Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough of Course!

If you are like me, and prefer the dough of chocolate chip cookies to the baked cookie, but you get frowned upon when you eat raw cookie dough, I believe I have a solution for you sad state of life! 

When you have the strong desire for cookie dough that I know we all get at some point in our lives, just follow my instructions:

Step One: Find your favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe.

Step Two: Follow the instructions on the recipe BUT! don't add the eggs. The consumption of raw eggs would be the reason for your getting-frowned-upon. Therefore adding them would be daft on our part wouldn't it? So instead of adding eggs, add 1/4 cup of water for each egg that should be present. 

Step Three: After you have finished with your egg-less dough, you can eat however much you want. You will probably not be able to eat all of it, to your own surprise I am sure. But never rear! It will not go to waste. You could try baking it, however I have a strong feeling this would end in a very messy oven, you getting in trouble, and a pile of cookie goo that does not taste good in the slightest. And so, instead of baking your new masterpiece, freeze it! I always press mine into a flat container and run a knife through it so it will be easy to break once it freezes. 

This way, the next time you feel like cookie dough you simply must get a spoon and head to the freezer. 

However! If you feel like the masterpiece you just made tastes too much like raw butter with chocolate chunks, as I do, I have a plan B! Never fear...

Plan B:

What then, is the remedy for too-buttery cookie dough? Well, remove the butter of course! If you now are scared of me, because you think I am mentally insane you can stop reading if you want. But if you do... you'll never know just what I mean when I say remove the butter. If you are confident enough in me, read on.

Okay so removing the butter AND the eggs from a normal chocolate chip cookie recipe is probably a bad idea. But what if we just used a recipe that didn't call for them? Dun dun dun dun!!! I'm going vegan on you.

After you get over the fact that you might be about to actually try to make something that is vegan, you can continue on with my ingenious plan. 

Step One: Find a vegan chocolate chip cookie dough recipe that you have most of the ingredients for. You can go to the library, or just google it. Once you have a recipe, follow it to a tea. Just don't preheat the oven, or grease any pans. This dough will taste very similarly to the dough of a non-vegan recipe, it just wont have that buttery taste. 

Note: The reason I said "find a recipe that you have most of the ingredients" is because there are many very common substitutes. Here I will name them: Instead of what ever kind of milk it says to use, you can use just normal cows milk (this is, unless you want your dough to be actually vegan) and for tapioca flour, you can use corn starch. 

These are my two solutions to the very common issue of not-enough-cookie-dough! 

I hope you've enjoyed!

As always,

      ~Moira Jane!

Theater!

Ready for a pretty horribly written, random post? Here it comes.

I am currently acting in the role of "Ruth" in "Pirates of Penzance", if you don't know what that is, go look it up.

Tomorrow is the first day of a week of all day play practices. Because of that, I can't stop thinking about it, therefore, a blog post is necessary. Before I started writing this post I had no idea what I was going to write about, so I'm just making this up as I go. So just bare with me.

I have been in a handful of theater shows. Here is some shows that I've done:
William Shakespeare's: The Tempest as: Miranda
William Shakespeare's: A midsummer night's dream as :Bottom
Guilbert and Sullivan's: Patience as a maiden, Mikado as a chorus member, Gondoliers as Tessa, and Pirates of Penzance as Ruth.
Broadway's 'Annie' as a maid, and an apple seller
Mitch Tomas's "Sardines and Biscuits as, Simon

Those are the shows that I can think of off the top of my mind, there are more no doubt.
So after that, what is your favorite theater production that you've seen or have been in?

As always,
    ~Moira

Guitar chips!

I have played the guitar for a few years now. The one problem with the guitar is that I am constantly losing my guitar chips, or picks. Then I saw in a 'thinkgeek' catalog a press that you can use to make old credit cards into guitar chips. Because I 1, didn't have the press and 2, didn't have any old credit cards, I forgot about it. But then today I realized I could make them! And so, it goes like this:

Step one:
Find any old 'credit cards', okay I used an old YMCA membership card, and hotel room keys. Any kind of card like this will work.
After you have found an old card of some sort, you'll need a real guitar chip, scissors, and a marker or pen.

Step two: Flip your card over (If you prefer one side to the other, otherwise it doesn't matter) once you have the 'ugly' side up, put your real guitar chip on top of the card, and trace the chip. Sharpie pens work the best.

Step Three: Remove the real guitar chip and cut out the outline you just drew.

This is probably the hardest part, and it isn't even that hard. Depending on the thickness of the card, the cutting may be hard. Just go slow and avoid cutting rough edges. 

You're done! Unless... :) So the card I happened to be using was mostly red, and its almost valentines day, so I couldn't help but make my guitar chip into a heart shaped guitar chip. This is the great part of making your own. You can make them whatever size or shape you want! 

Final product!

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed it! Happy valentines day!

As always,

           ~Moira Jane

Hey readers! (if there are any)

I just wanted to let you know why I hadn't posted in a while. Two of my good friends and I decided to start a blog together that was all about animals. I've been spending my time working on posts for that blog lately, and not this blog. I will, however, be writing on this blog soon again. Here I the link for the other blog, you should check it out!

bunniesbudgiesbigideas.blogspot.com

My first furry pet

Over Christmas vacation I was with my family a lot and stories were told. One of them, which I had forgotten, caught my memory and I thought it might be worth telling. Although some people may be discussed by it, this really shows how much animals are a part of who I am.

The story starts back when I was about 4. We had just moved into our 250 year old farm house and 4 story barn when me and my four siblings at the time wanted pets like crazy. We wanted cows and cats and bunnies and every other kind of animal that small children want. However our parents did not want pets and we were forced to living pet-less for a while. I was not okay with this. So what did I do? I went and found a chipmunk. I loved that chipmunk so much. I carried him around and made him a little bed and house. I was in total heaven. And then one day I showed my mom my new friend. My mom saw the little thing and then looked at me. She told me that he was dead. But not to worry, he wasn't dead. He was sleeping. At least, in my 4 year old mind he was sleeping. For about three days the whole thing lasted. Until my mom made me bury my first furry friend. Poor little guy, he was just having a long, long, nap.

NOTE: There may be more mistakes in grammar and spelling in this post, this is because 1. I am too lazy to check for them, and 2. I got a new computer for Christmas and my typing skills are not fully in check yet.

Christmas Christmas Christmas

For obvious reasons Christmas has been on my mind quite often lately. And in my many moments of thinking about it, I thought about the huge craze that everyone goes through to get everyone they know a great gift.

I don't know if its this year, or if it's just that I'm old enough to notice, how much Christmas is JUST about gifts. Although for some people it is about being with family and celebrating the birth of our Lord, for many it's a stressful time of year.

One thing that really got my attention was the music. So many schools have been banned from singing Christmas songs that are too 'holy' or 'christian'. I was so blown away by this! Something similar to this is, the colors red and green have been banned from dress wear for students performing what they call a "Winter Concert".

On to the last topic of Christmas that I do want to add on, presents. Although, I can't complain about getting nice things under the tree every year, I can't help feel like some kids just don't get it. I read a story online about this new "leap pad tablet" so... and iPad for toddlers. I read that so many stores had ran out of stock and parents were desperate to get them. There going price was 100 dollars, but when stores ran out, parents started buying for much much more than that. There was a small stock of them online for sale that were flying out of stock for over 300 dollars! How desperate these parents are to get their babies a tablet! When I was a small child I received PJ's and baby dolls (that DIDN'T require batteries) and good old barbie dolls. Don't get me wrong, I understand the world must progress in some way, but giving a 3year-old a tablet, even if it's made for 3year-old's, is just too much for me to handle.

Fish Drama already.

I couldn't believe that in two days, my two tetras died. However, I better go back a few days to explain whats happening. 

So about a week and a half ago I got one 'balloon belly' mollies fish and two neon tetras. I put them into my tank that already had my upside down catfish living in it. They seemed really good at first, although one of the tetras seemed a little out of sorts. 

I watched the new 4 fish get along really well for several hours, and nothing seemed wrong to me. Sadly only a few hours later I found one of the little tetras 'taking a nap' on the bottom of the tank. The poor little squirt had died. I thought it must have just been sick and was going to die anyway. However two days later the other tetra joined his friend in tetra heaven. 

It hardly bothered me because I don't get attached to fish very much. What did worry me is that either 1) the tetras had a sickness that the remaining two fish would get or 2) something's up with my water and the mollies fish was going to go too. However neither of the two were correct because my mollies fish is doing really well with no signs of illness. However now I have to go back to the pet store and pick out some friends for little snowball. 

One last thing, if you've never seen either a 'balloon belly' mollies fish or mini upside down catfish, I recommend looking them up on Google image. They are really amazing.