bits and peices
First things first: I spent a good portion of the weekend trying to teach myself geography on this website. The first time I tried it I got an embarrassing 64 (although to be fair a some of this was due to spelling: Spelling isn't my strong suit in English, let alone in any other languages).
Second: interesting things I learned over the holidays. If you don't let an ice cream cake defrost for long enough before you try to cut it, traumatic things may happen. In our case we broke the cake server when we were trying to cut the cake. The handle popped right off, leaving the triangular blade embedded in the dessert. It was very impressive looking, right out of a culinary horror movie. Fortunately we have about seven cake servers so it wasn't really much of a loss.
I also now know several things that won't help you fish the cork out of a wine bottle if it's been pushed down the neck. The cork was bobbing out of reach, which wouldn't have really been a problem except that when we tried to pour the wine it bobbed back up and blocked the neck. Pushing the cork down and out of the way with a butter knife didn't work because the wine underneath it had to go somewhere, and where it went was out of the bottle on to my dad's shirt (it was red wine too). Trying to stab the cork with a nut pick also didn't work because the cork simply bobbed out of reach of the short pick. Finally I got the bright idea to try a fondue fork, on account of it being rather long and better able to chase the cork. Unfortunately I didn't think to check the length of the fork against the height of the bottle and managed to drop the fork completely into the bottle. Fortunately this got both the cork and the fork out of the neck, so we were at least able to pour the wine. We just had to hide the bottle a bit so guests wouldn't see all the suspicious things floating about in their drink.
Second: interesting things I learned over the holidays. If you don't let an ice cream cake defrost for long enough before you try to cut it, traumatic things may happen. In our case we broke the cake server when we were trying to cut the cake. The handle popped right off, leaving the triangular blade embedded in the dessert. It was very impressive looking, right out of a culinary horror movie. Fortunately we have about seven cake servers so it wasn't really much of a loss.
I also now know several things that won't help you fish the cork out of a wine bottle if it's been pushed down the neck. The cork was bobbing out of reach, which wouldn't have really been a problem except that when we tried to pour the wine it bobbed back up and blocked the neck. Pushing the cork down and out of the way with a butter knife didn't work because the wine underneath it had to go somewhere, and where it went was out of the bottle on to my dad's shirt (it was red wine too). Trying to stab the cork with a nut pick also didn't work because the cork simply bobbed out of reach of the short pick. Finally I got the bright idea to try a fondue fork, on account of it being rather long and better able to chase the cork. Unfortunately I didn't think to check the length of the fork against the height of the bottle and managed to drop the fork completely into the bottle. Fortunately this got both the cork and the fork out of the neck, so we were at least able to pour the wine. We just had to hide the bottle a bit so guests wouldn't see all the suspicious things floating about in their drink.