“Good morning, Breakfast!”

“You could just call him by his name, E.”

“You never told me his name.”

“Lars.”

“Lard?”

“Lars. He’s a Norwegian pig.”

“Lard, lard lard!” And he made the pig dance again.

Sigh.

So I’ve been a little obsessed with these cupcakes ever since I saw them on Cakewrecks Sunday Sweets.

I’ve wanted to learn how to use fondant for a long time, and these looked like they might be an easy way to start. You don’t have to drape a whole big cake with one giant sheet of it, to begin with, and it looks like the shapes are fairly simple cutouts. But I procrastinate. I look at pictures and make plans and don’t do anything. I couldn’t afford the most recent cupcake class at Kitchen Conservatory. Damn my expensive teeth. Class with Stephanie of The Cupcake Project would have been so much better than a (still-aching) mouth full of Novocaine and goo. So I just moped for awhile.

Then E and I decided that in the interest of saving money, we weren’t going to do Valentine’s gifts this year. Maybe just dinner.

THEN they took the Pac-Man game out of one of our local bar haunts and replaced it with Big Buck Hunter, of all things. He was devastated.

So I hit the interwebs. “What’s Cooking, America?” has a recipe for marshmallow fondant, touted as a good learning tool for beginners. And tasty, too! Who doesn’t like marshmallows?

I do not like marshmallows.

Sticky, icky MESS. I was slathered up to the elbows in Crisco before I could get the stuff into a workable ball. Crisco, by the way, will make you drop everything you touch. I know this sounds obvious, but when you are covered in lard and you try to pick up a marble rolling pin, it WILL fall. On your foot. And when you try to pick up your Bud Light to wash away the pain in your foot, it WILL spill. On two of your cooling cupcakes.

But it got kind of fun – coloring the mix, adding chocolate to half of it, etc. I used a cookie cutter to make the chocolate slices to sit on top of the (strawberry cake, whipped-cream-filled) cupcakes, and that went over pretty easily. Black food coloring just sounded awful, so I mixed in some cocoa powder and chocolate bricks when I was heating the mixture. Worked like a dream and gave the mix a great dark color. Cutting all of those pieces, however, proved to be a problem.

Marshmallows, even in this recipe, do not cut very well, especially when you want to cut them into small shapes. I don’t know if I did something wrong or if it is just the nature of the marshmallow, but it is inclined to poof. I could not, no matter how hard I tried, get the crisp, clean edges of a traditional fondant. I ended up taking chunks of the mix and rolling out the shapes by hand, molding them and adding details with toothpicks as probes. It took me an hour, but here’s the result:

It’s not a great picture and the flash makes it hard to see the awesomeness of the colors I used on the little ghosts. Those ghosts, by the way, ROCKED. They had little chocolate dabs for the eyeballs. And of course, this selection features both Mr. and Ms. Pac-Man, sharing their love in the middle with a marshmallow heart.

E was ECSTATIC. He took the pan around to show his friends and his family and they were wowed with my domestic goddess skills. Since it was comprised mainly of straight sugar and lard, the fondant wasn’t especially tasty – although it outruns traditional fondant by a mile. So I included a jar of dark chocolate frosting with the cupcake delivery. The fondant peels right off and we put frosting on the cupcakes as we ate them. It was maximum Frosting Freshness!

I think I’ll try traditional fondant soon… this marshmallow recipe was a good starter, I think. And anything that makes his nuts family think I might be acceptable wife material is a perk.

I became friends with Tim this summer. It was a long path from our nasty breakup (two years ago this week, wow) to an actual friendship, with a few layovers in FWB-Land in between. When our best friends’ marriage began breaking up, Tim and I found ourselves thrown into identical situations with our friends and while they were falling apart, he and I had something to share that ended up with us in a much better relationship.

And then of course, E.

Tim and E met for the first time last winter and they got along okay. Like ex-boyfriends do, Tim always thought that the guys I dated weren’t good enough. He was fine with E at first, but in the early days of an improving friendship, I made the critical mistake of calling him once after E and I fought last spring, and it was all downhill from there. E was suddenly the devil to him and nothing he did was right.

E and I broke up and Tim was pleased that I was rid of such a terrible, terrible guy. Then when we got back together and Tim was skeptical, to say the least. For the first few months of the E and Me Do-Over, he was constantly saying “Are you REALLY serious about this?” and “I can’t believe you took him back” and other stuff in a similar vein. He couldn’t believe that we were doing things with each other’s families again (because that is serious shit, I say), so when he called me a few weeks ago and I told him I was with E at his mom’s house in Michigan, I was a bit surprised when he asked:

“What nights is E off work?”

I told him. “Why?”

“We have a pool league that plays on Thursdays.”

He wants E to play pool with him? Huh? “But he works on Thursdays.”

“Yeah, that’s why I was checking. We need a girl to kind of round out our numbers and I wanted to ask you but I didn’t want to have to take you away from him if it was going to be on one of his nights off.”

Whaaaat?

After I picked up my jaw from the floor, I protested about my absolute lack of pool prowess and he explained the way the APA scores so teams need people of all skill levels – even mine. He filled me in on some of the details and told me to ask E if it was okay. “I hope he doesn’t mind because it would be really cool if you could play, but let me know and it’s cool if you can’t.”

E was fine with it. Of course he doesn’t love the idea of me hanging out with my ex-boyfriend for hours every week, but he knows that he has to trust me and so he sent me off with a kiss and some sort of just-try-and-hit-the-ball-straight advice on the first night.

“How was it?” he asked me later.

“Meh,” I replied. “I lost, of course. But I had fun, I guess.”

“Any cute boys there?” he teased.

“There was one who talked to me a lot,” I said, teasing back. “But he looks like a 12 year-old with a beard. He looks like that High School Musical guy.”

“Should I be jealous?”

“I’m not a pedophile and beards aren’t my thing, so no.”

The next week when I went back, I checked in with Tim to see when I was going to play. “You don’t have to worry about <dude> anymore, by the way,” he added after telling me to chalk up at 8:30.

“Huh?”

“He was talking about you like crazy after last week,” he said, not making eye contact. “Asked if you were single and stuff. And I said no.” He made a scribble on the score sheet.

“Good, thanks.”

“You seem really happy with E and guys like <dude> are just bad news. If he doesn’t respect that, tell me and I’ll make him back off.”

“That’s really sweet of you… especially ’cause you don’t even like E.”

“It’s pretty obvious that you’re really happy with him and he’s treating you right this time.” He still won’t look up at me.

“I am. And he is.”

Tim finally lifted his head. “Try to get at least one ball in tonight, okay?” he grunted.

I think that was Tim-ish for ‘I approve.’ And I did win one of my four games that night… only because the other girl scratched on the 8-ball, but hey. The night was full of miracles.

GUESS WHO’S GETTING MARRIED?!?!?!!!!

Emily. You don’t know her. Haha. Fooled for a nanosecond?

The idea of a “marry me or eff off” ultimatum always seemed to me to belong to that class of women who had timelines for getting married and having babies. No proposal after two years? Marry me or eff off. Want me to move in with you? Marry me or eff off. Those women, I thought, were the ones who pored over those Cosmo and Glamour articles called “How to get your man to propose in 30 days or less!” and would resort to trickery to get the man on his knees.  It always seemed like a bad idea to me, a good way to eke a proposal out of Mr. Wrong – and if he IS Mr. Right and he wants to marry you, won’t he ask on his own?

Heh. NO.

Emily and the New Fiance have lived together for five years and she finally dropped the ultimatum on him last week. It was fantastic. She’s in her late twenties, he’s in his mid-thirties. They are both gainfully employed. But he’s been saying for years that he wants to marry her and hasn’t proposed? Seriously? They both knew they were right for each other, but the man needed a nudge.

SHE HIRED A MOVING VAN. She didn’t threaten to. She hired one, printed the receipt with the reservation date, and left it on their kitchen table. It was awesome. Best. Ultimatum. Ever. That was Saturday. On Sunday he gave her a ring.

I don’t recall reading about hiring a moving van in any of the magazine articles, so she gets bonus points for that.

It kind of put E and me in a mushy mood, and we had a big ball-of-love night on Monday. He gave me my Christmas present early (pearls! beautiful pearls! love!) because he says he loves me so much and always wants to make me happy. How can a girl resist jewelery and a line like that? Hijinks ensued, and then we curled up and talked about having a baby someday. We even talked about BABY NAMES.*

Put your eyebrows back down now.

We are so disgusting. We’ve become the people we make fun of. Where did my baggage-girl cynicism go? When did he ever high-five a buddy for getting engaged? It makes me feel old, actually. Dating and accumulating emotional baggage are part of being young, and getting engaged means you’re growing up. Even just being in love makes me feel a little old lately, even though it’s apparently supposed to make me feel like a young, bouncy bunny running through fields of clover in springtime or something.

I don’t mean old in a bad way, really. It’s just different. I’ve been watching friends get engaged and married and pregnant and divorced for years now and it never made me feel old. It made me feel YOUNG, actually, like everyone my age was moving on and doing grown-up things while I was still the baby, relationship-wise. It was cool though. I had all the toys to myself.

Maybe it’s just time. I always reasoned that my biological clock wouldn’t really start ticking until I was with the right man for it to tick with. I’m twenty-seven and in a stable relationship; it’s not unreasonable to just think of these things now. But dude. Five years? That’s only acceptable when you start dating at, say, nineteen. I can’t imagine how frustrated Em must have been after five years of just thinking and never doing.

So, the moving truck. Brilliant.

————————-

*Nathan or Abbie, for the time being. Now quit making fun of me.

It occurred to me just this morning that E and I forgot to put up a Christmas tree this year.

We really meant to. Last year we decorated my tree together and had a lovely, Norman Rockwellian evening with lights and garland and Perry Como and (spiked) hot chocolate. He gave me no small amount of crap for having a fake tree, though. I protested, citing shedding needles, a trunk-climbing cat and general inconvenience, but eventually said that if it meant so much to him, next year we’d go pick out a real one at the tree farm. He said he would be manly and chop it down himself and tie it to the top of the car AND lug the wretched thing inside.

Then we broke up this summer, blah blah, and I said to hell with him and his needly, spiky, shedding tree, etc. And then we got back together, blah blah again.

It’s funny to think that one of the first things we talked about when we did get back together was about that damn tree. I was, of course, terrified of trusting him again and so afraid of getting my hopes up when he went on and on with his apologies and “I want to be with you forever” stuff.

“You mean it?” I asked for the thousand millionth time. “You’re making promises again and I want to know that you’ll keep them this time. Even the little ones.”

“I will,” he said, pleading. “I want us to have a life together. I want to do it right this time.”

“You promised me last year that you’d take me sailing,” I accused. “And you didn’t.”

“But we would have done that in the summer. And I will take you sailing. We will go, I promise.”

“Are you still going to get me a tree?”

He knew exactly what I meant. “Will you let me?”

“Yes.”

And so trees and sailing have come to represent promises.

Maybe we both let each other down on this one. We don’t have a tree this year. Sure, I’d have kept up my end of the bargain and LET him get a tree, and he would have done his part and got the darned thing home. But this morning I wondered why we hadn’t done it and couldn’t come up with any better reason than that we were sleeping a lot on the weekends and kept putting it off.

Now in my head I have this picture of last Christmas and our first tree together and how I’d looked forward to more trees with him. And in front of me I have this empty space where we could have had one, and it makes me a tiny bit sad that we don’t.

It would be sadder to have a tree there without him. I HATE putting up the tree alone. Something about a Christmas tree requires that you share it with someone you love and without that, I’d rather not have a tree at all. I’d rather have him than a tree any day of the year.

Plus, now that we have promised to keep promises, I know that we’ll have more Christmases together as long as I keep him away from pine trees.

This way he owes me.