Baseball Cookies and Ghost Cupcakes!

Have you ever had one of those days when you think, I need to leave the room because I will lose it on someone I love because I'm just so sick and tired of doing.  Today was one of those days.  I feel silly even complaining about anything because I know my friends and family in the northeast are about to get hit by hurricane snow and are fighting for loaves of stale pumpernickel raisin bread at the Stop n' Shop.  Meanwhile, I'm down in the Peach State complaining about baking and going to parties.  Some nerve I have!

As always, I was the architect of my own demise.  Today was the Boy's last regular season baseball game (his team is the Tigers) and I decided I had to make cookies that looked like baseballs.  This is the inspiration:

 
Of course, while mine bore a passing resemblance to the above, they looked like this:

I ran out of red gel frosting, but had a bucketload of black, so I improvised and hoped that someone would have a red dye allergy and would be secretly grateful for the black ones.  I made one with the stitching until I decided that it was too time-consuming.  Here is a picture of the one good one:

Like how I put it on the baseball glove napkin?  Mad photography skills, right?  Hey, I know that it would have been cuter if I'd done them all like that with the stitching, but it was 9:30 and the kids were all faint with hunger, so I decided to feed them instead of getting all OCD over the cookies.  Totally the right decision, because when I unpacked them after the game, the icing stuck to the waxed paper and they all ended up looking like some bizarre Rorschach icing test.  I didn't snap any pictures because they were so pathetic.  Plus it was cold and windy and I was busy chasing the cute napkins that were all blowing around the ballpark.

My other baking project of the day (oh yes, there was another) was ghost cupcakes for our neighborhood Halloween block party.  I've made these the last few years and they're a big hit with the kids.  Here's the "recipe":

Ghost Cupcakes

Bake and frost 24 cupcakes of your choice
For the Ghost Decorations:
2 packages Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies or 1 package Nutter Butter cookies
2 cups white chocolate chips
1 tube black gel icing

Pour 1 cup of white chocolate chips into a microwave-save bowl and cook for 1 minute.  Take out and stir until smooth.
Using a knife, spread the melted white chocolate on the front and back cookie, coating about three-fourths.  Let the chocolate cool on a piece of waxed paper.  See picture:

When the chocolate has completely cooled, go back and make ghost faces on the cookies with the gel frosting.  I didn't take any pictures of how to draw the faces because I have total confidence that if you see the picture of the final product and you are over age two, you can handle it:

Easy peasy, right?  That's the Girl in the background looking glum because she couldn't find her new glow-in-the-dark vampire teeth that she desperately needed for her leopard costume.  Yeah, me neither.  Luckily, I found them in the middle of the family room floor.  She happily popped them back into her mouth without even washing them.  Sigh.  Builds immunity, right?

In between the baking projects the Baby and I hit Whole Foods and I even let her get one of those kid-sized carts so she could ram it into my heels help me do the shopping.  The Girl attended a wild Halloween party and we shivered our way through the Boy's baseball game and the Baby's soccer game. The K was a sport and raced out to Office Depot to pick up some DVDs that I promised to get for the Girl's teacher.  I'm doing my first sitting down of the entire day and I'm so happy.

Alrighty, last little story before I sign off for the evening.  Yesterday, the Boy and I had the following conversation:
Me: What do you think of those new stools in the living room.
Boy: (Aggressively tries to lick area between his upper lip and nose)
Me: Um, what are you doing?
Boy: Trying to lick my eyeballs like a gecko.

Sometimes I feel like I'm busy trying to make things *perfect* (as if such a place exists) because I'm so particular and want things to be just so.  Meanwhile, the Boy just wants to lick his eyeballs, the Girl just wants her damn teeth, and the Baby just wants to ram my heels with the shopping cart.  So, when I take that step back and realize that all this craziness and stress is me trying to reach some unattainable goal and that it doesn't make our family better or happier to do all these things, I feel better.  I'll still make the cookies and the cupcakes and be the room mom and overextend myself, but these aren't the things that make happy memories for my children.  It's when we do these things together and have fun doing it that really matters.  Wow, how deep!  Clearly I need to go to bed!  Good luck stormy north easterners!  I'm thinking about you!