I used to be well-known for my organizational skills. I don’t know if it is just that I have ceased caring about keeping track of things, that I have too many things to keep track of or that I am just losing my mind. Whatever the reason, I am dropping the ball a bit too often. This time – for the second time in recent months – my latest school assignment sneaked up on me. It is, in fairness, the least important thing to me and therefore my last priority. I know in the back of my mind that I need to get around to doing the reading and writing, but I have some vague idea of when the next deadline is (and my mind fixes this date routinely as a week after the actual deadline). I sign into the online learning platform and discover that, no, in fact, the deadline is not next week but tomorrow. I shift into high gear and race toward finishing. My final product is never my best work, and I do not mind this because somehow it is more fun to live through the race to the finish, to make sure that I can finish under such a tight deadline, even if the final product isn’t great. Since I already have a bunch of completed degrees, this one is not imperative (neither to complete it nor to get good marks). I am doing it on top of all the other things I do (the many work obligations and my baking multitasking) just to keep the gears of the brain shifting all the time.

I devoted the evening to the pursuit of completing the assignment, and I can report happily and with some relief that I have made it most of the way through most of the reading I need to do to write the relatively undemanding paper.

Meanwhile, here is a chronicle of all the baked goods I offered my workplace on Thursday…

*Kahlua coffee cupcakes

*Lemon cream oat bars

*Mini chocolate pudding pies baked into vanilla cupcakes

*Crème brûlée cupcakes

*Dark chocolate hazelnut mini tarts

*Oreo truffles

*Highly experimental red velvet cupcakes

*Dulce de leche bundt cake

*Carrot-pineapple cake with a brownie layer in between carrot layers

*Brown sugar cupcakes filled with Toblerone candy

*Brown sugar shortbread (used brown sugar in place of powdered sugar)

*Licorice cupcakes

*Banoffee cupcakes

*Vanilla orange biscotti

*Guinness cupcakes with Baileys frosting

Ah, and the surprise cupcakes (vanilla with vanilla bean Swiss buttercream)…

And some random shots of everything…