Cupcake Bouquet, Two-ingredient Sauces, Thrillers

It is the last day of September - and what a busy month it has been. We brought home our new dog, V had a week of work travel, we got a bathroom remodeled, the hot water heater ruptured and needed replacing, and our fall girlie celebrated her birthday and obtained a driving learner's permit, God help us all. 

This time, her birthday was a small celebration at home with four close friends. We took them all to pick up burrito bowls after school, then to our home for dinner and cupcakes, then back to school for the high school football game. 

My daughter's favorite season is Fall and she loves everything about this season. Not surprisingly, her birthday cake request was pumpkin spice cupcakes. I served up the cupcakes as a cute bouquet of a dozen flowers. This is how it came together-

• A batch of 24 pumpkin spice cupcakes using this Preppy kitchen recipe (cupcakes only, not the frosting)- so easy and so good. As a bonus the recipe uses a full can of pumpkin. 
• A batch of ermine frosting with vanilla 
• Dyed the frosting with gel food colors in what I imagine are fall colors- an orange-brown, dusty rose, teal, some green for contrast. 
• Used 2D tips to make orange roses and pink hydrangeas, and a petal tip and a small round tip to make some teal flowers. 

DIY cupcake holder

Assembling cupcakes into a bouquet: I used an idea I've seen online (see a quick video here). I made the bouquet base ahead of time. The idea is to staple paper cups together into a base structure. I stuffed each cup with newspaper so that the cupcake would perch at the top of the cup instead of sliding all the way in. I glued the stapled cup thing onto an oval cardboard base (cut from a cereal box). Then wrapped the whole thing in some tissue paper and tied on a ribbon. 

I cut green tissue into small squares. Each cupcake was placed into a green tissue square and then plopped into a cup. With the colorful floral cupcakes, greenery around each cupcake, and tissue wrap, it makes for a beautiful bouquet. Serving the cupcakes is very easy because the green tissue helps to lift a cupcake out neatly. 

If I had more time, I would have liked to make 2-3 different flavors of cupcakes (apple or chocolate) and frosting (salted caramel) for a more fun assortment. But the pumpkin spice cupcakes and vanilla frosting was a classic and crowd-pleasing pairing.

My wrapping was pretty untidy, to be perfectly honest, but this concept is forgiving even when imperfectly executed. I'm glad to have learned this little cupcake decoration trick, because a cupcake bouquet would fit a number of occasions and looks impressive when it is actually very easy and doable. Here's another idea for a cupcake bouquet that also looks very cute. 

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Meals this month have been basic, wholesome, and repetitive, think burritos and bowls, dal-chawal and so on. Sometimes a great sauce brings the meal together so perfectly. It happened twice and so I have two 2-ingredient sauce ideas to share. 

First, I impulse-purchased a new seasoning mix from TJ's- the Cuban Style Citrusy Garlic blend. When mixed in with sour cream or yogurt, this seasoning makes an awesome dipping sauce. This two ingredient sauce livened up our quesadillas and burritos several times this month. 

Second, I buy hummus every now and then for my daughter to snack on after school. This time I bought a lemon hummus, a flavor I haven't seen before. (Usually we get the roasted garlic or roasted red pepper or simply the original flavor.) Lemon hummus mixed with yogurt makes the most awesome sauce for a shawarma bowl. (I imagine the lemon hummus is nothing but hummus with extra lemon squeezed in.)

My hastily-put-together meal tasted like something from the local middle Eastern restaurant. It has the aforementioned lemon hummus yogurt sauce, lettuce, potatoes and eggplant roasted in the air fryer with shawarma spice, and a rice-soy curl pilaf made in the instant pot, again with the shawarma spice and some onion, tomatoes, peppers. 

Pumpkin spice may be the prevailing "flavor of fall" but here I put forth another contender- shawarma spice. I make it simply by mixing stuff from my existing spice jars and it feels like the epitome of fall- cozy and warm. 

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BOOKS: I remember the whole Y2K thing and the turn of the millennium like it was yesterday, so it feels unbelievable that we are past the first quarter of the "new" (21st) century. 25 years is a very decent chunk of time to start summarizing and processing events and media. The NYTimes published a list of the 50 best thrillers of the 21st century. 

Lists of this sort are great fun to peruse and dissect, and when it comes to fiction, I love the mystery and thriller genres. How are the two different? There's not one accepted answer, but in general, it feels like mysteries focus on the puzzle-solving aspect and arrive at one solution by the end of the book, while thrillers are more action-oriented, fast-paced, and take the reader for a twisty ride; there may or may not be a good resolution at the end. 

The NYT article I've linked above lets you mark the list with books you've read and ones that you haven't but would like to. The list of 50 books surprised me a little. There was an abundance of Tana French books- I've read most of them. She's really over-represented in this list (I guess the expert votes landed this way.) Also, there are many novels here that I wouldn't have called thrillers at all- more like general fiction or literary fiction. It goes to show that it is hard to classify books. 

I've read 14 books from this list.

Good thrillers from the list that I recommend-

• In The Woods- Tana French. Read this if you want beautiful language and great atmosphere. Not a satisfying ending.
• Dark Matter by Blake Crouch. Read this if you want a truly thrilling and fast-paced sci-fi novel. Don't think too much about the science.
• Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz. Read this if you want something fun and delicious. Two mysteries in one.
• 11/22/63 by Stephen King. Read this if you like historical fiction. Parts of it are great but for me it fell apart at the end.

Books that I loved from the list but don't necessarily think of as thrillers-

• Room by Emma Donaghue. This is what I thought of this book 10 years ago- "I finished this book in a day- part of it is the story, where I just wanted to know what happens next, and part of it is the fact that the book is an easy read, narrated by a child." 
• The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. A coming of age story and a doorstop of a novel that I read only last year and loved. 
• Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell. Here's what I wrote when I read it 13 years ago- "This short and intense novel tells the story of a teenager who's having to grow up too fast and specifically, about an episode in this teenage girl's life where she has to find her father who has skipped bail (and risk losing her home if she doesn't find him). The author succeeded in transporting me to this bleak landscape for a few hours and to a life and culture completely foreign to me." This book is set in Missouri and I was living in MO when I read it. 

Books that I've read from the list that I did not like much- The Da Vinci Code (forgettable, I read it when it was all the rage), Gone Girl (so unpleasant), We Need to Talk About Kevin (disturbing, cautionary tale re parenthood). 

I marked 10 books as want-to-read. These include a couple that I had never heard of, and some that have been on my to-read list forever, such as The Perfect Nanny and No Country for Old Men, neither of which I thought of as thrillers.

In the weeks since I read this article, I've already read two books from the to-read side-

• My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite. This is a short book and a page-turner- darkly comic. It features an older responsible sister and younger carefree sister and a satirical exploration of family dynamics including enabling behavior, pretty privilege, etc.
• Case Histories by Kate Atkinson. This book has three mysteries in one and the book surprised me by how engrossing it was. 

I am currently reading a third book from the to-read list- The God of the Woods by Liz Moore, set in a summer camp. 

What are your favorite thrillers? I'll add them to my list!

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Max-Maxxing continues unabated in the One Hot Stove household, and us four humans feel incredibly lucky to have found this dog. He is doing so well and has bonded with each of us. In my case, he is a velcro dog. I thought I was getting a pet, but it turns out Max was acquiring an emotional support animal- me!

There is one challenge we are working through. Max loves walks but isn't always a great walker. He can be reactive when he sees other dogs- lunging and barking- and being a big dog at 95 lbs, this is very hard to manage. I'm scrambling to find ways to fix this issue because we do want to enjoy our walks together. 

Meanwhile, his personality is blossoming as he settles in. Far from being passive, he has surprised us by turning out to be loyal and protective and a great watchdog. 

One of my favorite things about him is the circle wag. When he's overjoyed, Max wags his tail in a full circle like a helicopter propeller. It is the sweetest thing. 

Tell me your highlights from September!