SuperEggplant

Whew, I haven’t posted in several days, but Carolyn came to visit for the weekend, and we were too busy running around in the downpours to blog! We visited Alicia at her darling store Ella Posie, where we purchased some fun items and learned a few unexpected and delightful things about Alicia (I bet you didn’t know she’s addicted to Big Gulps). We also headed out to Beaverton with Melissa and Melanie to raid the Japanese craft books at Kinokuniya. That place KILLS me! I was good and only bought two books, which I’ll show you tomorrow.
What else? My friend Alice and her family were in town, so we headed up to the family castle (Mrs. H’s house), where we enjoyed homemade vanilla ice cream with angel food cake and chocolate sauce. They also broke open a bottle of Russian vodka from 1990:

I think everyone had fortified themselves with wine, so the vodka seemed to go down pretty easily.
And speaking of Russian things, Carolyn and I went into a Russian market today that had all sorts of interesting Russian foods and treats. They had some Russian kinderegg-type dealies that were really great.

And check out the prize! A lovely bracelet!

Some other highlights? Meeting Carolyn’s two cousins who were also visiting; the Pig ‘n Pancake, my new favorite restaurant; the yummiest cold brew coffee EVER from Blue Gardenia, shoes from PedX, fabric from the one-and-only Fabric Depot, and I don’t know. I’m sure there’s a lot more, but I am just too brain dead to remember.

So our basic task for Backtack 3 was to make a softie. I made the pointy kitty, a free pattern from the softie queen herself–Wee Wonderfuls.

Well, I had never made a softie before, and I’m afraid it shows. The poor kitty* is bowlegged and lumpy and suffers from so many birth defects that I fear for its survival. I do hope my backtack buddy Sarah doesn’t run screaming when she opens the package. Despite its flaws, the kitty is still kinda cute!
*As I worked on the kitty, Peter kept asking, “What IS that thing?” You see, you make the head and the body separately. The tail is long and sticks up in the air. Peter thought the tail was the neck and could not figure out how I was going to attach a head to it.

Saturday was a pretty big day around here: the concrete pour for our driveway was completed, the backtack party took place, and Peter was a chaperone for the PROM!
You’re probably most curious about the party, since it was a gathering of some formidable (but all very nice) bloggers! The backtack projects I caught glimpses of were all impressive. I really hope everyone had a good time. I have tons of leftover food, including some of those Thomas Kemper sodas, so if you’re in Portland and hungry, well, come on over. Among the guests: Alicia, Amy, Ann, Ariana, Melanie, Melissa, Action Hero Melissa, Sally, Stephanie, and my nonblogging buddies Taya, Wendy, and Lisa. I can’t show you a group photo, because not everyone wants to be outed, ha ha, but here’s one little shot of a few guests foraging through the tubs of free fabric that Alicia so generously brought (Taya’s been my friend for a million years, and she doesn’t have a blog, so I get to willy-nilly plaster her photo on my blog):

But hey, I can show you photos of food! I was concerned about the ganache-less state of my Chocolate Coffee Cupcakes with Mocha Ganache and Mascarpone Cream, but then I talked to my genius friend Wendy, and she suggested inserting the mocha ganache in the center of the cupcakes! She even loaned me a grapefruit knife to more easily core the cupcakes. It worked, and they were pretty tasty:
If you want the recipe, and I highly recommend it, I think I linked to it in my previous post (I’m too lazy to link again. Sorry).
Here’s part of the food spread:
What I didn’t make I bought at Trader Joe’s. Have you ever tried the Trader Joe’s guacamole? It is SO DELICIOUS. After most of the guests left, Action Hero Melissa and I kind of gorged ourselves on the guacamole. Mmmmmm. And then I ate a bunch of the buttery apricot squares that Amy brought.
And one final shot, probably not very interesting to 99% of you. Concrete!