Baking day.

I saw this scary time on my alarm clock last night when I was setting it for this morning. I promptly deleted it lest I accidentally switch on my middle of the night race-morning alarm clock (it's left-over from Sunday). Eek that was early.

This morning I started the day right by making special crescents rolls. Yummy yum I am a genius.

That's two choc chip, two s'mores (graham crackers included), two marshmallow/chocolate, and two plain. YUM.

The plain turned out prettier than the s'mores. Prettiness is not a good trade-off for deliciousness.

I had planning on saving this project, but I decided to go ahead and make this amazing Chocolate Eclair Cake this afternoon, since I was home early from work and clearly in a baking mood today. I've talked about making this before and am glad I finally did! Usually I'm really good at make bread doughs and pastry doughs (I've been baking challah for a long time and I mastered cream puffs last spring and there was no going back since). However, today something was "off." I still don't know what but it led to me breaking an egg on the floor (either a good omen or a sign of worse to come?). When I finally managed to crack an egg into the bowl, some how the whites of it also flew into the air, luckily (or unluckily, depending who you are) landing nowhere but my own clothes... so, I was a little crazy today... Then I neglected to mix each egg in at a time, and came out with lumpy dough.

Raw.

...and cooked.

Maybe I've lost my pastry dough talent, but I think I was just having an off day. The rest of the project came out wonderfully! I did a marbling design on top of the cool-whip topping (using choc sauce).

And of course I ate out a corner ASAP

I think it did turn out well other than the fact that I would've liked a little more substance to the dough. The dough is topped with a chocolate mixture, custard, and whipped topping (and more chocolate) and I think it would've been balanced out better with more dough. But maybe it was just my weird dough that was lacking substance...will have to attempt again.

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On the workout front today, I worked 3X2000meters on the erg. I'm trying to up my erging to 4 times a week (I think I got 3 last week, pretty good). I was able to sneak these 2ks in whilst I was baking this afternoon. They were hard. I did them at 5k-rate (well, a little higher than 5k rate...) and all together it was about 27 minutes. Erging has been really hard lately. I followed this stroke-rate pattern for each piece (I found it on concept2.com).

Maybe today it was hard because I'm still tired from Sunday, so I'll keep at it. I also think that running so much could be tiring out my legs to a point where they're finding it hard to push it out on an erg for 30 minutes a day. For now, I want to keep running but in a couple weeks I'll pull back, as we get closer to my try-outs date. 

I lounged later in the afternoon, reading more about Anne Boleyn (I know a lot about the Tudors...been doing my own (amateur) research through reading about them for almost a decade now!), looking back through all of Hungry Runner Girl's posts, and catching a Shark Week episode. Later on I worked in abs and a 5-mile run. More shark stuff tonight, perhaps. Wild night!