Pumpkin and Spice

I'm at the new lodge, now- it's much smaller than the old one. The old lodge was the "base" lodge- where skiers park for the day, where you pick up your ski rentals for the day, and where you buy lift tickets, so it's quite a large lodge. The new one is the highest one up the mountain, and can only be reached (during the day) by skiing in, so there's not the same amount of traffic as the other two lodges.

In the morning, we bake muffins and other breakfast items for the day. There's a little cabin at the top of the mountain that sells hot cocoa, muffins, cookies and other snackie foods. We bake their treats for them, and then have to send them up the mountain to the cabin. How do we get them up the mountain? We pack them in a box, put them on the ski lift, and send them on their way. It's so funny watching that little box full of muffins and cookies riding up on the lift all by themselves. It makes me laugh every morning.

We bake a wide assortment of goodies- pretty standard bakery fare. Cookies (chocolate chip, dark chocolate, peanut butter and oatmeal raisin), brownies, bar cookies, lemon bars, LOTS of biscotti, devil's food cake (which get made into a caramel chocolate layer cake) and cheesecakes. We also do muffins every morning- I've gotten to pick the "flavor of the day" the past few days. It's silly, but it makes me feel like I'm making an important contribution.

Today, I made my old friend (or is it arch-enemy?)- Carrot Cake. It's a huge batch- it barely fits in a 60 quart mixer. Once everything's in the mixer, and you mix it, stuff sometimes spills out it's so full. And once you have 60 quarts of cake batter, and you're trying to pan it up, no matter how hard you try to be clean and tidy, you're gonna wind up wearing some of that cake.

After making the cakes, I was so sticky and messy that I had to go get a fresh uniform from equiptment issue. The guy at equiptment issue asked me, "Did you try to feed your coat?" (I had to clean my shoes off, and wash batter out of my nametag!) Somehow, I look cleaner in the picture than I actually was... (I tried to enlarge it so you can see the mess a little better.)

We got some fresh snow today, and it's supposed to snow some more this weekend. I'm going skiing with some friends on Monday, so I'm hoping the snow keeps up so there's some nice, fresh powder to ski!