Food Torture

...aka, making pumpkin whoopie pies on the first day of a thirty-day nutrition cleanup.

So, Saturday - October 1 - marked the first day of the CFCC BCCC. Which is also the first day of my thirty days of no cheat meals (or, as Drywall would say, no kip meals). It was also the day that my friends and I had been planning for weeks to have dinner. I was put in charge of dessert, which, as a rule, makes me happy, since I love to bake. (Mostly for the batter, actually. I feel "meh" about actual baked goods, for the most part - with a few exceptions. But raw cookie dough or raw cake batter? Oh god, sign me up. And give me salmonella. Whatever.)

If I were a complete jerkface I'd have brought a bowl of mixed berries to my friend's house. But not so much. Instead, I did what I usually do when I can't decide what to bake - scour EatLiveRun's "recipes" page and find something fabulous.



PUMPKIN WHOOPIE PIES WHAT.



I know Jenna's a baking genius, but it's little things like this that make it clear. Along with the usual suspects in pumpkin baking (cinnamon, ginger, cloves and nutmeg), these whoopie pies had a little bit of white pepper. I assume it brings out the other flavors. Maybe I'll make these again in November and make sure.



So, we go from this



to this.



While they cooled, I got to work with this:



SO NOT PALEO. Or, well, I guess this part (where it's just a ton of softened butter all whipped up) is arguably paleo. In someone's world. If you wanted to lick whipped butter off of the beater. Which even I did not.



I particularly love making baked goods that include homemade frosting. I guess it's because something like a basic vanilla buttercream is so freaking easy, but it's one of those things that most people don't do, so they find it impressive. Like driving stick, or using chopsticks.



A little piece of me died inside when I couldn't taste this. Instead, I called PhillyGuy in from the living room, where he was parked watching football, to taste the buttercream for me. "Does it need more vanilla? What if I added some cinnamon and made half of them with cinnamon filling?" Poor guy's got it rough.



After the cakes (pies? cookies? whatever) were cooled, I piped in the frosting and assembled everything. Behold, the whoopie pie.



Once again, I had PhillyGuy sample the finished product to make sure it was OK. This was unnerving, because here I was, bringing eighteen homemade whoopie pies - something I'd never made before - to dinner with friends without having tasted them AT ALL to make sure they were okay. And trust me, I have screwed up some baked goods before. Like that time I tried to make candy cane Joe-Joe's. THAT was not pretty.

But he gave his seal of approval. And my friends all gave their seals of approval. I think between the seven-and-a-half (including my friend's 11-month-old daughter, who heartily approved of the whoopie pie) others who were at dinner, at least half of the whoopie pies went that night, and I distributed the rest of them to my friends to take home.

Perhaps a piece of me died a little inside, but I'm pretty proud to report that this food torture went down without my tasting so much as a single scrap of cake, drip of batter or speck of flour. One of my friends commented on my "amazing willpower." I definitely do NOT have amazing willpower. What I do have is the ability to flip a switch inside my brain once I decide I am on a structured plan of some kind.

And also it helps when you start your day with a good solid sweat, and then eat this before you bake.



(Three eggs over-easy, served over a handful of baby spinach, half a diced sweet potato cooked in a skillet with some chopped onion, and two beautiful slices of fresh cut black forest bacon from Whole Foods.)

VIVA LA CFCC BCCC. And...MAKE THESE WHOOPIE PIES. Thank you, Jenna.

Prepping for the Total

I am stupid excited - today is the Crossfit Total.

Essentially it's your chance both to find out your true max on three basic lifts (strict overhead press, back squat and deadlift), and to set up some baseline numbers. You have three attempts at each lift, with your heaviest completed lift in each combined to reveal your score.

I dig lifting. I dig finding out what I can do. I'm somewhat conservatively shooting for 435, basing this on a 225 deadlift, 75 press and 135 squat. I do not think 135 is my true max for a back squat, but my form has been awful this week with much lighter weight. Even with a piece of PVC, I find my chest sinking down as I squat. SO...while I think, from my prior squats, I could do more like 155, I'm not going to cry if today's not the day for that. I'd rather focus on doing it right and improving the weight later.

ANYWAY. While in the back of my mind I believe I should hit 450-460 today...I am focusing on making my press and my deadlift heavy, and my squat good. And I am stupid, STUPID excited to both do this myself, AND to watch everyone else kill theirs.

To prep for this, I spent last night hanging out with my dogs, watching Bradley Cooper run around Philadelphia-dressed-up-as-New-York in Limitless, and eating the majority of a rotisserie chicken.

Sophie acted coquettish in the hopes it would make some chicken come her way.

Cosmo reluctantly settled for a bully stick. Neither was impressed by Bradley. Whatever.

I got a buttload of sleep - I don't care if being in bed at 10pm on a Friday night makes me a loser. I only stayed up that late for the dogs' sake, to be honest - I could have crashed at 9 or 9:30. This was a brutal week.

After the pups and I took our usual Saturday morning jaunt, I decided to forego my normal routine of chilling in bed with my laptop in favor of getting down to business with breakfast.

I used kitchen shears to cut two strips of thick-cut bacon into small pieces, directly into the pan. After the bacon started to render, I added half a package of sliced mushrooms and, once the mushrooms were mostly cooked, tossed in a couple big handfuls of baby spinach.

I scrambled the entire mess up with three eggs, some salt and pepper, and called it good.

This paleo thing has been pretty good for me. I truly don't miss bread and dairy at all, though that may be because I give myself a couple of meals a week to eat whatever the F I want. Sometimes that means having Conn's potato chips for dinner.

(As far as I know, they only sell these in the Wheeling, WV/St. Clairsville, OH area. We always had them at my great-grandmother's house when I was a kid, and while I'm willing to bet they're not ACTUALLY that good, the fact that I only get them once a decade, when coupled with the nostalgia factor, makes them FUCKING AMAZING.)

Sometimes that means having a pizza for lunch with my boss. (We tried Serafina at 18th & Sansom this week. I had a pizza with prosciutto and an egg. It was underwhelming.) And pretty much every week, it means I slowly eat a bar of dark chocolate (either 70 or 85% cocoa content) a couple squares at a time over the course of the week.

But in general, I feel good and I am noticeably leaner. If I dialed it in a little more I bet I would shed this fat pretty fast, but I'm liking this whole "hey this takes no effort at all" business.

AND I CANNOT WAIT TO PICK UP SOME HEAVY SHIT TODAY.

How's your Labor Day weekend going? Picking up anything heavy? Performing any other feats of fitness?

Puppy Ice Cream

We started this morning off with P90X yoga. As I mentioned before, I've been regularly going to hot yoga...not a ton, but I've managed to go once a week. Taking classes again has helped me tremendously - my form is much better, which means that, in turn, many of the poses are more difficult. I'm happy about it, because it means that I'm doing it right, but it's also freakin' BRUTAL when I'm in the middle of it.

P90X yoga is challenging in general - about 45 minutes of tough moving asanas, lots of warrior sequences and chest opening poses, followed by another 45 minutes of balance postures and abs (in Horton-speak, the "yoga belly 7"). I broke almost as much of a sweat moving through this in our OBX living room as I do in the 90-degree studio at Philly Power Yoga, and I got through the tough poses by reminding myself that the only way it would ever get easier is if I pushed through.

And then I made bacon for breakfast.

Delicious, expensive, Whole Foods bacon.

Around noon, I suggested to PhillyGuy that we take the pups for a nice long walk, since (not unlike us) they've been spending much of the vacation like this:

But, as luck would have it, as soon as we set foot out the front door, it started raining.

So instead of a nice long walk, we packed the dogs into the car and drove about a mile down the road to get some ice cream.

I had cookie dough.

(Side note: how is that a small? I could eat 47 conch fritters, but I couldn't even finish half of this ice cream. I hit my capacity with sweet stuff WAY faster than I do with salty/savory.) The pups got to share some plain vanilla.

Sophie loves ice cream, but (kind of like me) loses interest quickly.



Cosmo, on the other hand?











He never gets bored with it.

(Okay, Mom...one more little bite.)

We're back at the house, I'm snuggled in my sweats and we're getting ready to spend the rest of this rainy afternoon playing scrabble. Yeah, I'm that awesome.

Friday Night Adventures

Adventures in baking, that is.

But first. Sometimes, there's only one thing you need at the end of a long week.



Okay...maybe two things.





After enjoying some Murphy-Goode pinot noir and a couple pieces of Lazaros - my favorite delivery pizza in the city! They do some crazy magic that makes the crust juuuuust right, the sauce is sweet but not too sweet...I love it! - I got down to business.

REAL business. The key ingredient in Friday night's baking adventures was...



BACON.

Yeah, I went there. I made bacon chocolate cupcakes with homemade caramel buttercream icing. I used Scrumptious Photography's recipe - no adaptations at all. Except that I made a half batch, which should have yielded 12 cupcakes rather than 24...but it actually ended up yielding 16.

I started with the cupcakes. Melt together your chocolate and butter. I used the metal bowl of my mixer as a double boiler:



Stir in your sugar:



While the chocolate cools, whisk together your dry ingredients and chop your super-crispy bacon.





After adding your eggs, one at a time, to the chocolate, it's time to stir in the dry.



And then your secret ingredient - fold in most of the chopped bacon. I say "most" because I decided to reserve a bit to use as topping/decoration for the cupcakes...couldn't tell you how much.



Once it's all just incorporated, fill cupcake liners about 2/3 of the way full. Bake at 350 degrees for 20-25 minutes.



While the cupcakes are baking, start the icing. By, you know, MAKING YOUR OWN CARAMEL.



I MADE MY OWN CARAMEL, BITCHES! Honestly, I think you'd do just fine using store-bought caramel topping, but making your own is surprisingly easy. And then you get to say "I MADE MY OWN CARAMEL BITCHES!"

This is what FOUR STICKS of butter looks like beaten in with eggwhites and sugar.



And then it's time to switch to your paddle attachment to blend in your HOMEMADE CARAMEL!





MAN, this frosting is delicious. I mean, wow.

Now, my decorating skillz are...shall we say...amateur. But for having never made cupcakes before? Ever? Let alone making them from scratch and making the icing from scratch and using an icing tip for the first time in my life?



I can deal.





Thank goodness Stephanie and I had a running date this morning. I only ate a couple bites of cupcake, but way more than my fair share of frosting and batter while I baked :) We braved the Kelly Drive/West River Drive/Art Museum loop, despite yesterday's insane flooding, and covered 8 miles in about 1:25.



Busy day - time to go get my haircut, hang with some great bloggy friends for a fun event at Sabrina's, and then out to the 'burbs for a "Diaper BBQ." Some of my bacon cupcakes might make the trip out with me...