain save for basil and mint.
It was an interesting combination of flavors, but didn’t hold a candle to the others.

They’re easy. They’re scrumptious. The dough isn’t too thick, but it’s thick enough that it isn’t all soggy from the tomatoes and/or outright dripping pizza innards everywhere: a dough-to-innard ratio that’s especially important given the cupcakey purposes. At least in my case. Because I’m not the kind of girl who eats cupcakes with a utensil.

Oh, right, you might want to cool them for 5 minutes after they come out of the oven...
if you have the superhuman strength required to bear waiting that long (I might not have it).

I wouldn’t recommend these if you’re watching your carb intake or whatever because they’re so fucking amazing that you’ll want to eat, if not all them, most of them, I swurr. I would also not recommend them if for some reason you don’t like pizza.

Thus endeth of my fair and unbiased review of AMAZINGNESS that recently occurred first in my oven, then in my mouth.

Bubby’s Leaf Cupcakes

Bubby gets intense about trees. I noticed this last time I was in Mount Shasta visiting Sophia and her ilk. On our daily excursions to the lake, I’d sit next to Bubby in the backseat of Sophia and Jeff’s not-insanely-sized SUV and watch Bubby’s wide, blue eyes move with quick, focused precision from tree to tree outside the window. He would do this for random moments throughout the car ride, when he wasn’t giving his attention to his toy cars or soliciting Sophia to talk for his Mickey Mouse toy. During those tree-centric moments, Bubby would look serious and say nothing.

One afternoon, during the ride back down from the lake, Bubby started saying, “Leaf… cupcake…” The latter because Bubby’s into cupcakes (that wise young man knows what’s important in the world). The former perhaps birthed from the moments of stern solemnity in which he took in the sight of the forest. Whatever the concept was in his two-year-old mind that inspired the joint leaf-and-cupcake preoccupation, it remained for the duration of the car ride: “Leaf cupcake… leaf cupcake…”

It was less of a demand and more of a thoughtful rumination, I think, but nevertheless it’s why Bubby was promised cupcakes. Of course, when we got back to the house, it turned out “leaf cupcake” had more to do with the Play Doh cupcakes that Bubby had made a day or two before… but Sophia and I made him cupcakes anyway.

Play Doh molded into abstract blobs?
Hell no. These are cupcakes. Indisputably so.

Sophia suggested the Nigella Lawson recipe for yellow cupcakes with royal icing, which Sophia had used for her wedding cake years ago. Jeff pitched in a request to incorporate lemon into the cake, e.g. by means of injection and preferably in the form of lemon curd. We discovered that injecting wouldn’t be possible: this was Mount Shasta, the tiny town with a startling crystal-shop-to-everything-else-ratio (exact ratio: a BUH-JILLION:not many). You can find any gemstone you could possibly need to open your chakras and/or improve your communication with angels, but there’s nothing to be had when it comes to things like socks and a-fore-referred-to injector mabobs.

As far as we know, in a world-ending scenario, it may pan out to be practical to have a surplus of chakra-opening crystals around (…and weapons. An armory’s right there). Even though we were injector-less, our situation was not the end of the world, both in the literal sense and in the cupcake sense. After the cupcakes were out of the oven and sufficiently cooled, Sophia and I ended up digging holes in each with a spoon and applying generous dabs of lemon curd before replacing the dug-out cake debris. (Which ended up being effectively tasty, IMO. Well-matched components indeed.)

Mind you, when I say “Sophia and I ended up digging holes”, I really mean that Sophia dug holes while I took on and quickly gave up on the icing. Royal icing is basically like a meringue, which, judging from previous baked Alaska flops, I’m just a fucking genius with. Unlike a meringue, royal icing doesn’t get baked at all. But like a meringue, when making royal icing, protein is the enemy. Even the slightest bit of yolk will sully the whole batch, invalidating its ability to rise, and ruining Christmas.

Of course, the second egg I cracked open was the one where the yolk slipped right out and landed exactly where I DID NOT want it to be. I dealt with this by making noise about how Sophia, it’s haaaarrrrrrddd…

To which Sophia gently asked how I was going to become an expert if I didn’t try. I do want to be the girl with the most cake, don’t I?

To which I responded with more noise, and as soon as the last cupcake was curded, Sophia appeased me. One two-year-old is enough without a twenty-six-year-old’s vocabulary rapidly regressing into only words that can easily be drawn out in an inconsolable whine. This wasn’t an observation of Sophia’s, as far as I know. I later recognized it as the stratagem of my inner league of meringue-phobes.

Sophia finished the icing and deftly spread it onto the cupcakes. The icing was pretty: stunningly white and smooth when first applied.

It does look like something at a wedding.

Two cupcakes were set aside for Bubby during the curding and we drew big, green leaves on them so that we could tell them apart from the rest (we didn’t think he’d like the lemony ones). I hadn’t really thought beyond the leaves, which gave more reasons to be glad Sophia was there. She tried her hand at piping tiny rosettes on the cupcake tops. I totally wouldn’t have thought of that. Our finished product looked so pretty!

After a while, royal icing cools and hardens a little on the top, which is pretty neat.

See the cracks?

I feel compelled to announce that if you are considering executing this recipe, please know that the icing will knock you on your ass with how sweet it is. I thought I’d be acclimated to the sugariest of climates by now what with my frequent, manic fits of cupcake production, but that royal icing wiped me out, man. Like bruising your tailbone at roller derby practice, only without the pain.

Also, rewinding a little, Sophia remembers the cake at her wedding being less “fall-apart-y” than our leaf cupcakes. The Nigella Lawson recipe calls for a food processor for most of the batter-mixing. The metal-blade attachment of Sophia’s Cuisinart was M.I.A. and we settled on a plastic attachment with shorter blades that’s usually used for bread dough. If you find yourself in an eerily similar situation, I’d recommend skipping the Cuisinart and mixing the ingredients with a bowl and a spoon. The mixing will be more effective that way and the consistency of the cupcakes will ultimately be more stable and less crumbly.

Overall, the cupcakes were a success. Not just because they were so pretty, but because Bubby seemed to enjoy his.

(btw, Sophia has a recipe blog)

When’s the last time you baked something for a toddler?
Do you have any inner meringue-phobes? What about salmonella fears?
If there was a cupcake apocalypse, would gemstones help?

A Few Words Regarding Giving No Shits About Salmonella

In case you were wondering why I gave no shits (HA HA) about eating the royal icing Sophia and I made, my reasons are twofold:

Reason the First: The eggs were from Sophia’s chickens, who enjoy individual attention from their caretakers as well as a nice coop surrounded by ample roaming space. Eggs from chickens in this kind of environment are your best bet if you insist on eating eggs raw. If you get your eggs from chickens who live in deplorable, overcrowded, factory-farm situations, then eating uncooked eggs (or eggs that are not pasteurized at least) is no bueno, a term which here means exposing yourself to the 1 in 20,000 chance of facing the 4-7 day runny-shit-a-thon that is salmonella food poisoning. (SPOILER ALERT: if you get salmonella and you’re an otherwise healthy specimen of a humanoid and without a compromised immune system like Sophia currently has, you’ll be fine in the long run.)

Ample room to roam also means ample room to wallow in the dirt.

Reason the Second: There are many sacrifices I would make for the good of the cupcakes. In theory. #forthecupcakes #vivelagluten

Now I’ll share one more chicken picture for the road, because who wouldn’t?

Because it’s PINK! (Mount Shasta Edition)

Mount Shasta has plenty of pink things!

Like this Play Doh that was left outside and obliterated by all kinds of weather!

And this Play Doh that wasn’t left outside!

And rose quartz!

It opens your crown chakra, I hear.

And this fairy that Sophia says looks like Courtney Love!

And this Yo Gabba Gabba! figurine!

Toddler and pink-shirted mother not included.