Baking is all about artifice and trickery
I have spending a ridiculous amount of time in meatspace recently. I haven't watched a single episode of television in a week. (That means I haven't seen 5x15 or 5x14 LA LA LA NO SPOILERS). I haven't read a single fic in almost two weeks. My internet is busted at home, so not even any casual surfing (except at work...).
What have I been doing? Having dinner with friends (every night this week), re-reading Pride and Prejudice, and decorating a cake! The cake was a surprise for a friend's birthday, so J and I conspired to make it Wednesday to surprise him at dinner on Thursday. J baked the actual cake and made most of the frosting. I made some of the frosting and did most of the decorating.
Cake!:
The frosting was a bit gooier than we'd anticipated, leading to some oozing and gradual loss of shape to a lot of the decorations. :( But we covered it in raspberries and it tasted nice. The cake itself suffered from some structural integrity problems (there were references to the Leaning Tower of Pisa), but we managed to mostly compensate through cunning use of frosting. I made a comment along the lines of "Baking is all about artifice and trickery", which has become the catchphrase for our cake-baking endeavours, and if we ever have a bakery we will name it "Stealth Cakes". Or possibly "Cake or Death". (Though I still root for "The Greatest Cake".)
We also constructed the cake while watching Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, aka Japanese LSD trip. It's apparently based on actual dreams Kurosawa had during his life. The vignette where the guy goes inside a Van Gogh painting is amazing, but the entire thing felt like I'd been huffing paint. Cool but weird. Still, I was proud of how much Japanese I understood and I was very smug about noticing that the "title cards" at the beginning of each segment give the name in English, but the Japanese is always the same and just reads "I saw a dream like this." (And ridiculously proud that it had not one but two kanji, and I still could read it! It's the small victories that count.)
What have I been doing? Having dinner with friends (every night this week), re-reading Pride and Prejudice, and decorating a cake! The cake was a surprise for a friend's birthday, so J and I conspired to make it Wednesday to surprise him at dinner on Thursday. J baked the actual cake and made most of the frosting. I made some of the frosting and did most of the decorating.
Cake!:
The frosting was a bit gooier than we'd anticipated, leading to some oozing and gradual loss of shape to a lot of the decorations. :( But we covered it in raspberries and it tasted nice. The cake itself suffered from some structural integrity problems (there were references to the Leaning Tower of Pisa), but we managed to mostly compensate through cunning use of frosting. I made a comment along the lines of "Baking is all about artifice and trickery", which has become the catchphrase for our cake-baking endeavours, and if we ever have a bakery we will name it "Stealth Cakes". Or possibly "Cake or Death". (Though I still root for "The Greatest Cake".)
We also constructed the cake while watching Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, aka Japanese LSD trip. It's apparently based on actual dreams Kurosawa had during his life. The vignette where the guy goes inside a Van Gogh painting is amazing, but the entire thing felt like I'd been huffing paint. Cool but weird. Still, I was proud of how much Japanese I understood and I was very smug about noticing that the "title cards" at the beginning of each segment give the name in English, but the Japanese is always the same and just reads "I saw a dream like this." (And ridiculously proud that it had not one but two kanji, and I still could read it! It's the small victories that count.)