Tag Archives: gifts

Snowballs from My Oven

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Another recipe from my annual baking extravaganza.

Every year, I bake cookies for my favorite clients. They always include my famous helicopter sugar cookies and my favorite oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. And sometimes they include so-called “magic cookie bars” or brownies.

Snowballs from my OvenThis year, they include “Snowballs.” This is a small spherical cookie made primarily of butter, flour, and finely chopped nuts, dusted with powdered sugar. Tasty without being too sweet.

Here’s the recipe for four dozen. I doubled it and got just under 8 dozen.

Ingredients:

  • 1 cup butter or margarine, softened. I used half butter and half margarine.
  • 1/2 cup powdered sugar.
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla.
  • 2-1/4 cups all-purpose flour. I use unbleached.
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt.
  • 3/4 cup finely chopped nuts. I used walnuts which I chopped almost to a coarse powder in my food processor.
  • More powdered sugar.

Instructions:

  1. Heat oven to 400°F.
  2. Beat butter, measured powdered sugar, and vanilla in a large bowl with an electric mixer on medium speed.
  3. Stir in flour and salt. I did this in the mixer on lowest speed.
  4. Stir in nuts. Again, I did it in the mixer. The dough ends up being rather dry and does not cling to the side of the mixer bowl.
  5. Shape dough into one-inch balls.
  6. Snowballs before BakingPlace balls about 2 inches apart on an ungreased cookie sheet. Because these don’t flatten out, you can get quite a few on a standard sized baking sheet or jelly roll pan. Although my first sheet had only a dozen (see photo), I was able to get two dozen on subsequent baking sheets.
  7. Baked SnowballsBake for 8 to 10 minutes or until set but not brown. I judged that they were done when the tops began to crack ever so slightly.
  8. Snowballs Dusted with SugarImmediately remove from cookie sheet and roll in powdered sugar. Now although I tried this, I soon discovered that this was a very messy way to go about coating them with sugar. So instead, I put them on a wire rack with some newspaper (okay, it was Trade-a-Plane) under it and used a tea strainer to sift powdered sugar over them.
  9. Cool completely on wire rack.
  10. Roll in powdered sugar again. Now although this is part of the recipe, I didn’t do it. Too messy!

If you have two baking sheets, I recommend using them both. It took me about 8-10 minutes just to roll up the next batch of cookies, so I was able to have a sheet in the oven at all times. This really saves energy when you’re running an oven at 400°F.

If you try this recipe, please let me know what you think. I love them.

Shop Smart for Services: Avoid Dealing with Middlemen

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I cannot stress this enough.

As usual, I’ll use a story to illustrate my point. I’ll try to keep it brief.

The Flight

Today, Flying M Air did a 2-hour charter for two men from Texas. They’d come to Phoenix to do a rather unusual aerial survey. I don’t think it would be appropriate for me to go into details of what it was all about, but I can say that it required me to fly low and slow over a bunch of commercial properties all over the Phoenix area.

The flight was booked last minute in an odd way. I got a call from a local airplane charter company who told me that these two guys had shown up to charter a helicopter — which the airplane charter company did not have. Could I take these guys on a survey flight? I spoke to one of the clients, got a few quick questions answered — including their weights, which I needed to calculate a weight and balance for the flight — and told them my rates. Then I hung up and got ready to meet them at the airport in less than two hours.

I was just leaving when my phone rang. It was XYZ Company (not their real name), which I wrote about at some length here. The short version is that XYZ is a booking company that markets itself as a provider of aviation (and other) services but doesn’t own a single aircraft. Instead, it hires third party companies (like mine) to provide the services,

The XYZ person on the phone told me they were sending two clients to me. She then proceeded to describe the job I’d booked directly with the client.

I told her I’d already booked it with the client and that the client was going to pay me with a credit card at the conclusion of the flight. I was trying hard to keep XYZ out of it. It didn’t matter much to me — I’d get paid the same amount whether they were involved or not — but I simply don’t like the way XYZ does business. But the caller told me that the client already had credit with XYZ and that XYZ was willing to pay me for the 2 hours of flight time up front with a credit card.

I didn’t want the client to pay me and still be on the hook with XYZ, so I took the payment. I then called the client and told him what had transpired. He seemed happy enough.

I went to the airport and did the flight. It was far from an ideal setup. For some reason, the client expected me to know the addresses of the buildings we flew over. As if flying a helicopter 300 feet off the ground while watching for obstructions and other traffic and talking to an airport control tower wasn’t enough of a workload for me. They were completely unprepared to get the location information they needed — hell, a handheld GPS, which I could have provided with enough notice, would have been a real handy tool.

But the client seemed satisfied with the flight. It was a nice day to fly and I was paid up front. So how could I complain?

The Lesson to Be Learned

I do, however, want to use this story as a lesson to folks shopping around for services — perhaps for holiday gift-giving.

There are several points to be made about what transpired. Although these points deal specifically with XYZ, they also apply to similar organizations that act as booking agents for services:

  • XYZ Company makes money off every flight it books. It typically marks up my services by 30%. So yes, if you bought an hour of flight time from me, it would cost you $545. But if you bought the same hour of flight time with XYZ in the middle, it would cost you about $700. In today’s story, these guys spent $300 more than they could have for the same service.
  • XYZ Company does not give refunds. For any reason. If you need to cancel a flight, you get a credit for the amount you paid. You have one year to use it elsewhere. Since I don’t (usually) take payment in advance, when you book with me, you don’t need to worry about refunds or credits. So if XYZ had been unable to book the flight with me, these clients would probably be stuck with a credit.
  • XYZ Company charges a fixed price for the service you say you need. So if you want 2 hours of flight time, you’ll pay for it up front. If you fly only 1-1/2 hours, you’re out of luck since they don’t give refunds. But because I charge charter clients based on actual time flown, if they fly less than expected, they pay less than expected. In fact, I typically overestimate flight time so folks feel good when the final cost is less than they thought it would be.
  • XYZ Company can’t be relied upon to get a reservation handled correctly. This is a classic example: they booked an airplane when the client clearly needed a helicopter! These guys flew in from Texas for this survey — imagine if there weren’t any helicopter charter operators available to do the flight on such short notice. They would have made the trip for nothing. Another time, they booked a 5-hour survey flight for a client that required landing illegally in a wilderness area (which I was not going to do). And I can’t tell you how many phone calls it takes to arrange a flight for a client with XYZ in the middle. Right now, I’m waiting for a yes/no answer on a flight they’ve called me about four times already — and I still don’t know if it’s going to happen.

Yet time after time, people turn to companies like XYZ, relying on a middle man who knows nothing about the provider’s capabilities or operations. The chain of communication is never properly established, services are misrepresented, clients and providers get unpleasant surprises at job time.

And the buyer of the services is paying a 20% to 40% premium.

What are they getting for this extra cost? Well, they don’t have to call more than one company that appears in Google’s search results.

You see, that’s how these companies get the calls. They buy up domain names and Google AdWords. They set up generic websites for local helicopter tours or airplane tours or balloon rides or skydiving. You search and they come to the top. You look at their site and you think they’re some big adventure travel company with airplanes and helicopters and hot air balloons all over the country. You call and they assure you they can help you. So you stop looking and let them do the work.

Is that worth 30% more than you could pay?

If you think so, fine. Like I said: it doesn’t affect me. I get paid the same amount, whether you book through me or them.

But in a day and age when everyone is so hot for deep discount deals like the ones Groupon offers, it seems so very strange to me that people would be willing to give money away to a middleman just because he knows how to dial a phone.

On Radio-Controlled Helicopters

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I rediscover an old Christmas Present.

Spin MasterA few years ago, my husband bought us a pair of Spin Master battery-operated radio-controlled helicopters. They’re tiny little things, maybe 8 inches long made of styrofoam, suitable for indoor flying only. We played with them that Christmas but soon lost interest with frustration. They’ve been lying around the house since then and I just charged them both up and started playing with mine again.

Kyosho RC HelicopterThis isn’t my first RC helicopter. Back in the early 2000s — maybe 2002? — I bought a kit and constructed a gas-powered one. Mine was a Kyosho, probably a lot like this one. It was big — nearly 4 feet from the tip of the main rotor in front to the tip of the tail rotor in back. I painted it up to look a lot like my old R22 — white with a red stripe — which is what I was flying back then. The kit took hours to assemble and tune and, with the radio, I figure I sunk a little over $1,200 into it.

Soon afterward is when I realized I that flying an RC helicopter was a hell of a lot harder than flying the real thing.

Sure, I could fly a real helicopter. But an RC helicopter isn’t the same. Not only do you have to be able to lift off, hover, and fly — which requires putting your mind’s eye inside the aircraft — but you have to have it properly tuned and balanced first. Every time I tried to fly it, I crashed it. That usually meant destroying the main rotor blades, which cost about $55 to replace, and rebuilding. That meant rebalancing. And did I even have it balanced right in the first place?

I kept at it, though. I managed to learn how to hover it. That’s when I got cocky and tried to actually fly it. The resulting crash took out the main rotor blades, tail boom, tail rotor blades, and tail rotor gearbox. If it had been a real helicopter, my insurance company would have totaled it.

I rebuilt it with about $200 worth of parts and, along the way, made friends with another RC helicopter pilot. He helped me tune it properly. I joined him and his son at an RC field where his son flew my helicopter, partially to prove that it was airworthy. He did aerobatics with it. I’m talking about inverted flight, among other things. So it wasn’t the helicopter. It was the operator. It was me.

That was the last time I saw it fly.

In 2004, I sold it to a student pilot who happened to stop at Wickenburg Airport one day. I was running the FBO there at the time and he came with his flight instructor in for a break. The topic of RC helicopters came up. I told him I had one for sale and he bought it, on the spot, for $500 with a PayPal transfer. I gave him everything I’d accumulated for operations, including a toolbox with a few handy tools and a battery for getting the glow-plug going.

So a few years later, I wasn’t exactly happy to get a new RC helicopter as a Christmas gift. Sure, it was only about a $50 investment. But I was prepared for the frustration. That’s probably why it was cast aside so quickly.

(Honestly: I hate dumb gifts. I’d rather get nothing than something I don’t want or care about. I have enough crap around my house.)

RC HelicopterThis year, however, RC helicopters are big. I’ve seen them in mall kiosks all over the place. They’re big electric models with fuselages designed to match real helicopters, both military and civilian. They seem to be a big hit.

The main difference between these new RC helicopters and what I owned/own is that they use a stacked tandem rotor system with counter-rotating blades. As a result, there’s no issue with torque and no tail rotor is necessary. Because of this, I assume they’re a hell of a lot easier to fly. But they’re also kind of cheating, taking away the true helicopter flight experience — and the challenge.

I guess people don’t care about that. People want quick, easy thrills; they don’t want to actually put real effort into anything these days.

Even my little styrofoam RC helicopter has a tail rotor that actually works. As a result, it has the same basic aerodynamics as a real helicopter. Increase or decrease power and the nose shifts left or right accordingly. There’s a tail rotor trim toggle that has to be fine-tuned for flight. Since rediscovering the helicopter, I’ve spent most of my time just fine-tuning it so I can control it.

My RC HelicopterOn my little helicopter, forward movement is determined by simple weight and balance; a few push pins in the nose (see photo; sunglasses give you a sense of scale) gives me just the right amount of weight for slow forward flight. One control lever increases or decreases power, like a collective/throttle combination. Another lever points left or right like a limited action cyclic. Tail rotor trim can be avoided if set right. It’s pretty challenging and, fortunately, pretty sturdy. I crash-land almost every time I fly it, but I am getting better.

I think it’s the RC helicopters I’ve seen in the mall that made me want to pull out my little RC helicopter and play with it again. I’d like to try (but not own) one of the new ones, just to see what it’s like. Until then, I’ll keep flying mine around the kitchen — at least until I finally snap the main rotor blades off.