On the homefront...

We finally hit a rhythm of springy weather, and I've been a busy bee in the house and without.

I'm still waiting for my perrenials to pop up and come back to their full glory, but every day I see the hostas unfurling more, and the rusty coleus are getting brighter and standing taller. Calladiums won't come up for a while (if the come back at all...fingers crossed!). And the new additions this year are red impatiens, 2 varieties of fern, and a white hydrangea.

The impatiens are plopped right in the ground as they'll die at the end of the summer, but the hydrangea is potted up nice so we can take it with us and plant at our future home. The ferns and hydrangea, unsurprisingly, seem very happy, but the damned impatiens...sigh. Always an uphill battle. I don't know what it is--I see other impatiens blossoming like rock stars, but my little guys are still looking sickly and weak. I Miracle Growed them for the first time this weekend since they'd been in the ground stretching their roots (or so I hope!) for 2 weeks now. Hopefully with some encouragement they'll fill in a bit more.

So here we were as of planting day back a few weeks ago. I'll have to take some more photos once the new mulch goes down and compare how things are looking.

And now, the rainbow cookies. Oh, you guys, the rainbow cookies. This is a recipe I had been eager to tackle for a long time, and I figured when better than Mother's Day? In addition to the scones, clotted cream and lemon curd I had planned (only the scones were homemade, though I do have a recipe for lemon and lime curds that I'm eager to try...stay tuned for that!) I decided to tackle the rainbow cookies. I found a recipe that was very straightforward, and used 99% of ingredients I already owned. This would test my method, though! In addition to a new preparation in general, I'd have to tackle two processes I had yet to undertake: whipping egg whites to soft peaks, and using a double boiler. Both concepts I'd understood, and I'd beaten cream to soft/stiff peaks plenty of times, but egg whites...oh, that'd also mean I'd have to successfully separate the eggs, another process I'm still perfecting (I will think of Sabrina every single time I crack an egg; I can't help it). I did screw up the egg whites--there must have been some unwelcome moisture or food particle or something in there cuz I was beating like crazy for a ridiculously long time before accepting I had screwed it up. Thankfully, on my second attempt (sorry 4 wasted yolks!) that ish came together in about 3 minutes.

Long story short, the baking process was broken down into two nights: on the first, I made and thirded the dough, died two thirds, baked all three layers. Once that was done and cooled, I added raspberry jam to the green bottom layer and apricot jam to the white center layer, stacked them up an popped them into the fridge to chill and compress overnight.

Fast-forward to the next night when I trimmed off the crispy, uneven edges to make a nice-looking rectangle. Used a double boiler to melt chocolate and frosted top with chocolate. Back into the fridge to harden up. Then, finally, I was able to slice it up. That's where the "I'm totally nailing this!" kinda ended. haha They tasted AMAZEBALLS, but hmm...a lot of them were weird shapes because the chocolate cracked. So slicing is a science I will have to perfect over the next few attempts.

When all of my baking was done, I portioned two sets of everything--scones and cookies--for our two Mother's Day celebrations, and packed up a few cookies to take to work on a test audience. Perhaps the greatest compliment I got came from my office manager: "As an Italian girl born in Brooklyn, I can say with confidence these are the best layer cookies I have ever had, and I have tested a significant number of Brooklyn Italian bakery layer cookies. These are really really really good—moist, flavorful, really perfect." Bam. I was all ::drop the mic:: on that one! I got that comment a lot, actually...three other people also told me they were the best they had tried. Yeh, I'll be patting myself on the back for a while.

What's next on the baking horizon? Lavender-blackberry scones and homemade lemon curd.

And now, friends, you're all caught up for now. And so until my next adventure (or 8...sigh), I bid you goodnight.