I already know I perpetrated a Stupid.

And yes...it was a Stupid with a capital "S".

So Monday night/Tuesday morning. I am sleeping, as I should be at 3am. Cell phone rings (we dont keep a house phone & it has to be on because I am the first call for the security company for all of our buildings - you SO want my job now, dontcha?!?) and its our security company telling me that a motion detector has been tripped on the second floor of the restaurant closest to my house. Fine. Am I happy about this ~ fuck no. Did I lay there and pout for 10 minutes or so ~ hell yes. But I eventually got up, found clothes, pulled the hair into a ponytail and head to the store to see what stupid fucking Oktoberfest decoration set of the stupid fucking alarm that I am getting up at 3am to go check out. Because every damn call I have to go on is something dumb like that, but I still have to go. I did ask them to send the cops out, but I ask them that most times and have yet to actually see one.

I get there around 3:30. I drive the lot & walk the perimeter, I dont notice anything alarming. I go inside and in my best Paul Rudd Wet Hot American Summer impression I start to check the building. I hit all the lights, look for anything out of place, stomp around a bit and dont find anything out of whack that would have set off the alarm. I am confused by this. I believe I said so out loud while standing in the second floor dining room tired & out of sorts. Yes, I talk to myself, dont judge. I do a very perfunctory look in the upstairs bathrooms, hit the lights, go back to main floor, walk the basement (fucking CREEPY when its NOT the middle of the night for the record) check all the doors, still see nothing odd, hit all the lights, reset the alarm and go home. Cranky. I was home a smidgen before 4am.

At 4:10am my phone rings AGAIN. Its the security company AGAIN. Telling me the upstairs motion detector went off AGAIN. This time I tell this way-too-fucking-happy-to-be-calling-me-at-4am-woman to silence the alarm, send the cops and ignore that sensor...something must be wrong with it and I will deal with it in the morning. She says fine, whats your passcode, enjoy the rest of your evening blahblahblah. I go back to sleep.

At 5:07am the phone rings. Guess who it is this time? If you took the security company you WIN!!! I got bitchy. Something to the effect of "which part of ignore that goddamn sensor did you NOT get when I told you an hour ago?!?!?" to which the pleasant lady replied "well we are, for the upstairs, but this time its the bar & side door. In that order." Hmmmmm. This is odd. Unless the whole system shit the bed. Which would also be odd. So I have to go back in and check it out. I tried the boss first because he is usually up at 5am...but he didnt answer my text & I didnt want to call.

So I go back. And this time I go over that place for about an hour trying to figure out WTF is setting off the alarm. I find a bottle of tripel sec & a screw driver on the floor behind the bar that wasnt there at 3am. I dont like that, its just not right & no reasonable way for them to get there outside of our building's ghost - which is not out of the question.  I finished up around 6am. Didnt rearm the building because the opening manager was due in in about half an hour, came home and emailed the boss to 1) tell him what had been happening all night and 2) tell him my ass wouldnt be in until later because I needed some fucking sleep and then go back to bed. Where I promptly passed out.

Woke up at 10am and the boss texted me that yeah, someone had in fact attempted to break in but was unsuccessful.  They had smashed in a window under the deck and tried to gain access by removing the hinges from a door. They failed because the doors wont open that way...

Him telling me this weirded me out. They could have been under the deck while I was there. Wasnt freaked out, just a tad unsettled.

Well after I go back in daylight and start piecing together all of the stuff the Boss found and what I found and doing some Sherlock Holmes work me & my General Manager are convinced that there was definitely SOMEONE in the building last night. Had to be. Boss is unconvinced. We ask him to come down so we can show him what we found that has us so sure. We show him, he is skeptical. We push harder, he believes.

So this is what happened after it was all figured out.  At some point after the closers left at 1:30am someone broke in under the deck. They busted 2 screwdrivers and destroyed the door hinges in their FAIL to get in. When this didnt work they tried to pry open a door on our deck & on the side of the building - both new doors and also a fail. They then used our hood duct work and the deck railing to get onto a roof that gives access to the 2nd floor windows and came in through said window, setting off the alarm at 3am. I can only assume they were on the 2nd floor while I was at 3:30am hiding somewhere I didnt find them. *shudder*

They attempted to leave a little after 4am, setting off the alarm again because I had reset it while I was there. But this time I didnt go out, I just had them silence it so as not to bug our neighbors and went back to bed. But Im guessing they hid again waiting for me to come back or the cops to arrive. Either way they stopped moving.

At 5am they moved again, only this time down the service steps, into the kitchen and behind the bar...where they attempted to clean sweep a liquor shelf quickly, dropping the screw driver they brought up from under the deck, knocking over the tripel sec and a bottle of tequila we found behind a piece of equipment. They grabbed partial bottles of Jim Beam, Jack Daniels, Well Bourbon, Grenadine (LOLZ), Seagrams VO & SoCo. Less than $40 worth of liquor, really, it was just the closest to the door and the alarm was blaring at this point. They dropped the grenadine outside by the side door, where boss found it in the morning.

I arrived about 10 minutes after the alarm went off. I probably missed their exit by a couple minutes.

Fucked up, huh? Things I figured out: 1) Not going to go into a building on an alarm call without a cop no matter the circumstances ever again. I was naive to just assume it was something dumb setting off the alarm. 2) I am amazingly lucky. I could have been very seriously hurt if I had come across this person on my first trip in had I accidentally confronted them while I was there. *shudder* and 3) I really really really miss my big lab, Diamond, that passed last February. I usually took him with me on calls because he was the Protector & would have let me know that I wasnt alone in that building at 3:30am.

We finished Tuesday night at The ScareHouse for the Crazy Scary event that was a fantabulous fundraiser & one hell of a good time that raised almost $6300 for Christmas Crazy & Make Room for Kids which is awesome.

And I have decided the only kind of scary I want to experience for awhile is of the Haunted House/Scary Movie variety. No more creeping on thieves by myself in the middle of the night. Promise.

Cinnamon Roll Cookies!!!

I'm going to double post today, but first the cookies. The next story kinda shook me up and needs its own posting.

I made them over a week ago & thought they were so yummy I should share...well that and the recipe was requested by a couple folks so here it is.

I will preface with this ~ it would be totally ok to use a premade sugar cookie tube thing for this recipe. Personally I wouldn't, but if you're not a baker, dont have the tools/time or just want to make them fast it would be ok.  Personally, I wouldn't. Those tube-o-cookie things have a very odd flavor that I dont particularly like & have never been able to identify...well that and read the ingredient list. I dont put any of those super long nonsense words in my cookies.

For the record I use a KitchenAid Pro stand mixer (yeah, it really is as badass as it sounds like it is, basically has a honda motor in it) with a paddle for all cookies and for this recipe following the right mixing procedure is important because you have to form & slice these...

The Recipe.

2 sticks Salted Butter - softened
3/4 cup Granulated Sugar
1/2 cup Light Brown Sugar
2 whole Eggs
2 Egg Yolks
1 Tbsp Vanilla Extract
1 Tbsp Butter Extract (optional)
2 Tbsp Heavy Cream (can sub sour cream or milk)
2 1/4 cups All Purpose Flour
1 tsp Baking Soda
1/4 tsp salt

•  Cream the butter until light & fluffy. Add both sugars and continue to cream until light again. Add the eggs & yolks one at a time beating well between additions. Add the extract(s) & cream and mix in to combine.
• Place all the dry ingredients in a bowl and mix with a wire whisk to incorporate. Add in small increments to the butter mixture and mix until well combined. Have to make sure you get it all mixed in thoroughly or you'll get weird blops in your dough.
• Eat some of the dough...it really is pretty damn delicious.
• Line a half sheet tray with plastic wrap so it over hangs on the left & right sides (yeah-not parchment. The wrap is easier to deal with later, I learned this the hard way. Benefit from my frustration) and dump the dough on top. Use your hands or a rolling pin to evenly spread the dough out to cover the pan evenly.  I start w the hands and finish it off with the pin to even it all out. Side Note: flouring your hands a little makes the dough not stick to everything.
• Eat some more dough...I heart cookie dough. 
• Place the tray in the fridge until the dough has chilled enough to be workable by hand.  Mix up a bowl of roughly 1 cup brown sugar & 4 Tbsp cinnamon* (you can add other spices here too, like ground ginger & some allspice or nutmeg - go nuts!). Pull the dough out of the fridge & remove from the pan using the plastic wrap to help you.
• Cover the top with the brown sugar mix. Should be a light, even coat so dont dump it all on, it may be too much. cut the dough sheet in half vertically, making more of less 2 almost squares.
• Use the plastic wrap to roll the dough up cinnamon roll style. Dont stress about perfect seals or anything, the dough can be pinched & forced into submission- its a cookie. When its a lovely tube wrap it tight in saran wrap and refrigerate until it is firmly set.
• Preheat oven to 375, slice the tubes into 1/4" slices and lay on parchment lined trays to bake. My oven took 11 minutes so thats a good place to start. Cool on the tray for 5 minutes then transfer to a cooling rack
• For a glaze I mixed up 2 cups powdered sugar with 3 Tbsp of Milk & 1 Tbsp of vanilla. I also tossed a chunk of really soft butter in there because I like it that way.  When the cookies are TOTALLY cooled use a spoon to drizzle the glaze over top, let it set for a couple minutes then devour. 

These were very pretty pinwheels & easy enough my nephew could handle making them with some direction if he wanted to, so they are good for fancy schmancy cookies or to just make at home with the kiddies. Not to mention they are buttery, soft & chewy & packed with cinnamon. LOVE them.

The *cinnamon - I use a Vietnamese cinnamon, so its rather pungent and spicy. Would highly recommend & you can find it at Penseys or online. It really is much different than the crap on grocery store shelves and takes a good cookie and makes it aromatic & dreamy. Like an oatmeal cookie is next level with this cinnamon.

I also make my own vanilla extract so its more pungent than store bought as well....

I am a baking dork.

But I dont care. My shit's delicious!!

Hope you make them! They really sound more complicated than they are. Start to finish I probably spent less than an hour putting them together, the hard part was patiently waiting for dough to chill so I could bake them....but I always suck at patience.

Let me know how they come out!

PS - I bet these would be good with orange zest in the dough & an orange glaze too...like those Pillsbury orange cinnamon roll thingies my mom used to make...