Posts (page 2)
Like many other junior high girls, I loved Gone With the Wind. Oh yeah. Hoop skirts, big romance, scheming pretty girl, unrequited love, I was all over it. Absolutely one of my favorite books. The movie? Also fabulous. I watched it with my gran, at sleepovers, you name it. Then Scarlett came out. I got just as excited as everyone else. After all, Alexandra Ripley had been chosen by the family to write the sequel. She was a southerner. How bad could it be? Well, it wasn't bad, but it wasn't Gone With the Wind. Scarlett moves to Ireland? Um, okay. She finally ends up with Rhett, which you knew was going to happen. It just wasn't that satisfying. We won't even talk about things like The Wind Done Gone, which I thought was such total crap I didn't make it past the first five pages. All this is setup to let you know that, previously burned, I wasn't expecting much from Rhett Butler's People.
I'm glad to report that I was pleasantly surprised by this story. I think it is a great companion piece to GWTW. Not only do you get insight into Rhett's backstory, but the book fleshes out memorable scenes like the barbecue at Twelve Oaks or what really happened during the Klan raid after Scarlett was attacked. Not only do you gain insight into the life of Rhett, but you also get the story of his sister, Rosemary, as well as his relationship with Belle Watling and even a bit more about Melanie Wilkes. I liked that, unlike GWTW or Scarlett, this book let you into everyone else's head. Of course, the last third of the book is the author's version of what happened after Rhett left Scarlett and, while it wasn't the one true perfect ending to what GWTW started, it was a reasonably satisfying ending and well worth the $2.20 of fines I incurred finishing it well after it was due at the library.
That said, it wasn't without its faults. You know how I said it fleshes out scenes from GWTW and gives you Rhett's side? Yeah. Well, it also ignores some of them. Remember that great bit where Scarlett was a widow and there was that ball/fundraiser thing and Rhett said he'd give money to the confederacy if he could dance with Scarlett. Not in this book. When Bonnie dies? Not in there either, but at least it gets mentioned, vaguely, as well as when he leaves Scarlett. I can understand not wanting to trample on something that... iconic, for lack of a better word, but still. A sentence or two for such a defining moment? Really? Also, I understand that nothing no one ever writes is going to be the definitive answer to what happens after Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn/Tomorrow is another day, but the ending was kinda unsatisfying.
All in all, I liked this book. It made me want to read Gone With the Wind again. Okay, it really made me want to see the movie again, because I don't have enough free time to read that book over. Anyway, I really liked it.
I'm trying to post more since I completely neglected my Vox for a month or so, which meant you missed stories about our second annual open house, the cast of thousands that attended and the crazy fun we had. I'm also going to try to start heading my posts with what they're broadly about, because you usually can't tell with my odd titles. Anyway, on we go.
I saw this post on the Lime & Violet blog and it got me to thinking. I don't consider myself a designer. I consider myself an "adapter". I think there's a big difference, like the difference between being a composer and an arranger in music. When you're a composer you write the music you hear in your head. You create new content. You (hopefully) bring something into the world that no one's heard before. When you're an arranger you take what someone has already written and change it up. You take someone's giant work and turn it into a piano reduction. You turn someone's piano work and fit it for an entire orchestra. You take the works of a rock group and set it for a concert band to slaughter. Yes, you're creating something new, but it's a version of something that was already out there. It's like Windows 3.1 and 95. They weren't doing anything new, they were just adapting what they had. That's what I consider myself. An adapter. I take something like the Knitter's Handy Book of Patterns and the Vogue Cable Stitchionary and make myself an Irish sweater, or a pair of socks. I take one of the Barbara Walker treasuries and make myself a hat. I don't design, I adapt.
So this is what I'm wondering. Can I call myself a designer if all I do is adapt stitch patterns? When I see things like that post from Lime & Violet, or when I look at the patterns in the new Knitty or MagKnits I think huh, maybe I should submit a pattern. Something I've put together and liked the outcome of. Then I think to myself no, it's not like I really came up with it myself, so I wouldn't feel right trying to pass it of as one of my creations. I didn't create new content, I just took what I had and made it into what I wanted. I didn't invent a new stitch pattern, why should I say I've come up with something new? I think I'd feel like a plagiarist, and since I work in the academic setting that's a bad bad thing. I don't know.
I'm going to put it out there to you, my small readership. Is what I'm doing designing? I certainly don't think so, so don't be afraid to tell me hahahaaaa, no. Because that's what I'm already thinking, and I'd genuinely like to know your thoughts on this matter.
Because all my friends were doing it and I am nothing if not a late bloomer follower, I just got done reading the Uglies/Pretties/Specials/Extras books by Scott Westerfeld. Also, because I tend not to do research on these things I thought this was a series of books about high school cliques. Ha ha wrong! The entire series is about a Utopian society 300 years in the future. Civilization as we know it was destroyed by biowarfare that ignited gas and oil, I think, and so society vowed to never go back to that and to be as green as possible. Also, because of a "wasting disease" where people didn't eat because they didn't think they were attractive enough, everyone gets surgery when they turn 16 that makes them pretty. And now, on with the book commentary...
Uglies is the tale of Tally Youngblood. All she wants to do is turn 16, be made pretty and go be with her friend. She's one of the last in her dorm to turn 16 so she has some serious envy going on. She makes friends with another girl, Shay, who has the same birthday and they go out and pull pranks and have a good time. One night Shay tells Tally there's another civilization out there called the Smoke, which is a group in hiding that lives off the land, but respectfully, and she's not going to turn pretty, she's joining them. She invited Tally to join her but Tally's horrified by this. Shay leaves Tally instructions in case she changes her mind and off she goes. Tally goes to turn pretty but DUN DUN DUNNNNNN! They won't do it unless she leads them to Shay. Tally sets out to find Shay and, of course, experiences a change of heart.
I think maybe this one was my favorite of all the books. I will admit, I am a fan of series beginnings because there's nothing to compare them to, you know? Sometimes when you read books later in the series you realize that they've changed direction or something you don't like happens to a character you do like and it's irritating. In this case, I really liked the story and I liked Tally's growth and change of mind and beliefs in the book and the choice she made at the end. With that, let's move on to book 2...
Pretties sees Tally Youngblood back in the city as newly turned Pretty. She may be a pretty bubblehead like the rest of them, but she still remembers her old tricks. Then a face from the past leads her to some pills and everything from book 1 comes back to her. The rest of the book is a journey out of town and out of being a pretty bubblehead as she breaks free from Utopia to try and live a real existence.
This one wasn't bad, but I think I was as frustrated by her struggle as she was. I was really annoyed by the final meet up at the end and her attitude towards non-pretty people, and I really hated the absolute ending because I thought it went against everything Tally was fighting for, even though she had no choice in the matter. Also, that bit with the anthropologists and the tribe was just odd. I understand it served to show just how horrible and control freaky the Specials were, but come on. I also realize I've been purposely trying to be vague in these descriptions to not give things away, only to be foiled by my brief plot synopses. With that, book 3...
Specials sees Tally as a member of Special Circumstances, the elite force that keeps the law in the pretty town. Tally and her friend Shay are members of a new breed of Specials. More and more people are curing themselves of being pretty and running off to join the New Smoke and they're fighting to stop it. Once again, circumstances separate Tally from the group and her experiences lead her to a change of heart and mind.
This one wasn't bad. I think I liked it better than Pretties, in that I think the struggle that she went through was an even harder one than curing herself from being pretty. Pretties seemed like more of a candy floss book and this one was more sharp edges and I think I liked that style better. I know, that's a crap comment but my brain's not working these days.
The final book in the series was Extras. Extras takes place a couple years after Specials, in China (Japan? Maybe Japan) instead of California. They are run by a fame based economy and Aya's trying to improve her rank so she joins a group of girls who surf on the top of trains. That leads to her discovering what might possibly be a government coverup. She breaks the story, which wins her the fame she wants, but all hell breaks loose and she finds herself on the run.
This one really frustrated me. I think it's because I read the books one right after the other and got used to the story through Tally's viewpoint and this one was all Aya, with Tally showing up about halfway in as a secondary character. I think Aya and her fame seeking and shallowness didn't really hold my attention. It just felt like it was written by someone else, almost. Kind of like all those later VC Andrews books. The style was there, the characters were there, but it wasn't the same. Also, there were some unresolved issues in this book and I'm still wondering "What about...?" The ending explains the major points, but there are some minor, but still important, ones and I'm wondering if I was disinterested enough and just glossed over them. Probably the least favorite of the set.
All in all, though, they were definitely a great read. I'd highly recommend them, if you're into future Utopian sci-fi.
I was shocked to see it's been two months since I updated this. Whoops! Well, I have high speed internet at home now, so maybe I'll be posting a little more now. After all, we're coming up on the holiday season, so that means plenty of crafty opportunities and hopefully plenty of posting.
Anyway, to ease back into it, tonight I made a pork roast. I had decided to do the 100 things in 1001 days, only I'm doing a mini version of it, 10 things in 101 days. One of the things on the list was to roast two for the following- a beef roast, a pork roast or a chicken. We happen to have all three in our freezer and I've been talking about doing a monthly roast, so I figured this was a great way of getting into it.
What I really wanted was a flavorful roast. I had a couple ideas in mind, like the Hawaiian pork roast my mom made when I was a kid, or maybe a nice herb crust, or maybe a cranberry orange pork roast. The Husband thought that maybe we'd been eating a lot of sweet things lately, so he suggested a different recipe from one of our usual suspects, Cooking Light, for mustard herb crusted pork. The original recipe called for a tenderloin and we had a top center loin roast, but we could work with that, right? This is usually where things go wrong for me.
Okay, so if the recipe was for a one pound pork tenderloin and we had a 2.1 pound pork roast, then I should double the coating part of the recipe, right? Well, it worked well for the mustard part of the recipe. That part was easy, coating the roast with a mixture of mustard, fennel and minced garlic. I don't think I really needed to double the bread crumb/parmesan part of the coating, though. I ended up getting rid of a lot of bread crumbs and I think the original recipe would have worked just fine. That was the easy part. The hard part was how the hell do I cook this roast? Obviously I can't cook a 2.1 pound roast like a 1 pound tenderloin, so what to do?
I'm a librarian. I did what I do best- research. How do you cook a pork roast? According to the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook- and, as an aside, you learn in library school that when you give someone an answer to a reference question, you should always begin your answer with "According to _source_ ..." and then give your answer. That lets the person asking the question know where you got your answer from and it may or may not be the absolute correct final answer, but it is what that particular authority says is the answer, so take that information and make what you will of it. Anyway, BH&G said that you should cook most pork at 325 until it reaches the internal temperature dictated by the cut of meat, which in this case was 155. The Rombauers disagreed. They said for my particular cut of pork, it was a good idea to start it at 450 for 10-15 minutes so that the roast would brown, then turn it all the way down to 250 and let it cook until it hit 155. Huh. I think I was looking for "Cook it this way" from cookbook number 1, then "Yeah, they're right. Cook it that way," from cookbook number two. The Gourmet cookbook refused to give me a definite answer and Alton Brown's "I'm Just Here for the Food" gave me a headache- we have the first printing of the book, which has something wrong with it- there's a shadow printing type problem in the roast section, making it hard to read. Anyway, I figured the Rombauers wouldn't steer us wrong, right? Right? It helped that their method was similar to what I could read of Alton Brown, so that's the method I picked.
The roast cooked pretty much like it was supposed to- after about an hour I put the thermometer in and it read 146 and it took about ten, fifteen more minutes to get up to temperature, so I pulled it out and that's where I hit dilemma number two. Because I'd coated it so nicely, it didn't drip. We had maybe a quarter teaspoon of pan drippings. Crap. What now? Well, because I'm lazy, we had pork roast without sauce. I made my mother's "Double secret probation rice", which is really just minute rice with butter, boullion, minced onion and mushrooms, and some mixed vegetables. The Husband and I liked how the pork came out. It was juicy. It wasn't overly tender, but it wasn't horribly chewy either. What surprised me was how much you could taste the fennel, and how not so much you could taste the mustard. Fennel always reminds me of cheap frozen pizzas of my youth, because the sausage on those pizzas always had fennel in it, so that was a bit disconcerting. All in all, I think it ended up nicely and we're both looking forward to having pork sandwiches this week.
Hey all you knitters and crocheters, I am finally on Ravelry! I'm doublearegee over there, so if you're on too then find me and friend me! I am LOVING it!!! So super awesome! Squee!!!
This reminds me, I finished a sweater a couple weeks ago, a UFO that had been sitting in my basket for a couple months while I figured out how much longer I wanted the sleeves to be. As soon as it cools down enough to put it on- it's been hot this past week!- I will take pictures and do a post.
It's been a while, but but it's been a very busy while so I'm going to try and make up for it with a bunch of posts. I've been doing a lot of reading lately- I have four books that go back to the library tonight- so it's time for some book haiku and maybe a little discussion as well.
This book was both why
and why I did not go to
camp. It's a good read.
book I've read this summer.It's so funny!!! Must buy.
remember the first book. I
doubt this one either.
And now, an actual review of something I've read. The premise sounded interesting: Call center in India. It's Thanksgiving in America and people keep calling with problems until suddenly the call center people get a call from God. Yeah, well. I should have read the reviews on Amazon, because Publisher's Weekly said "Lackluster writing and a preachy tone cripple what could have been an interesting premise." Yeah. I'd agree. It starts off with a conversation on a night train with the author and a woman about some friends of the woman's and how the author should make his second book about them, because a fantastic event happened to them. Um, yeah. Not so much. In between discussing the drama from their personal lives at work, they discover that not only has their incompetent boss stolen two guy's web site design and passed it off to corporate as his own, but they're also all getting downsized. They decide to skip out on work and go to a club and on the way home they take a shortcut that ends them in a pit at a construction site? None of their cell phones work, but hey! Suddenly God calls one of them and tells them they've lost sight of who they want to be and they need to make a change in their lives and that will set them free, both from the pit and from the struggles they're having in their lives. They get out of the pit and figure out a way to save the call center and the guy telling the story gets the girl in the end and you find out that the person the author was talking to on the train? Also God. You know, I don't think I've ever seen or read anything where the deus ex machina is actually God. Also, they're Indians. This is probably going to sound horribly ignorant, but shouldn't Buddha have called them? Also, I don't know how to explain this, but the way the author wrote God in this, it was almost like he didn't have an idea of how God really was. You know? It's like if I were to write a book featuring David Tennant, because I've seen a lot of shows and movies he's been in, and then people read my book and said it sucked and it was obvious that I had no clue what David Tennant was really like. Anyway, this book sounded really interesting, but I think it wasn't too well executed. If you're curious, go ahead and read it, just don't expect much.
I should have known this week would be a disaster from the word go.
I put my cake together Tuesday night and it was a little warm in the house, so I stuck it in the freezer and promptly forgot about it. I got it out Wednesday and let it sit on the dining table. A little while later I came back and it was sweating profusely. I touched the cake and some of the frosting came off on my finger and it felt all slimy. Ew! There was no way I was taking that in to cake class. So, I made another cake. I took time off work after lunch and put the cake together while I made the rest of the frosting for the next class. I got the medium frosting for the sweet peas and bows done, then I started on the stiff frosting for the roses. We needed one cup of shortening. How much did I have? Half a cup. I can not believe I've used an entire 6 pound tub of crisco in a month. Ugh. I called D and she agreed to bring more crisco to the house when she came.
After work we went home and I realized I couldn't frost my cake until D got there because I had given her my big froster tip and my spatula/knife thing to wash in her dishwasher. Crap! D was late getting to my house, too, so there was a lot of last minute running around. I finished mixing the frosting while D garotted my cake layers, put a layer of frosting in the middle and put the second one on top. Then she packed the stiff frosting while I frosted my cake, because she still can't get frosting to stick to the sides of hers. This is where fun thing number two kicked in- I ran out of frosting. My poor cake. It was sparsely covered in spots, covered with crumbs and looked like one hot mess. AND we were running late, so we threw everything into the car and off we went.
When we got there, the teacher looked at my cake and raised an eyebrow. I told her my sad sweaty cake story and she said, "You know, if you'd just left it, it would have been fine. It's just condensation. It would have dried in time for class." GAH!!! So class started and she showed us how to make sweet peas and bows. I filled up my frosting bag and my frosting was way too stiff. Crap. I emptied out the frosting bag, put some water in the tub, stirred it up and tried again. I think I made the frosting a bit too runny, but she said it shouldn't work too badly for making roses. Trustingly I filled up the pastry bag. She had us all get out nickels and showed us how to make the beehive shaped frosting base of the rose, then had us make about 15 of them on the wax paper squares we had to bring. Okay, done and donerer. I looked over at D's frosting globs and started laughing. See, we had to bring frosting colored for the bow and sweet peas and D had covered her cake in Tiffany blue frosting. We decided that what goes great with Tiffany blue? Chocolate brown! Except we didn't put enough coloring into the frosting and it was more the color of peanut butter. So, D's frosting beehives looked like tiny mounds of poop. We laughed about that until we noticed the girl across from us. She had neon day-glo pink frosting and her piles of frosting were rather tall and had kind of a pointy top that was wider than the base. It looked like she had a tiny army of bright pink penises. We started snickering. Her mom looked up, saw us looking and said, "You guys! She's only 13!" She said it while she was laughing, so we figured we weren't in too much trouble.
Then it was time to put petals on the rose, and here's where it really came off the rails. She had us put a rosebud type swirl around the top of all of our frosting mounds. We were supposed to really press into the top of the rose to get it to stick. I did, and my mound went splat. I picked up another mound and it puddled too. Yeah. That frosting she said would be good for roses was way too mushy. So I started over. I dumped all the frosting off my wax paper squares and refilled my bag with the stiff frosting for roses. Since I'd made that frosting a little stiffer than the sweet pea frosting, I softened it with a bit of water and also, once I got the bag filled, worked it with my hands to soften it up. Then I made frosting beehives, marveling at the difference the stiffer frosting made. Of course, this meant I was waaaaay behind when it came time to put the petals on. In fact, I'd just filled the bag when she started putting petals on so I half watched, half made beehives. Eventually I caught up and was ready to put my petals on. My first rose looked like someone had kind of smooshed the petals up. It didn't unfold nicely, it was all straight up in the air. To make matters worse, I have no idea if it was the frosting or my tip or what, but for some reason frosting didn't want to come out of the top of the tip as evenly as it did out of the bottom, so I had a really ragged edge to the top of the petals. I set the rose down and tried the next one. D went to take hers off the rose nail and dropped it in her lap. The teacher said that she hadn't wanted to say anything, but every time she's taught the class, someone always drops a rose. Shortly thereafter, I finished my second rose and promptly dropped it. Into my purse. Did I mention my purse looks like this? That pretty green one? Had a pink rose inside it. Yeah. After our rose dropping fiasco, D and I gave up. D put some random designs on her cake and I watched everyone else put roses on their cake and we waited out the end of class.
People in our class had some really pretty cakes. The other Me in class's cake looked really nice and D and I expressed our jealousy. We mentioned she'd done such nice cakes and we wished ours had turned out that nicely. That's when she told us this was her second time in the class. No wonder! At the end of class, the teacher handed out certificates of completion. Mine, appropriately, got a frosting blob on it. D and I talked about it and decided we were a bit burnt out on cake class and maybe we'd wait a while to take the next one. This is good, because I was getting tired of the late Tuesday night frosting and Wii parties and making the metric ton of frosting every week.
The Husband called towards the end of cake class and wondered if we'd be in the mood for food. I told him that after the class we'd just had, D and I needed Olive Garden. See, there's one cure for tough times and that is melty cheese and alcohol. Usually our go to place for that is our favorite Mexican place, where they make queso that's like liquid crack, but for frustration this extreme, we needed Olive Garden. More specifically, we needed red wine, fonduta and a tasty chocolate dessert. That bad. We talked about it at the restaurant and we both knew that making roses wasn't going to be easy, but it seemed like this class had been extra frustrating. Grrr.
When I got home I decorated my cake. No roses. A shell border, lots of sweet peas and a bow. It looked like this.
Last night I was going to make pumpkin gorgonzola pasta but we were out of evaporated milk. It's been cooler outside lately, so I was in a pasta mood. Tuna noodle casserole? Nope, we're out of tuna. (How could we be out of tuna?) What DID we have? We had the makings for orecchiette with pancetta and peas.
This recipe intrigued me, probably because it called for saffron. The only thing I knew about saffron was that it was a very expensive spice that turned things orange and I think they use it in Spanish cooking? Looking it up online, I understand why it's so expensive. Saffron threads come from crocuses (croci?). Each crocus has a couple of the red saffron threads and it takes about 150 crocuses to yield one gram of saffron. Wow. Now I know why it's so expensive. Not at Trader Joe's, apparently, because I think I was expecting to pay an arm and a leg and my 1 gram bottle wasn't that expensive.
Now that I'm thinking about it, most of the makings for dinner came from Trader Joe's- the alfredo sauce, the pancetta and the saffron. You'd think the orecchiette would have come from there too, but I had to do some searching for that and found it at Mal*Wart, of all places. The peas? Grocery store.
This was another of those "5 ingredients or less, 15 minutes or less" meals and again, they didn't lie. While waiting for the water to boil I chopped the pancetta, then cooked it with the saffron while the pasta boiled. Normally when I drain pasta, I have one of those little hand drainer things that you hold against the pot, but every time I'd tip the pot and shake it, I'd get more water out. I ended up having to go and get the colander out because some of the orecchiette, which is shaped like little ears (hence the name), suctioned itself to the sides of the pot. I'm used to shells, which you can shake the water out of with no problem. I'm not entirely certain why you had to fry the saffron with the pancetta, but it did dye the alfredo sauce a pale yellow when I added it.
Normally when you add the sauce to the pancetta, you would add the peas, but the Husband hates peas so I did those in the steamer and just added them to mine. I tasted the pasta, sauce and pancetta, then I tasted the finished product with peas added in. I think it was better with the peas- the peas not only gave it a bit of color, but their sweetness cut through the almost too salty pancetta. That made me worry. How would the Husband just like the sauce, meat and noodles without that buffer there? Unfortunately, for him it's a texture issue, so no dice getting him to eat them. I had my dinner with a glass of viognier- Saint someone from Trader Joe's, and in case you're curious yes, I do buy all my wine there- and it went pretty well. The first time I had a glass of the wine I thought it had a little too much of an afterbite but it went really well with this dish. I think I need to take a wine class, though, because when I looked up viognier it said that it goes well with spicy dishes, strong flavors and fresh fruit. Well, maybe the pancetta gave dinner a strong flavor?
When the Husband got home I explained what dinner was. He was enthusiastic about it, mainly because the kitchen smelled like cooked pancetta. I warned him that I thought dinner needed the peas to balance the flavor. He enjoyed dinner, but agreed that it was really salty. His thought was that maybe next time I make it, I add some pearl onions to his. Interesting thought. I think they'd probably do what the peas did for me, except for giving it color. Hm.
Final say- we'll be doing this one again. It'll be interesting to try adding pearl onions and see what the Husband thinks of how it effects the taste. Recipe number three gets a thumbs up.
First off, hello everyone who's joining us because I made the This Is Good! Imagine my surprise at that one! Very cool! Hopefully I'll get to reply to everyone's comments soon. And now, the continuation of Hell's Kitchen. Okay, not really, but here's what happened the third week of cake class.
As mentioned before, D and I were a bit apprehensive about making clowns. First off, that's a LOT of frosting. Who in their right mind feeds a kid that much frosting? Second, clowns are creepy. While we were discussing the clown class, D kept bringing up "famous" clowns from history- Stephen King's It, John Wayne Gacy, Ronald McDonald, Shakes the Clown- and saying there was no way she was going to make a clown. I was a little concerned because I was taking the cake in to work and the day after cake class we were having a reception for our new coworker, who is getting married on Saturday. What better way to say "Yay! You're getting married!" than a cake with freaky freaky clowns on it? This was not looking good.
D came over to my house Tuesday night with her cakes- unbroken this time, she'd made them Monday night and bought the huge storage bags to carry them in- and we had dinner. No drinking this time. Well, okay, I had a glass of wine while I made frosting, but that was it. We looked at the class requirements while eating dinner and discovered that all we needed to make was one batch of thin frosting to cover a cake. How did we get that lucky? Well, this might squick some of you out, but our cake class teacher told us that if you make buttercream frosting with water, it'll last in the fridge a long time. By long time, we're talking probably the month's worth of classes. So last week after we frosted our cakes, we combined the leftovers and discovered we had just about the required amount to frost a cake. Rock star! We also needed some medium consistency frosting, which we again had from last week, and we'd need a little bit of thin, which we skimmed from the leftover frosting after D frosted her cake with the fresh stuff. Good deal. Cake frosting went well this time around, although I'm not sure what D is doing wrong. Her cake had bald patches again. Actually, I think I have an idea of what D is doing wrong. The teacher told us that when we frost, we should cover the top of the cake with frosting, then the sides of the bottom layer, then the sides of the top layer. Then you take the frosting knife and hold it against the side of the cake and slowly spin it on the turntable, periodically stopping to wipe the frosting off your knife. Once that's done, hold the knife on the cake and again turn the turntable, smoothing out the top. This is what I do. I'm not sure what D does, I think it's a random variation on this, but when she gets done it looks like she's just slapped frosting on the cake and tried to smooth it out. There were still spots where you could see cake through the frosting. I don't know what to tell her.
Anyway, we showed up to cake class Wednesday night and learned that it wasn't going to be all scary clowns, we were also going to learn a couple flowers and some leaves as well. We learned shell borders and big stars, and how to twist your wrist while making big stars to give you pretty flowers. I wasn't happy with my shells. In the picture, they show you these shells with a nice tapering point at the end. Mine looked like their back ends exploded. The teacher said they looked good, though, and pointed out that if I was making a border those ends would get covered up anyway. After those, we put on the dot tips and made big dots- for faces- and small dots. I totally would have made a bunch of grapes, but we couldn't get the tub of purple coloring open. Seriously. No one could get the tub of purple coloring open. This could possibly have been because D and I both tried after we'd been practicing frosting techniques, so we had frosting hands, and we probably greased it up good for everyone with clean hands. Oh well. Cake covered in grapes, I will make you, mark my words. We also learned how to take the big dot and turn it into a heart, although most of our hearts looked a little odd and our teacher said it actually worked a little better to turn the hearts into shamrocks. D pointed out that her hearts looked more like women with big thighs crossing their legs. Again I have to ask, how the hell do you get the points at the ends of these things? I swear, the people taking pictures for the decorating books get in there and fix the hell out of those things so they're all perfect, because there's no way one person is that perfect. We also strapped on the leaf tip and did leaves, and the teacher announced I had the touch for leaves. It's still really weird to her her say "Lorelai has the leaf touch, those look great!" and realize oh yeah, that's me!
After we'd done that, the teacher had us gather around her so she could show us how to make clowns. I have to say, it wasn't as bad as we'd been expecting. The worst part really is their creepy heads on spikes. You use the big star tip to make a stack of frosting for the body, then you squirt two legs out of the bottom and arms off the sides of the top. It was at this point that I realized that what she was making sort of looked like a rabbit, so I decided no scary clown for me. The teacher finished the clown, spiked the body with the head and sent us off to make our own clowns. I started mine, but instead of finishing it like a clown, I tried to make a bunny. Logistics failed me on this, as one of the arms didn't want to stay attached to the body and kept sliding off and my round blob of frosting wouldn't hold the ears. I think my problem was that I wanted the ears to stand up. I should have made a long eared bunny, so that the ears could spill down the back and therefore wouldn't have to defy gravity. Once my bunny was done, I moved on to putting flowers on my cake- so pretty! Let's take a look.
You're probably thinking we've reached the end of this entry and where does Brokeback Clowntain fit in? Well. D and I had been discussing how really the only way we'd feel okay making clowns would be if we did CSI: Clown College and had them all broken and jacked up and made our clown cakes look like a crime scene/horror movie. Since I'd turned my clown into a bunny, I didn't worry about doing that but D was all about going with our original idea. She made her clown's body and tried to attach one of the arms, but ran into the same problem I did, where one of the arms didn't want to stay attached. When it fell off, inspiration struck. She left it lying there, dismembered on the practice board, and made one regular leg for her clown and one broken one, then stuck the head in at a bizarre angle and piped "Ouch!" in front of it. It looked like this-
Next week is the final class, I believe. This is the class where we learn to make roses. There have been instructions in all the lessons and I think we were supposed to be learning it step by step, but our teacher thought it made more sense to learn everything all at once. So, next week will be Cake Class: The Rose Ceremony. I'm really excited about that. I mean, come on. Who doesn't like frosting roses? Other than my diabetic mother? Or dentists? Or people who don't like frosting in general? Hopefully it'll be really easy so I can be like that woman in that old commercial. "Oh! I worked so hard! No need to thank me, really!"
I should add, D didn't decorate her cake last week so this week she was determined to make it look like something, and here's how it turned out.
Show us a great wedding photo.
