Just a Baking Babe

These days when I'm not counting my calories, sweating on the cardio equipment to Annie Lennox belting out "Missonary Man", or submitting to some new torture designed for maximum burn by D_wn, my personal painmaker trainer, I'm standing in the middle of my flour-coated kitchen baking the sides, roofs, and chimneys for 30, count em, 30 gingerbread houses. Wrap your head around that for a minute. Imagine 90 cups of flour, 15 cups of brown sugar, 30 eggs, 18 3/4 cups of molasses, 8 pounds of butter, and a cereal bowl of spices. It took one day to pre-measure the dry ingredients, another day to mix the dough and most of today and tomorrow to do the baking before wrapping and freezing enough gingerbread walls that if laid side by side would reach all the way to somewhere and back again. And I, Phatgirl, am having a blast!

I'm rather fond of Christmas, it being the Baby J's birthday and all.
And children. I'm totally smitten by my waist-hugging buddies.
And church. One of my favorite hang-outs. Dio's casa mi casa.

Put it all together and you end up with a Children's Christmas party that's gonna rock da' house with games, a showing of Disney's "Small One" (my favorite Christmas animated film of all time and required viewing for all children in my life), a haute cuisine luncheon of grilled cheese sandwiches sans crust and chicken oodles' of noodles soup, concluding with gingerbread houses buckling under the weight of thick blobs of royal icing festooned with obscene quantities of candy and liberal doses of child spit from finger-licking and stolen nibbles. This, my people and peeps, is the good life in a chestnutshell.