The Bill Emerson National Baking Fellowship

Every winter, one of the directors of my Fellowship apparently has a holiday party for which she invites people over to bake and decorate cookies. This year, the event is extra special as she recently moved to a new house. Thus, tomorrow's get-together is actually a housewarming-cookie-baking-extravaganza.

Lindsey and I were at a true loss as to what to give Shana, our boss, for a housewarming gift. First, we thought about getting her some baking supplies, but someone who throws cookie-baking parties probably isn't in particular need for any of that stuff. Second, we're kind of broke-ass poor. You know how Fergie's song "G-L-A-M-O-R-O-U-S" suggests that "if you ain't got no money," you should "get your broke ass home?" That's basically what Lindsey and I did. But first, we went to Giant and bought $20 worth of cake-decorating supplies.

See, earlier today, I had decided that it would be a good idea to bake Shana a brownie and then decorate it like the Congressional Hunger Center logo -- you know, the one where the Capitol dome is being ravaged by the giant tentacles of a set of racially distinct, conjoined twins:


Why? Who the hell knows? But I didn't have any other ideas... To keep things healthy, we used a box of "No Pudge" brownie mix with low-fat, plain yogurt. Actually, that's a lie; we only used that stuff because we already had it. To make this dessert palatable/morally acceptable, Lindsey got a recipe for frosting that somehow called for an entire pound of butter and 3 pounds of sugar. That's 64 ounces of fat and sugar, folks. (Somewhere in the world, Paula Deen just got excited, y'all!)

So Lindsey made this frosting, and I baked the brownie. And then we used food coloring and made 4 different colors of frosting. And then, we used a $7 pastry bag we got at Giant to pipe on the fat-sugar-food-coloring mixtures:

The result after 3.5 hours of making a huge mess out of Maisha's house? (There is butter everywhere.)

BAM!


All I have to say is that Shana better like this crap, or I'm going to quit the Fellowship and become a food policy analyst for the Heritage Foundation. I mean, Lindsey and I qualify for food stamps according to income guidelines, and we're obviously eating too much. (But really -- $52 million in revenue? WTF is Heritage doing with all of this money, anyway -- other than conducting really crappy "experiments" on milk prices?)

And here's some live-action footage of the baking action. (Nina, after seeing this clip, has suggested that I get some Prozac. Not all of us can have vocal inflection, Nina. Geesh!) As it's clearly demonstrated, Lindsey and I bring different levels of excitement to life.

Partial transcript:
David [lifeless]: "Lindsey, what are we making?"
Lindsey: "We're making cookies!"
David [without feeling]: "No. We're not..."