Want the recipe for these yummy chocolate peppermint cupcakes? I am today’s guest blogger over at Frosting for the Cause – please head over there to check it out!

Starting to make macarons was a lot like when I started to bake bread. I knew there was a huge wealth of knowledge out there, but how far did I have to bother learning before jumping in?

One positive point (or at least, I consider it positive) that macarons have going for them: in bread baking, there are elements that we consider “perfection” – crunchy crust, open crumb, for example. But those “perfect elements” change depending on what type of bread you’re baking. I love that about bread baking, but it’s intimidating as a newbie….how do you know if your soft, chewy crust is “perfect” for the recipe you’re using?

By contrast, there is a true definition of a perfect French macaron. Macarons do have to have filling, and there is “traditional” filling, but there isn’t so much right and wrong as there is with the macarons themselves. According to a multitude of sources, a perfect macaron should be:

- Light in color, not browned on the top or edges.

- Not cracked in any way.

- Sandwiched with some type of filling, buttercream is traditional, I personally prefer ganache.

- When bitten into, the outside shell should crack, but not shatter, giving way to a slightly chewy meringue-y center.

- It should not be very thick, and most of its height should be composed of the foot. This is the place where I most often see bakeries diverging from what thins are “supposed to be.” EVERYTHING I read says macarons should be thin. Everything I see is thick, including the “best of NY” Ladueree macarons my father brought me to sample over Thanksgiving.

A big thing to keep in mind is that macarons are classic French pastries. French pastry will drive people crazy. A lot of what they do is dictated by law, the rules behind the Meilleurs Ouvriers de France are wonderfully insane, and even THEY consider macarons to be the pinnacle of what they do.

That doesn’t mean that it’s hard to make a macaron. It really isn’t. Even the cracked ones with air bubbles, cracks, and no feet are still macarons, and as long as you can get them off the pan, they’re probably still just as yummy and edible. But they are not French pastry perfection. And that’s where the crazy-making comes in.

So instead of giving an actual recipe, I’ll link to some of my favorites below, and just give some tips and tricks I’ve learned along the way. Learn from my mistakes!

• YouTube is your friend. I cannot imagine trying to learn how to do this without having watched as many videos as I did of people making macarons. The best way to understand what the meringue should look like, what the almond/sugar mix should look like, and when to stop mixing the batter is to watch. Articles online help as well, I’ll link some of the most helpful at the end of this post.
• If baking with the oven door open, as you should be, GET OUT OF THE KITCHEN WHILE BAKING. It isn’t entirely ridiculous when you think about it – your oven door is open, therefore susceptible to drafts. Swooshing around the kitchen, possibly opening and closing a microwave door directly over the oven, or opening a refrigerator door, is causing air to move around the kitchen and into the open oven. A strong enough draft can cause enough of a temperature shift to crack the macarons. It took me 3 batches to figure this out.
• No matter what method you use, you are essentially making a meringue and collapsing it around very dry ingredients (powdered sugar and almond meal). You cannot have a very dry, ‘can be held over your head forever and ever without moving’ meringue and expect it to have enough liquid left to properly incorporate the dry ingredients. The meringue needs to be a little beyond soft peaks, but not solid stiff, it should still bend a bit.
• Mixing. Well, folding. This is the most important part of making macarons, and the difference between perfect and broken macarons can be as few as 10 extra folds. People say you should mix it no more than 50 times, no more than 80, 28…numbers are all over, since I suspect the choices made elsewhere in the process (what type of meringue, are any dry ingredients incorporated already, etc.) will change this number, as will your own arm strength and technique for folding. For me, at least, I see the batter change around turn 20. From there I’m watching it very carefully as I fold, basically just thinning it out a little bit more, and I generally end up around 30. I have been going by the advice that it should take 10 seconds for a drop of the batter to lose its peak….this advice differs greatly depending on who you talk to – I’ve seen recipes that advise pushing down the peaks after piping the cookies. I never, ever have peaks.
• You don’t need to be delicate with the mixing either, one pastry chef I saw said to “beat the shit out of it.” Beat it, while carefully folding everything together.
• Oven temperature is crucial. I don’t really believe an oven thermometer is necessary so much as paying attention to exactly what the right setting on your own oven is. For me, it’s just a smidge above 300. If I go as high as 325 I end up with cracked shells.

And last but not least, here are some great links where you can learn all you ever wanted to and more about macarons!

Serious Eats: Macarons – This is my macaron recipe of choice right now, and has the easiest meringue preparation. I will definitely play with other types in the future, but for now – this works great.

David Lebovitz’s French Chocolate Macarons David Lebovitz is a fantastic resource for all things French, and macarons are no exception. While I don’t use his method, I did use his proportions when I made chocolate macarons (but ultimately decided I prefer using food coloring, cocoa powder makes things too chewy).

Syrup & Tang, La Macaronicite This is a series of blog posts that go over all of the different methods for making macarons in great detail. I read this multiple times before deciding on my own strategy.

Tartelette http://www.tarteletteblog.com/2008/06/snickers-macarons.html Yet another macaron recipe. I love this blog in general, so of course I went reading up on macarons there.

Almost Foolproof Macarons Another recipe that’s good reading, this time with pics and geeky details.

Happy baking!!

In case you didn’t get enough food over the holidays, I finally uploaded a whole bunch of baking related pictures to Flickr. Some of them are fairly old (my “standard” mushroom/cheese pizza is much better looking these days), and some of them will end up in blog entries over the next couple of weeks with recipes and more information. I’ve become quite obsessed with macarons as of late, and definitely have a slightly embarrassing backlog of unpublished recipes to catch up on.

For now, I think it’d be fun to revisit a classic. Just plain, old, what I call “utility” bread. My daily bread, basically. I make this with up to 75% whole wheat bread, and will throw in milk, olive oil, sugar/splenda/honey, herbs and spices, nuts and seeds….whatever I want to change it. It’s different enough now than the last time I shared my basic recipe that I think it’s worth giving again. I’m sure I’ll always be improving upon this. So this is my best basic…for now.

Basic White Bread

3 cups of bread flour
1 1/2 – 3/4 cups of lukewarm water
1 heaping tsp yeast
1 1/2 tsp salt

Mix all of the ingredients, and knead for about 10-15 minutes. Cover and allow to triple in size, this should take about 1 1/2 hrs.

At this point, you can throw the dough in the fridge and shape/bake as desired, or go ahead and shape it all now. Allow to rise into final shape, slash, and bake in a well heated 450 oven for 20-25 minutes. It will get dark and brown – this is due to the high salt content and intentional. Cover the top with foil if really concerned about burning, but it’s unlikely that will happen.

Bread is done when it sounds hollow when thumped, and should crackle when removed from the oven. Let cool for at least 15 minutes before slicing, and enjoy!!

Boing Boing 10/5/11

I feel like I should be writing something hugely prolific and deep, but I kinda like what I wrote on twitter a little earlier tonight…

I originally started typing out how I wrote my first program in basic on an Apple ][c, how I never could have imagined what was about to grow out what I was looking at on that little computer, how mind blowing it is for me at times to think that without computers the vast majority of my world, and at the very least, my job wouldn’t exist.

Although I hate quoting myself, what I said on Twitter really explains how I feel about Steve Jobs very well. While I couldn’t imagine my life without my iPod, and would miss my iPad if it disappeared tomorrow, it’s the expansion of my world that I love Steve Jobs for. So for that…

Thank you Steve for giving me a career that didn’t exist when I was a kid.

RIP.

I love to make muffins. They’re quick, easy, and can take on just about any flavor you want to throw into them. They can be healthy or unhealthy, sweet or savory, and, no matter how complicated you make them, they never take more than 15 minutes to mix up.

So, after making the Whoopie Pies with my coworker’s lemons, I decided to use up some more of them in some muffins. This recipe is my standard muffin formula, adjusted for the lemon/cranberry mix.

Ingredients:

* 2 cups all-purpose flour
* 1 tablespoon baking powder
* 1/2 teaspoon salt
* 3/4 cup sugar
* 1 lemon, zest of
* 1 lemon, juice of
* 1 cup dried cranberries
* 1/4 cup buttermilk powder
* 1 cup water
* 1 egg
* 1/4 cup oil
* for glaze: 1 cup powdered sugar, 2-3 tbl milk, icing coloring as desired

Mix up the wet ingredients, add the dry ingredients. Pour into greased or lined muffin tins, bake at 350 for 20-30 minutes, until golden brown around the edges.

Mix together the sugar and milk for the glaze, add coloring as needed. Remember how I mentioned in my last post you need to be careful with gel colors? Yeah, well, you can see the results here in the muffin glaze. PATIENCE is the important word when coloring anything. Only add a little bit of color at a time. I wasn’t particularly patient, threw in a glob of gel, and this is what I ended up with. Oops.

Wait for the muffins to cool off, then drizzle the glaze over the tops for a little extra sweet shine.

These muffins will keep for at least a week in a bag at room temp, or even longer in the freezer (if frozen, nuke ‘em for a minute or so to defrost, they’ll be fine).

Enjoy!!

One of my coworkers brought in some fresh picked organic lemons from his backyard, and I couldn’t resist bringing a bunch of lemons home to do some baking. After all, what’s more perfect for spring, sunny weather than lemons?

I’ve been reading whoopie pie recipes left and right in various baking blogs lately, and had been looking for an opportunity to try to make some myself. I started with a basic lemon cake recipe, and adapted it from there.

Ingredients:

2 cups AP flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup butter, softened
2 cups sugar
4 eggs
1/4 cup dried buttermilk
1/2 cup flour
2 tsp lemon rind/shredded peel
2 tablespoons lemon juice

For frosting:

6 oz cream cheese (softened)
1/2 cup butter (softened)
1 tsp lemon rind/peel
2 tsp lemon juice
4 cups powdered sugar

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 325.

Measure out the 2 cups of sugar into a bowl. Grate the lemon rind directly into the sugar. Mix (I use a plastic container with a lid and just shake). Set aside. You can do this in advance of baking – the longer you let the rind and sugar sit, the better. Shake the container every so often to encourage those lemon oils to go into the sugar.

Mix together the flour, salt, baking soda, baking powder, and buttermilk powder, set aside.

Cream the now lemony sugar together with the butter until fluffy. Add the lemon juice, then the flour mixture. Slowly add the water until you get a thickish batter, feel free to use less of the water if you want thicker pies.

Yum, lemons!

To bake:

Drop the batter by the teaspoon onto a cookie sheet. These will spread – a lot – I could only really bake 6 or so at a time on a full size sheet. The larger the batter drop the larger the cookie will be widthwise, you will not get more thickness by using more batter (use less water for that).

Bake for 8-11 minutes, remove to a rack to cool. The “cookies” should be slightly brown around the edges, but still mostly yellow. When the cookies come out of the oven, sprinkle the tops of the cookies with yellow sanding sugar (or other coarse, decorating sugar) if desired for a little crunch and sparkle.

The icing:

Mix together the cream cheese, lemon, and butter until fluffy. Add the powdered sugar a cup at a time until the desired stiffness is achieved. If desired, add yellow coloring gel at this point. Be careful with icing, a little goes a very long way! I got the color right on the icing for the whoopie pies, but…as you’ll see…I kind of made neon day-glo glaze for the muffins. Oopsies, you can laugh at me in the next post.

To assemble: Easy as pie. Once the cookies have cooled, take one, spread icing on the flat side with a knife or offset spatula. Top with another cookie, flat side down. You can get fancy with piping if you want, I did for a little while, but the results are barely visible and not really worth the extra effort.

Let the cookies sit for another hour or so for the icing to set and the cake to firm up, then dig in!

Yield fully depends on how big you make the cookies – I’d guestimate I got about 20-something cookies out of this batch. The icing was the perfect amount.

Aren’t they pretty?

At least 2-3 times a week, I am baking something or another. It tends to be a combination of food for dinner and some kind of “fun” stuff to feed my boyfriend, his kids, or the office. I don’t keep track of my experiments as well as I should, so I figure I might as well write stuff up in here.

I had intended to take pictures of what I baked for this entry, but totally forgot – look for those next time!

This week’s adventures have been:

Pizza.

I have an ongoing quest for the perfect pizza. There is my personal favorite pizza to eat (thick crust and crunchy), the pizza I aspire to bake (thin crust neopolitan), and then the pizza those around me most like (thick crust and bready). Trying to find a good balance between the three hasn’t been easy.

This week’s pizza experiment was definitely one of the best results yet. I’ve recently been experimenting with 00 italian flour, which I have to say, I should have done a long time ago. I used a 60% hydration dough, all 00 Flour, and it blew up on the second rise (I was making thick crust pizza), falling off the sides of the pizza pan. Instead of cutting the dough, I folded it over the toppings back on itself, which resulted in a stuffed crust kind of pizza. It was amazing! Chewy, crunchy, yummy crust, and the cheese and toppings hidden in there were awesome. I will absolutely be making it again this week, and take pictures.

Snickerdoodles.

I’d done one of my “ask person what their favorite junk food is” things the weekend before, and was told snickerdoodles. This is my go-to Snickerdoodles recipe, with some tweaking. I used all butter, since I don’t particularly like baking with shortening unless there’s a very good reason to do so. I also added extra vanilla to the cookies. I didn’t add cinnamon, which I should have (and usually do), simply because I forgot. So if you make this recipe, I highly recommend adding another teaspoon or so of cinnamon to the dough, otherwise all of the cinnamon-y sugar taste has to come from the coating.

Honey Wheat Bread.

Every couple of months I place an order from King Arthur Flour, and happily spend the next couple of months playing with new ingredients. This time around among the playthings I bought was a honey bread base. I experimented with bread bases way back when I first started baking, but at the time decided I needed to master “normal” ingredients before branching out into add-ins and funky flours. The honey base adds a touch of honey (obviously), spelt flour, gluten, and some seeds to any bread. I added it into a whole wheat recipe I use (2/3rds whole wheat flour, 1/3 bread, 50% hydration) along with some salt and honey (for happy yeast and flavor). It was…ok. I’m still not sold on the usefulness of bread bases and think I could probably make my own just as well with minimal effort (and customized for me), but it is a nice way to “kick up” a basic whole wheat. A lot of what I got from KAF this time around was specifically for whole wheat bread baking, so expect a lot of “I tried this…” type stuff. No recipe to share due to the use of the custom ingredient.

I also tried making two low-fat, sugar-free versions of the mug cakes (one chocolate cake, one vanilla lemon almond yellow cake) that have been spinning their way around the internet. Nothing worth sharing yet, but suffice to say – eggs make them too eggy/soufflee-ish, and extracts/flavorings do not do enough actual flavoring for a “cake” like this – stick with chocolate. The results haven’t been terrible, but I need to do some more tinkering before I can truly call this a good, quick, diet-friendly cake, which is what I’m trying to achieve.

This week: I have a big batch of french dough in the refrigerator (which had taken on a life of its own when I looked at it this morning, will be interesting to see what state it’s in later today). I want to repeat the pizza experiment from last week and see if it can be replicated. And I have some pre-party baking for the freezer to do. I’m thinking simple chocolate fudge brownies, and maybe Jacques Torres’ New York Times chocolate chip cookie recipe, since it’s a slightly “kicked up” version of a cookie. I’d wanted to do some playing around with filled brownies (marshmallow filled, in particular), but I suspect marshmallows won’t do very well in the freezer, and I’m probably better off waiting until I won’t have to freeze. I’m also considering making a cinnamon sugar pull apart bread or monkey bread, inspired by Annie’s pull apart bread recipe.

We’ll see, though. I always start the week thinking I know what I’m going to be baking, then as the week goes on a combination of what I feel like doing and what just seems to happen as I pull recipes together mutates things a bit.

I bake a lot. I’m regularly bringing things I bake to work or to friends, since part of the fun of baking is being able to share, and seeing other people smile when they eat your yummy creations. Last time I brought something to work, one of my coworkers asked me how long I had been baking. I answered without thinking, “I’ve been baking seriously for about 15 years.” Her response “what’s seriously baking?”

Good question, and one I had to think about. I believe I did give the right response. I’ve been baking my entire life, but for years and years I was like most people and just pulled out a random chocolate chip cookie recipe or something every once in a while. But 15 (or so) years ago, it all changed.

It wasn’t really intentional, I didn’t set out to become a baking geek. A friend of mine had a bread machine, I saw what it could do, and thought it was the greatest thing ever. I bought a second hand machine off of Ebay for next to nothing, and discovered I could bake very good bread very cheaply. Financially, bread baking made a lot of sense for me at the time. I joined a bread maker Yahoo! Group, and found that the science behind baking was really interesting and fun to play with.

I still think I tend to approach baking as more of a science than an art – most bakers would agree (in fact, “if cooking is an art, baking is a science” is one of my favorite quotes). I tend to think about what I want as the end result and back into a recipe from there. I think that’s different than what most chefs do, which seems to be more adding ingredients to see what the end result will be, playing with various combinations that seems like they’d work well together. Baking is a bit more complicated.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I’m a perfect baker. I screw up ALL the time. That’s part of playing around. I always have a couple of recipes I’m working on perfecting, and more and more I tend to make “kitchen sink” bread where I open the fridge/cabinets and throw stuff in randomly. I made an awesome loaf last night this way (and will share the recipe below), but often have disasters. My recent explorations into ciabatta baking have resulted in a number of disasters. My one successful loaf looked like ciabatta, but was fairly tasteless – there is a lot more perfecting to do.

These days, if I want to bake something specific and don’t know how, I tend to read a bunch of recipes and combine them into something I like. But if it’s totally unfamiliar (like ciabatta) I will follow the recipe to the letter until I get the technique and procedure down.

Enough blabbering, onto the recipe. I fully intended to make a pizza for dinner last night, but when I started pulling together the dough, got a bit carried away, and it mutated into something else. This obviously isn’t a tested recipe by any sense of the word, seeing as I only made it once (I wouldn’t put it up there with my perfect French bread or anything), but it is good, healthy, whole-wheatyish sandwich bread. I am out of real sugar at home, which is why the splenda, substitute real sugar if desired.

Ingredients:

3 cups white bread flour
2 cups whole wheat flour
2 1/2 cups water
1 1/2 tsp salt (this made for a slightly salty bread, which I think worked well with the other ingredients)
heaping 1/4 cup splenda
dash of honey (this was for the yeast more than anything else, there isn’t enough for flavor)
2 tbs olive oil
1/4 cup non-fat milk powder
1/2 cup seeds & grains (I use this – I love everything about KA’s harvest grains blend except for the poppy – this lets me make my own).
2 tsp yeast

Throw all the ingredients in your bread machine set to dough, OR…mix the yeast, honey and water, let sit. Mix all the dry ingredients, then add the yeast/water mixture and olive oil.

Once the dough is kneaded (if by hand, about 20 minutes kneading should do it), let it triple for the first rise. In my case, this means I have to pull it out of the bread machine – the machine will automatically knock the rising dough down before it can fully triple. Took about an hour.

Now to decide what to do with the dough! I made this into 4 rolls (for dinner that night), and 1 big loaf. The rolls baked at 450 for 15, the loaf at 375 for closer to 30. Both batches were sprayed with water 5 and 10 minutes into baking.

Allow to cool off completely before slicing, then enjoy!!

I worked for a very “cool” Silicon Alley (NYC) company called Pseudo back in the bubble days.

Within our little world of startups, we were rock stars. We had huge parties, we did whatever we wanted in the city, and everyone thought we were the greatest. We were hanging out with celebrities, going to awards shows, really part of a whole other world as the “startup kids.” We thought we were revolutionary (and to an extent, I guess we were), and really believed we were changing the world…this was all covered really well in the documentary We Live in Public. But that’s all perception, and being cool doesn’t write checks…

What happened is we concentrated more on being cool and having fun than we concentrated on actually making money, as did many other startups at the time. It was an awesome ride for a few years, but it was not sustainable. There are also other aspects of this culture that I hope don’t exist anymore, like the very prevalent in-office drug use, and other things (sex in the office, for example) preventing actual work from getting done. I haven’t seen that happening at a company in a very long time, thankfully.

The concept of the cool kids has not gone away, it just switches from company to company. It existed here in SF just like it did in NY in the late 90′s, and is beginning to exist again today. I think it’s horrible, has a terrible impact on the industry as a whole, and let’s face it, none of us are “cool,” we’re nerds who spend all day in front of a computer. Some company becomes cool, everyone scrambles to hire the employees from there and copy their ideas…and six months later it’s another company that everyone’s imitating.

I guess all I can say to anyone who thinks they’re one of the cool kids, is that they should be very aware that as soon as the market or popular opinion changes, they won’t be oh so cool anymore. They should make sure they’re building a career they can keep going after their company goes away, or even better, build a company that can exist after the cool factor wears off.

A few weeks ago at BlogHer, the University of Phoenix was offering a learning assessment you could take to find out what your learning style was to win an iPad (which I did win – holy cow – but more on that in a future entry, there’s a funny story to share). As you can see from my results here, I tested nearly completely as aural, with a big chunk of logical, some solitary, and a teeny weeny bit of visual. I was told that was pretty much dead opposite of the rest of BlogHer attendees, which I found pretty fascinating. I knew my learning style was considered more masculine than feminine, but I would have said it was because I was visual/spatial (or what I thought of as left brain vs right). Mind you, spatial isn’t on this learning style chart, could mean the same thing as visual, and maybe one doesn’t exclude the other (anyone know?), but I barely registered as a visual learner.

I have always been very musically oriented, from starting to play the piano when I was 4, to learning a bunch of other musical instruments just because (not saying I was good at them, but they were fun to play with), to singing in any chorus, choir or musical that would have me. And of course, if you know me, you know my love for Broadway. A good song, or even just an amazing voice will easily bring me to tears, but I never really thought about whether or not that meant anything.

I was staying with my parents while I was in NYC at the conference, and when I told my mom (who’s a lifelong academic/educator, now a college professor and school superintendent) what the test said, her response was simply “of course!” Oh. Revelation to me, known fact to her.

Some people have eidetic (photographic) memories, where they can take a quick look at something and recall every single element of it. I can do something similar where my brain takes single snapshots of certain moments and can recall details of those snapshots, no matter how old they are. My memories are full of mental pictures. If I’m remembering notes on a page, I have to remember where those notes are on the page before I can remember the content of the notes. I’m also terrible at foreign languages, and thought all of this made me a visual learner.

Now with the learning assessment results in mind, I realize that my “visual snapshot ability” (it’s in quotes because I don’t think it’s considered any kind of “real” ability) doesn’t even come close to what I do with audio. People with eidetic memories can remember every single detail of something they’ve seen for a brief moment, which I can only do on occasion, and I can’t make it happen, as much as I’ve tried to “train” it. It just happens, sometimes due to an emotional event associated with the moment, and sometimes for no good reason at all.

However, I can recall audio I’ve heard for a brief moment down to the most minute detail, sometimes with visuals, sometimes without. I know the proper pitch, the vocal tone, I can identify single notes in chords in my head, I often remember the lyrics, and although I may not be able to accurately recreate the audio due to my inability to play the piano or sing even half as well as I used to (I mentioned all of this briefly in the 25 things you don’t know about me post/meme/thingy), I know the tune inside and out. It used to drive my piano teachers crazy (they call it “playing by ear”), if they made the mistake of playing a song for me before I learned it by reading the music, I would never look at the music again and play from audio memory. I’ve always thought that was due to a lot of training (both vocal and instrumental), and music theory classes, but I now think it’s more than that. In hindsight, the learning assessment results make perfect sense. Why else would I still be able to recall every single helper verb I had to memorize in 6th grade to the tune of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star (“be being as is have has could, do does did, may might must….” and so on). My teacher said we would never forget, and she was right.

I also learned years ago that I cannot do much of anything without sound in the background. It doesn’t really matter what the sound is, just something my mind can grab on to so the rest of me can concentrate on something else. When I was younger, this was a pretty big problem due to the common belief that you must have silence to be able to study. Once I got older and figured it out, concentrating became much easier. I blamed that on my general tendency towards hyperactivity (or ADHD, or whatever you want to call it). I’ve never been good at sitting still, and have never grown out of the “ooh, shiny!” distractibility.

The same goes with me in the office and at home. If I’m at home, the TV is on, no matter what I’m doing. CNN is on right now, has been for hours, but it’s just background noise. I do know part of my head IS listening, though, for example, I just heard the words “Clay Shirky” and looked up. And now (it’s probably hours later, I’ve been doing other things while writing/editing this entry) I just recognized a voice, looked up, and it’s Marc Saltzman, who used to work with us at Pseudo years ago, wow, hey Marc! How on earth is possible that he looks younger now? I sure don’t. But he’s on CNN! See, random bits and pieces catch my attention. But is my attention being swiped by the TV ADHD, or my ability to learn almost subconsciously through audio?

At work, if I’m trying to concentrate, my headphones are on. I’m not really paying attention, but just like CNN right now, I will be affected by what I’m listening to. I tell you, there’s nothing like fighting tears while writing a spec (I swear, I’m not crying over specs, even if Jira does love to suggest that I tag all my specs “pain”). And nothing on earth will keep me from falling asleep more than a sound I can just barely hear, no matter what it is, my mind will not stop trying to interpret it into something I can recognize, put to a pattern, and end.

Everyone gets a song or a jingle stuck in their head every once in a while. I’m the same, except in my situation, I cannot get the tune out of my head until I completely memorize it. I will hear commercials as I’m wandering around the house (I fast-forward through them when I’m actively watching TV) and end up memorizing them, or even worse, memorizing bits and pieces. It doesn’t matter what the song or jingle is, anything musical has to have an ending, otherwise it gets stuck on a loop in my head.

That is also why I tend to listen to full musicals or albums that run together (like Queensryche’s Mindcrime) while I’m working (and monotonous TV when I’m reading or writing or something), I don’t notice the switch from one song to another as much, and am able to easily stop in the middle, since it can then continue through to the end in my head.

If I don’t know the ending of a song or jingle, or if it ends on a discordant note or in the middle of a beat or something (like nails on a friggin chalkboard to me!), I’ll end up mixing it in my head with a song I do know that hits the same note or a complimentary one in the same key.

Fortunately, I tend to forget the mix once I learn the song, since I do come up with some really weird ones, I don’t know how my head pulls the songs together. I’ve wondered before if really good DJ’s train that ability to select songs that match, and that’s how they mix music so well (I don’t do it intentionally, and have never tried), but that’s another blabber for another time. I do get well done mash-ups (ones that match more than just a beat) stuck in my head pretty easily, and tend to avoid them as a result.

As a silly example, last September when I was on vacation to Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon, we kept hearing “See You Again” by Miley Cyrus everywhere. It has a funky chorus with off beat lyrics, and got hopelessly stuck in my head. I bought the song as soon as possible (I think I got it from iTunes while I was still at the Vegas airport), put it on repeat many times over a few days, worked out the piece of the song I was having trouble memorizing, even looked up the lyrics I couldn’t clearly understand, and was done with it. I can still run though the whole thing in my head, it’s actually a cute, catchy song, but the point is…I don’t have to.

For the most part, I discover interesting music this way. The annoying piece is when I get bits and pieces of TV jingles stuck in my head, or songs I really don’t like – the solution is still the same as with the Miley Cyrus song. I’m also often amused when I discover what song goes with what tv commercial, there’s rarely any relation between the lyrics of the song and what the commercial is pitching.

Strangely enough, this all started out as an entry about my trip to South Africa, but it’s safe to say that this is already far too long of a single blog entry from a girl who’s already been told her entries get too long. Oops.

Until an actual “all about my trip to Cape Town” entry (of which there will be many), I leave you with this…gorgeous, isn’t it?

Disclosure: I wrote most of this entry on an iPad I won from the University of Phoenix at BlogHer because I took the learning assessment described in this entry. I think I’d be writing this entry anyway, because the findings were really interesting to me, but maybe it wouldn’t be quite so rambly if I hadn’t had the iPad on some very, very long plane trips. You decide if that is a good or bad thing. I’m too jet-lagged to care. There ya go, FTC – full blogger disclosure.