molasses cookies and subtle changes

i baked molasses chocolate chip cookies last night!

a strong urge to bake kind of hit me at 9 pm, because i hadn't done any baking over the weekend. Since i didn't have too much work to do, i decided to roll with it. I got the recipe from the lovely Joy the Baker.

2 sticks unsalted butter
2 cups plus 2 Tablespoons bread flour ( i used all-purpose)
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
1/4 cup plus 1 teaspoon dark molasses, not blackstrap
1 egg
1 egg yolk
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

2 Tablespoons almond butter

LOTSA chocolate chips!

i messed it up at first by accidentally half-ing all the ingredients except the molasses. After i fixed that i decided to add a little bit of almond butter just for kicks.

i decided to be a little fancy and press them down with a fork. cute :)

i may or may not have had some left-over cookie dough in my cereal this morning :P

the finished product:

yum!

you couldn't really taste the almond butter, but the molasses-brown sugar concoction is great. I baked them for barely 8 minutes so they're a little prone to falling apart, but very very delicious and gooey.

I got home from school super early today because i only had three classes and they were all in the morning. 

I love LOVE LOVE this extra free time. 

On my way home, I stopped at a Duane Reade near my house to look for the Candy Cane Tootsie Pops that seem to be popping up on the blogosphere and look totally up my alley. Although they didn't have them and i mostly ended up just wandering around the store and buying some other random groceries, it got me thinking.

Lunch today (plus a couple cookies!)
Props to anyone who tells me whose wonderful blog they spy in the background...

Last year and the year before, if i had had this day in my schedule where i got out of school at 12, i would most definitely have just rushed home to binge &purge. Most days back then, i would go home from school as soon as i could to either hide under my covers for hours or to rush off to buy binge food and then b/p for hours.

I probably would have gone to that same Duane Reade and bought 50 plus dollars of food and rushed home in a frenzy to get it in and out, asap.

i've finally had time to read! I'm loving this. Anyone read any good books lately?

It's so nice to notice small differences like that. I loved my free time today. I was relaxed and blog-reading and ate some yummy food and might go take a nap later and it's just awesome to be able to notice little things like this that would have been so different a year or two ago.

willy wanted to say hi

That being said, i think old habits die hard, because I did feel some weird kind of pull to go to DR in the first place, and somehow it just seemed natural to buy some food, even though this time, of course, i was just buying food that i actually plan on digesting.


Yesterday my mom and i went to see Black Swan. I loved it. Last weekend a few of my friends and I actually watched Requiem for a Dream, one of Aronofsky's other films, for the first time. I was thinking while i was watching the movie how i would have been freaking out before about how skinny Natalie Portman (and all the other actresses) in the movie looked.
I would have been crying and screaming in my head about how badly i wanted to be them.
I wouldn't have noticed or cared about the fact that Portman is miserable and sick and delusional in the movie, only about the fact that she weighed less than me, and that i wanted to look like that.

I still have major body image issues.
Some of which still do include wishing that i was super-thin, or idolizing girls who are thinner than I am.
But the difference yesterday was that i was able to actually enjoy the movie as a work of art, and not spend all of my time thinking about what i was going to do to look like a sickly Natalie Portman.
So, yeah. I enjoyed the movie a lot. Some of it is kind of graphic and hard to watch,  as is Aronofsky's style, but i highly recommend it, it was riveting and beautiful and tragic.*
Anyone see Black Swan, or any of Aronofsky's other movies? Thoughts?
Anyway, that's what's going on with me today. Hope you all had a good start to your week! Happy monday!
xo
rose

my version of an Apollonian Gasket, for those of you who watched the video i posted last week. :)

 * Maybe skip it if you're deep into an eating disorder, or get triggered easily. Just FYI.