Tea (Cakes) but mostly sympathy

It appears that I'm not getting around to baking or blogging lately. It has just been too busy. My top priorities are family, work, and exercise. Baking just hasn't been fitting into those categories much lately.
I have, however, made two of the many items I am scheduled to make. I just don't have photos of either of them. Cassandra might have photos of the Tea Cakes -- I'll ask her. If so, I'll post those later.
I hope we do have pix of the Tea Cakes, because mine look far different than Maria's do. Since I'm the one that is supposed to stick to the recipe, I rolled mine out and cut them with a cookie cutter. This is fine with me because I really enjoy rolling/cutting cookies. It reminds me of Christmas.
But this was some sticky dough. I refrigerated it for more than 24 hours before I rolled it, which was a good thing. I had to flour like crazy to get it to roll out, and had to move at lightening speed so it didn't get to soft before cutting and transferring the cookies. A la Cassandra, I used the tape measure to roll the dough to the exact thickness it was supposed to be -- and used a 3-1/2 inch round cookie cutter like Maida said. I had divided the dough into four sections, and was able to roll and cut each of those four sections. The scraps were worthless. I guess I could have put them together and chilled them for another 24 hours, but I decided that due the hugeness of these cookies, I really didn't need more than the number of cookies I had already cut out.
As Maria said, these cookies, while already huge, became more huge because they spread while baking. But they were very beautiful looking. Very perfect looking, in fact. I didn't even want to eat one at first because they looked like something you would see in a high end bakery.
I did finally force myself to eat them. They are very good cookies. Like Maida said, they are plain. They are not too sweet. Mine did not have the texture of a Madeline as Maria described. Mine were nice and crunchy throughout.
I packed these up 2 cookies to a bag and sent them off in school lunches (and work lunch for me). They were gone in a week. I would definitely make these again.

While the Tea Cakes were going out in school lunches, I held off on making anything else. I also held off because I really didn't have anytime to make anything else. I bought all the ingredients for the next 5 items, thinking that would prompt me to make them. It didn't. But finally an opportunity arose. The Girl Scout troop was going camping, and I was responsible for dinner. What an opportunity to make the Oreo Cookie Cake.

But of course, I had no time to make the Oreo Cookie Cake. The week before the camping trip, I did not arrive home before 8:00 p.m. any day. When I did get home, I was wiped out. I had already advertised the fact I was bringing a homemade cake, so I had to make it. Thursday night, despite the lateness of my arrival home, I got the ingredients out and baked that cake.

Fortunately, it is a very simple cake to make. The most complicated part of the recipe is cutting the Oreos into quarters and making the little tunnel in the cake for the Oreo batter to settle into. Otherwise, it took about 10 minutes to throw the batter together. My cake came out of the pan perfectly. It looked so perfect that I thought maybe I would skip the frosting. However, I had bought a huge amount of chocolate which was cluttering my baking supplies, so decided Friday morning to make the frosting too. The frosting was even easier than the cake. Yay.

After making the frosting, I threw the nicely frosted, but unphotographed, cake into the cake carrier and packed it into the car with the rest of the camping supplies. And there it sat all day Friday, all Friday night. Saturday, it got to sit in the blazing sun of the desert. The chocolate frosting did weep a little bit, but not too bad. Finally, around 3:00 p.m. on Saturday, we voted to eat cake and milk for our snack. It was quite tasty, despite all its sitting around. It tasted fresh and Oreo-y and chocolately. Mo and Maddy had two pieces. Mo had one more piece that night.

There was still half of the cake left after the trip. I couldn't get myself to eat anymore though. It was looking a little worse for wear after sitting around the campsite all weekend. I would, however, highly recommend this cake for any camping trip. It held up like a champion through heat, wind, and chilly nights.

What do I need sympathy for? I've got 4 more desserts to make to catch up with Maria. We'll see if I can do it.