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Sunday, September 28, 2008

Halloween at Michael's

Michael's Craft Store is one of my favorite places to browse at Halloween. They have an extensive collection of animated mini-village scenes in stores that are really cool. Apparently you can't buy them on the Michael's website.

This year Michael's has a nice variety of Martha Stewart craft products. If you have been unable to muddle through the copying of her stencils in the Martha Stewart craft magazines or website, Michael's now makes them for you.


A few treasures made it into my shopping basket including some Martha Stewart Baking Cups. Because one can never have too many cute papers for cupcakes.

The four styles you see on the right come in one pack of the Martha Baking Cups. There are two more packs of Baking Cups on the lower left that are Wilton. Only one of these styles was available when I checked the Michael's website and none were available on the Wilton website.

I found a couple of fun candies that I hadn't seen at Michael's before. Slithering Snake Suckers from Bee International were surprisingly affordable. The 12-inch snake (stop snickering, fools) was under $1.50. The flavor key on the package reverse says the candy snake can be found in

Green = Apple
Red & White = Strawberry
Black & Orange = Grape
Orange & Yellow = Orange


On my trip, there were only two snake flavors available so I'll keep an eye out for other varieties (more shopping? Why, it's research for my blog... really Dear!).


I also found Halloween Gummy Tape Worms from Kandy Kastle. Two tasty gummy worms in one pack. I didn't see varieties of this pack but inside my pack were an orange worm that tasted like orange and a green worm that tasted like lime. Each flavor worm can be pulled independently of the other so you could just eat your favorite or share with a friend (or fiend).

Sunday, September 14, 2008

Ch- Ch- Ch- Changes

You know how sometimes you get a really great idea about something in the middle of the night or during a dream and you don't take the time to write it down thinking, "This is so amazing I could never forget something like this." Then the next time you're thinking about that particular thing it seems so much less amazing and you wish like crazy you could recall your exact original idea? Well that's where I'm. Full of all kinds of great dreams and ideas and no time to stop and write them all down.

Over the summer I decided to leave the bakery and go back to working full time in a factory. Prior to my Pastry and Cake work I was a Quality Inspector for various types of factory-made products. Currently, it's electronic circuit boards.

My decision to leave the bakery was not an easy one. I still very much love the hustle of the kitchen environment. Thankfully, one of my Bakery Managers has enough heart to keep me and allows me come in and play around with the cakes on occasion. It's tough cutting back though. I still have that itch to bake and create. I guess my new co-workers and my blog readers will be the beneficiaries of my creative outlet.

I have been getting back up to speed with my fellow bloggers (because losing my old computer with all the great blog links really stunk) and I see some of them are going through changes as well. Change can be a good thing. How boring would we be if we we never changed, eh? A long time ago, a really smart man I knew had a plaque on his wall that read, "Do what you've always done and you'll get what you've always got." I try to remind myself of this when something changes that I'm not yet prepared to face.

With all this said, I hope you're assured this goofy blog will continue on, until that changes too. Baking, cooking, a little gardening sometimes, and lots of silly, crazy, edible stuff I find around the Internet or in my local dollar store will continue to trickle in here. Oh, and don't forget, Halloween is right around the corner. I hope to share some of that with you too.

Thanks for reading here. I'll try to keep it up.