{"id":1130,"date":"2012-03-18T17:13:17","date_gmt":"2012-03-18T08:13:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/life-in-japan\/?p=1130"},"modified":"2012-03-18T17:13:17","modified_gmt":"2012-03-18T08:13:17","slug":"a-pound-of-sugar-tablespoon-of-milk-and-a-cup-of-awesome","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/?p=1130","title":{"rendered":"A pound of sugar, tablespoon of milk, and a cup of awesome."},"content":{"rendered":"

I know what you’re thinking: Jason lives in the most populous city on earth, has no one to support, and no outstanding debt. He must lead a pretty awesome life and have exciting weekends, right?<\/p>\n

Well, you’d be absolutely correct<\/strong>. I bring you..<\/p>\n

Hamburger Cookies<\/h1>\n
\"Hamburger<\/a>

A hamburger AND a cookie<\/p><\/div>\n

Yep, I had to think of something to do to occupy my free time, so I decided to make some hamburger-inspired cookies. We had [censored]<\/strong> yesterday, so someone had to go into the office to [censored]<\/strong> for [censored]<\/strong>. Naturally, I volunteered. So part of my weekend of awesomeness was spent at my desk, doing work-y things. Today, though, I was totally free! So after going to a museum exhibit in the morning (I got two museum\/art show tickets earlier this week), I went to a bunch of grocery stores to gather up the materials one needs to make some hamburger cookies. And those ingredients include…<\/p>\n

\"Hamburger<\/a>

These!<\/p><\/div>\n

These! Thanks for asking. I was going to make mini french fries (out of thinly-sliced poundcake with small cups of strawberry jam or red-dyed icing for ketchup), but realized that I really have no desire to eat all this stuff, so I’m going to have to bring it to work. It’s kinda hard to pass out tiny french fries in a law firm full of people who are actually serious, so I kept it only to the hamburgers.<\/p>\n

Not content with just the cookies, I found it best to bake the top cookies a bit to brown them up. Unfortunately, the cookies I bought (Pepperidge Farms) for the hamburger patties were–much to my surprise–oval<\/em> and not circles, like I assumed. Since (as you may know) hamburgers are typically not ovals, I had to cut a sliver out of the middle of every chocolate cookie and bond the sides together to make circles.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Lettuce, anyone?<\/p><\/div>\n

You can see here what the ovals look like when cut up. To bond everything together, we need icing–and lots of it! For anyone who’s seen my not-infrequent cookie events, you’ll know that I’m no stranger to icing and (for one reason or another) seem to always have the supplies on hand in my closet. You never know when you need to decorate something with lots of sugar! So I made 3 types: thick pale green (lettuce), thin bright yellow (mustard) and thin bright red (ketchup). This gives it the appearance of actual hamburger condiments and has the benefit of bonding the cookie together. This turned out to be more critical than I originally planned, due greatly in part to the problem with cutting these stupid things in half. But hey, why worry about that? After putting down a layer of green and putting on the ‘patty’ cookies, we’re ready to spray on the ketchup and mustard! Having never worked at a fast food restaurant, I must admit that I lacked the certain finesse or skilled required to get the perfect condiment patterns, but I think I did a passable job all the same.<\/p>\n

Lastly, sandwich the top (and previously baked with some butter brushed on the tops to promote browning) cookie on to bond with the other icing, and then finish it up with some melted white chocolate to make those delicious little sesame seeds.<\/p>\n

\"Finished!\"<\/a>

Finished!<\/p><\/div>\n

And after all that work.. you sit there and stare at your 10 little hamburger cookies and then debate what to do with them. As for me, I’m gonna bring them to the office and pass around to the people I work with. I have no idea how they taste, but I imagine they must be all right. The only concern is that biting through cookies into a cookie may lead to breaking up. But hey, my concern was about making something that looks nice and tastes decent, not something that you can eat cleanly.<\/p>\n

So yes, dear stranger, I do have some pretty awesome weekends.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I know what you’re thinking: Jason lives in the most populous city on earth, has no one to support, and no outstanding debt. He must lead a pretty awesome life and have exciting weekends, right?<\/p>\n

Well, you’d be absolutely correct. I bring you..<\/p>\n

Hamburger Cookies <\/p>\n

A hamburger AND a cookie<\/p>\n

Yep, I had to think of something to do to occupy my free time, so I decided to make some hamburger-inspired cookies. We had [censored] yesterday, so someone had to go into the office to [censored] for [censored]. Naturally, I volunteered. So part of my weekend of . . . → Read More: A pound of sugar, tablespoon of milk, and a cup of awesome.<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1130"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1130"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1135,"href":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1130\/revisions\/1135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}