As God is my witness, I. Will never. Bake. Again.

Last night, I made a spice cake. That part went well (lesson learned: next time, just make a cake). This morning, I got up, did the dishes (cause I was that lazy last night), all the while whistling Chocolate Salty Balls. I won't lie, I was excited about my cake balls. So, my balls were in the freezer (heh heh) and I was melting my white chocolate, when I accidentally splashed some water in there from my double boiler. Now, before this morning, I didn't know that chocolate could seize. For those of you who also didn't know this, here's the explanation I found via about.com:

Chocolate is a mixture of fat (from cocoa butter) and dry particles (cocoa and
sugar). When the melted chocolate comes into contact with water, the dry
particles become moist and begin to stick together, quickly forming a
gritty, rough mass of chocolate.

Bully. It also goes on to say that it can't be fixed. Great. Thankfully, I had got 2 bags of chips (which wasn't enough, but I'll get to that). Adam will not see chocolate go to waste, so he pressed it between some wax paper, wrote in it, and put it in the freezer.

Aww. Bless his little heart. So I didn't take them out back and hurk them at the squirrel like I wanted to do. No no, I "dipped" them. Ish. Problems included:

• Too much icing made for squishy balls.
• Squishy, crumbly balls made for dirty chocolate.
• Dirty chocolate made for not very pretty balls. Nobody wants to put a lumpy ball in their mouth. But I persevered.

I ran short of white chocolate, so I had to melt some semi-sweet. I think I ended up with more on my hands than on the cake balls, but that's okay. They're done, and they taste good. They should just be eaten in the dark. Want to see my balls?

I partly blame all this on tomorrow's full moon. Also being blamed on the moon:

• Took the dog to the off-leash part of the Bedford Commons yesterday where he proceeded to pee on 2 people. We're now known as the people who own the "pee-er". Amidst our protestations of "No! No, he's never done this before!!" and "I don't know what could have come over him!" and our apologies to the people with the sodden boots (just what you want when it's COLD), there he is, off in the distance, standing next to the oblivious girl on her cell phone, leg cocked... the hound, not the girl. Adam yelled, and he stopped, but what the hell?? I looked it up, and apparently he is a)either marking people he would like to keep as his own (I hope not; we really don't have room for an extra person in here), or b)just superexcitedOMGpeopleanddogsanddogsandpeopleOMGOMGOMG!!. I think it's probably the latter, and what I read said that with young dogs, excitement will cause them to pee on the closest vertical thing. It shouldn't be hard to correct him, we just have to be close to him when he's about to wee. In the mean time, I've been calling him Pissyfoot, and if you see him, don't stand too close.
• Adam broke the over-the-door towel rack yesterday (through no fault of his own. Hung the towel; a screw snapped. Clearly, it's a lunar event). This forced me to put up the wall mounted rack my sister got me for Christmas. This may have been the turning point for the day, as this went well, we went back to the park, and no one was peed on, and then I made a delicious hamburger/potato/not quite Shepard's Pie for supper.

Full moon tomorrow; I'll be expecting a drastic turnaround on all fronts by Friday.