When you are cooking for the masses, you need a strategy.  You need to conceptualize your menu, draw up a grocery list, and prep your ingredients as much as you can ahead of time.  That is, if you don’t want to go crazy the day of the event.  So in an effort to prevent insanity, I’ve been preparing little by little for the brunch tomorrow (the last guest count according to G was that we are up to 18 people, including ourselves).  I’ve actually been preparing since Friday night when I shredded the carrots for my carrot cake cupcakes and also grated the cheese for my crab quiche.  Friday night after work was also when I went grocery shopping.  And today, I sliced, battered and fried the boneless chicken breasts for the chicken francese (supposedly this recipe is like the chicken francese from Sbarro’s) and baked the aforementioned carrot cake cupcakes.  It’s past midnight and I’ve been re-starting this episode of The Big Bang Theory countless times in an effort to fully watch it — which likely will not happen since I’m blogging while watching the episode.  Alas.

Ran out of cupcake liners with maybe a dozen cupcakes’ worth of batter to go.  It’s times like this that I am glad to live in an urban setting, where I could just skip out at 10pm to go to the corner store to look for the needed cupcake liners, but alas, no dice.  I really didn’t want to make the leftover batter into a cake, so I just made them into mini-cupcakes (I had liners for mini-cupcakes but didn’t want to use them unless I ran out of options):

It’s partly my fault that I’m up this late.  I bought a Diet Coke from the corner store upon discovering that there were no cupcake liners there — didn’t want to waste the trip.  Also, I was feeling very lazy and lethargic today due to the rainy, rainy, gloomy, gloomy weather.  Let’s hope tomorrow is better.