Cake

I made a cake! It's my very own Katamari Damacy cake, although I think the inspiration for the colors might have actually come from We ♥ Katamari. But no matter. Here it is!



I used a "sports ball" cake pan and 10 mini muffins. On a side note, did you know that they no longer sell the liquid food coloring made by McCormick that we all grew up with? Man, that stuff lasted forever. I suspect that McCormick finally ran out of the original batch that they made back in 1956.

Anyway.

Lessons that I learned:
1. I need a lazy susan
2. Don't decorate a round cake on a plate that has curved edges, unless you don't mind if there are huge spaces at the bottom of the cake that don't have frosting on them
3. Start from the bottom, not the top
4. Spend a little more time thinking about how much frosting you will need of each color (for example, why did I make a huge batch of "lightest blue," and a tiny batch of yellow, when I clearly needed more of the yellow?)
5. Spend a little more time placing the knobbies so that they're even

Other than that, I'm quite pleased. I love the colors, especially the dark blue.

The Culinary Arts

Several months ago, I had a conversation with some friends about Life Goals. One of our friends had three goals that he wished to achieve in his life and not only were they all ridiculously easy, but he is 29 and has already achieved two of the three - he has managed to not achieve the third through simple lack of effort. I poked some good-natured fun at him, but at the same time was well aware of the fact that I didn't have a Life Goal. At one point, my Life Goal consisted of NOT marrying a pastor; once I got married to a non-pastor, the LG became obsolete and I never replaced it with anything.

I made the decision yesterday that someday I want to go to school to be a pastry chef. Unfortunately, we'll either have to move or have a lot of extra money to spend so that I can live in a different city. There are two schools within commuting distance that offer culinary classes, one in Moorhead, a mile east, and one in Wahpeton, 45 miles south. Both of these are full Culinary Arts degrees, but I would really prefer to focus just on baking. My main motiviation for this is that I HATE onions and I currently refuse to cook with them. On the other hand, I wouldn't grow fatter sampling dishes that had onions in them, so maybe I could cook exclusively with onions and be skinny. Ha! Seriously, I prefer baking to cooking, and not just because Wookie Cookies are so yummy. There's just something so great about eating a meal with friends and then being able to say, "And we have Bananas Foster Cheesecake for dessert!"

There are several books out there for people who want to take baking to the next level, but the vast majority of them have the word "Professional" in the title, which means that I would have to know what the hell I was doing. The book I have (mostly) settled on as a good introduction is "How Baking Works" by Paula I. Figoni. This book has the quality of being comprehensive without being incomprehensible, as well as the added bonus of not costing $100. I'm mostly attracted by the chapters that deal with oven cooking temps and substitutions; the concept of measuring by weight instead of volume is also very intriguing. The discussion questions and worksheets at the end of each chapter also sound really helpful, but maybe I'm just a geek.

I realize that I have a long way to go in terms of just following the freakin' recipe already, but I'm willing to give it a shot!

Yarn and Cheesecake

It's been a while! I'm back. I got my new yarn in due course .... the yarn for the purse looks awful together, so I'll have to make something else with it. The beautiful green yarn is currently being made into a wimple, just because I hate trying to keep track of a stocking cap when I'm temporarily somewhere that I don't need to wear one, such as the grocery store. I'm not quite halfway done with it.

In other news, I'm on a quest to lose some weight. My friend Amanda, who has lost 30 pounds in the past 6 months, gave me a spreadsheet she made up that is loosely based on Weight Watchers' point system (Amanda is nearly finished with a Ph.D. in Mathematics, btw). I also signed up at thedailyplate.com, which is a pretty spiffy little site. It has pretty much every food that you could think of, and all of the nutrition information for it. The coolest part, though, is the feature where you can enter in a recipe, ingredient by ingredient, and it will figure out the nutrition info for the finished product. Going by both Amanda's modified point system and my daily caloric goal at thedailyplate.com, I have been doing pretty good ... umm ... yesterday and today. But now, the weekend is here, and I know that I lose a lot of ground on the weekends. I've been walking on our treadmill nearly every (erm week) day for the past 3 weeks, with a day or two of "Accelerated Body Sculpting" pilates thrown in. But I already walked on the treadmill today, which is better than I've done the past 2 Fridays, so I have hope!

Now, I'm off to enter the recipe for the bananas foster cheesecake I plan on making tomorrow, so that I can prove how terrible I am at diets.