Post title borrowed from a Ben Folds song of nearly the same name.

Last song I purchased from iTunes: When Will I Be Loved by John Fogerty & Bruce Springsteen.

Made for dinner tonight: Chicken, cheddar and onion quesadillas. The chicken was marinated with chipotles in adobo sauce & grilled with the onions before being turned into quesadilla filling.

Currently drinking: Nothing. But a glass of milk sounds good.

Playing on iTunes right this very second: Glory Days by Bruce Springsteen.

Currently reading: Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson and Amarcord by Marcella Hazan.

Laughing about: The episode of Mad Men we just watched. We’re at the beginning of Season 2 and Joan is my favorite character. Tonight she discussed why crying in the break room is bad: “This is why I don’t allow crying in the break room. It erodes morale. There’s a place to do that, like your apartment.”

New to me, easy and delicious dessert I recently made: Tarta de Santiago (as pictured here). It’s a Spanish almond cake with a hint of lemon. Yum. Recipe here. I followed it almost exactly.

Song I can’t stop playing over and over and over again: 21 Guns by Green Day.

Currently knitting: Still nothing. But it’s almost cold enough for me to want to knit again. And I’m hankering for a project that will use some of the Noro Iro in my stash.

In need of: A new immersion blender. We had a generic one that mysteriously died/broke when I tried to puree black bean soup. I need to decide what brand to go with for the new one.

Playing on the iPod now: Something to Say by Toad the Wet Sprocket. I still love this song from the early 90s.

Will soon attempt to learn: Adobe Lightroom. It’s installed on my computer at work and I haven’t had a free minute or hour to learn how to use it yet.

Not getting enough: Sleep. I think the changing season has made me want more of it. And I still don’t know how to go to bed early.

Hyped up about: Autumn weather. I like the sorta warm, sorta cold days and I can’t wait for the leaves to change color.

Something I need to do tonight if it kills me: Decide what kind of cookies to bake tomorrow. Yes, it’s important that I decide this tonight.

Craving: A grilled hamburger. We walked around W&M yesterday and there was some sort of barbecue somewhere and the hamburgers called to me.

Trying to learn how to: Stop buying clothes that all look the same. It takes real effort on my part to buy shirts in different styles and to refrain from purchasing something I like in every color made in it.

Something I thoroughly enjoy: Random cussing in songs that don’t seem like they’d have them. Ben Folds and Glen Phillips are both good at dropping random f-bombs in the middle of a song and I love it!

Hell hath frozen over because: I gave up whipped cream on my Starbucks iced toffee nut lattes. And I’m drinking less of the lattes as they’re not as good without the whipped cream.

Best thing I’ve bought this month: New corduroy pants. I love corduroy pants and these Old Navy ones are pretty spectacular.

What I might be for Halloween: Lucille Ball. Or a devil. Or something else that can involve my red hair.

Still bragging about: The wedding cakes I made this summer. I’m proud of me for having the skills to do that.

Looking forward to: Next weekend and the possibility of our first (and last) camping trip to the Outer Banks this year.

Not looking forward to: More painting in our house. It looks nice when it’s done but the process is so long and tiresome…plus I’m only a moderately decent painter.

Playing on the iPod now: Fidelity by Regina Spektor.

Next up on the reading list: The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan.

Can’t believe: That the new season of 30 Rock hasn’t started yet. I need an Alec Baldwin fix.

Absolutely, positively obsessed with: Trader Joe’s dark chocolate covered almonds with sea salt and turbinado sugar. Best new food I’ve tried in a long time. They’re good like dark chocolate covered pretzels are good…only better.

Next in the Netflix queue: More Mad Men Season 2, American Beauty and Away We Go when it’s released.

Must make time to: Get everything ready to get our kitchen inspected by the state so that I can legally bake things for money. After that’s done, there’s a business license to be purchased.

Trying to decide: How to spend less money in October. Less eating out? Less clothing purchases? Too bad it’s fall and I want new cold weather clothes.

Last dessert I baked: Caramel Apple Upside Down Cornmeal Cake from Better Homes & Gardens.

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Let me set the record straight on these cookies before I go any further. I did not bake them. My boyfriend did. Yes, he bakes. Very well. He just doesn’t do it as often as he did before we started dating.

While I’m admitting that I didn’t bake these beautiful cookies, I’ll also admit that his standard double pastry crust fruit pies are probably better than mine. I do a great job with fancy pies and tarts or pies with crumb tops…but his normal apple or blueberry pies are superior to mine.

I did, however, take the photographs of his almond and raspberry thumbprint cookies. They’re a very slight alteration of the “Thumbprints for Us Big Guys” cookies found in Dorie Greenspan’s Baking: From My Home to Yours.

The very slight alteration is the substitution of almonds for hazelnuts. We had hazelnuts in the house but the process of toasting them and rubbing the skin off of them and then grinding them was far too arduous for that particular evening. Almonds were the easy way out. Sorry, the easy – yet still delicious- way out.

Sometimes you have to do that. If I never took a shortcut in cooking and baking, I’d probably turn out way more delicious food…but I’d have a lot less free time on my hands. Running to the grocery store for something I don’t have wastes a lot of time…especially when I have a reasonable alternative for the item needed in the house. Sometimes the easy way out is okay (as it was with these cookies). Just don’t do it all the time. Sometimes you need to deal with the hazelnuts…time consuming or not.

These almond and raspberry thumbprint cookies were great. Delicate and crumbly yet somehow sturdy enough to make the drive with us to Myrtle Beach for our vacation.

The boyfriend made these cookies after a string of three or four bad batches of cookies baked in my old apartment. Yes, I know there are no bad (or ugly) cookies…but these were all terrible. After the first bad batch or two, the boyfriend joked that I’d lost my baking mojo. The jokes ceased after he baked a bad batch of oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.

We thought the problem was baking powder or baking soda…but they weren’t guilty. We eventually chalked it up to the terrible half-sized oven in my apartment that wouldn’t hold an even temperature. That oven liked to burn the bottoms of cookies well before the tops began to set yet it was incapable of getting much above 400 degrees and the broiler didn’t work at all. Is it any wonder we blamed it for bad cookies?

The problem wasn’t solved until a week or so ago when I baked another bad batch of cookies…the first batch in the new house. It was a cookie recipe I’d used the week before with great success so I was pretty sure the recipe wasn’t to blame. I was also pretty sure it was not the oven in the new house’s fault. Albeit it is a very cheap oven, it is still a brand new oven that works very well.

Because of the bad batch of cookies in the new house, we finally figured out the culprit: Food Lion butter. Cheap Food Lion butter that probably has too high an oil or water content for successful baking. If you’re not familiar with Food Lion, it’s a grocery store. A kind of chintzy grocery store. I tend to like high-end grocery stores and really only go to Food Lion for staple items. I usually don’t like to buy meat or produce there. Nor will I even buy butter there again. I’m back to Land O’Lakes for a while.

The recipe for these cookies can be found on the internet currently so I’m not going to type it out today.

Here’s a link to it at : Recipezaar. The only change that was made to the recipe was the substitution of almonds for hazelnuts.

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Quote from  American consultant, statistician and educator W. Edwards Deming

I believe that these pictures of my blueberry almond bread pudding officially mark the end of the blog posts about the goodies I made with all those fresh blueberries I picked earlier this summer. Took me long enough, eh?

The inspiration for this bread pudding came from a post at Food Gawker over the summer. I really like to use sites like Tastespotting and Food Gawker to find new food to make and bake. Anytime I’m bored by my own ideas and my own cookbooks, all I need to do is to turn to the food blogs for an endless set of options.

This particular recipe was adapted from a recipe at Cook (Almost) Anything At Least Once.

As usual, I did make a few alterations to the original recipe. I used fresh blueberries instead of frozen as I had plenty of fresh ones available. I baked the brioche from scratch from a recipe in Martha Stewart’s Baking Handbook. I did take a few shortcuts in baking it (as I really didn’t want to wait 24 hours to bake the brioche) and it probably would have tasted better if I hadn’t taken them.

The original recipe used a Meyer lemon marmalade in the filling. I skipped that entirely as I had no Meyer lemon marmalade and no way of obtaining or making any since Meyer lemons weren’t in season. Instead of the marmalade, I used copious amounts of amaretto and slivered almonds to add a little more flavor to the pudding.

I also used a lot more cream and eggs than the recipe called for as it seemed too dry otherwise…but maybe I made my bread pudding in a larger quantity than the original recipe?

This was the first bread pudding I’ve ever made but it certainly won’t be the last. Next time I may or may not go to the trouble of baking the brioche from scratch…baking the brioche wasn’t difficult but it takes a long time to prepare…and then I had to wait another day to assemble and bake the bread pudding. The anticipation of the eventual dessert killed me…enough so that the next time I make bread pudding, I might start with stale French bread from the grocery store to save myself a day.

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