I’m breaking the silence to show off the results of yesterday’s baking! I recently bought Roses’s Heavenly Cakes, the new cake bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum. This woman knows her cakes, and I’m excited to see that this cookbook has more than one coconut cake in it! (Her other book, the Cake Bible, didn’t even have one, which confused me.) Marie, first of Bread Basketcase, and now of Heavenly Cake Place, started a bake-along for the book, and it seemed like a good idea to join.

First up (for me) is the Apple Upside-Down Cake. I must admit that upon opening the book and seeing this recipe, I knew I must buy the book straight away. No waiting for Christmas. Apples. It seemed like synchronicity to find that the first cake I would be able to make with the bakers was this apple one that so drew me in.

As far as cake recipes go, this one was quite simple. It uses Rose’s signature “reverse creaming” method, and is a basic yellow butter cake. The batter reminds me a lot of my Nanny’s Two Pound Cake, though it had more eggs. The technique is simple: macerate some apples, create a caramel sauce from the juices (and butter and sugar), put the sauce in a cake pan, the apples on top, and the cake batter on top of that. It was pretty simple, and I had the cake done by about lunch time, even after waking late.

The results?

Delicious. The crumb was tender and moist, and the apples were fantastic. I used Honey Crisp, and was pleased with how they worked out. As usual, I browned the caramel just slightly too much; I need to chain myself to the stove while it’s cooking, because I always seem to walk away just as it is ready. I did feel like the cake was a little lacking in flavor—it just couldn’t compete with the apples, and didn’t have much to add. I think if I make this again I will add some spices, like cinnamon and nutmeg. (I admit I was surprised they were absent from the recipe.) Perhaps if I had bothered with the whipped cream my opinion would differ, but whipped cream felt too decadent for me today.

The funniest part about this cake? I was so excited to make it. Andrew and I delayed our trip to his Nana’s so that we could bring her some cake. In the car on the way over, Andrew made a comment about the other apple upside-down cake I made.

What other apple upside-down cake? I mean, I know I made a peach one, but not apple. (Or maybe it was pear?)

Nope. Apple. Huh. So I guess I didn’t need the recipe for this cake after all; I already HAD an apple upside-down cake recipe. With one harmless comment he invalidated my excuse to buy this book. Too late. I got a little butter on one of the pages. Oh well, I guess I’m stuck making more cakes!

It has been too long. I’ve been busy, but that’s not a good excuse. It’s late right now, though, so I must be brief.

First, a photo. This is a delicious crumble. A Strawberry-Rhubarb Crumble. Recipe from SmittenKitchen.

Here’s a favorite video.

It hits a little close to home. Let’s examine it, shall we?

First in my class here at M.I.T.
Got skills, I’m a Champion of D&D
MC Escher—that’s my favorite MC
Keep your 40; I’ll just have an Earl Grey tea
My rims never spin, to the contrary, You’ll find they’re quite stationary
All of my action figures are cherry
Steven Hawkings in my library
My MySpace page is all totally pimped out—I got people begging for my top 8 spaces
Yo I know Pi to a thousand places
Ain’t got no grill but I still wear braces
I order all of my sandwiches with mayonnaise
I’m a whiz at minesweeper I can play for days
Once you see my sweet moves you’re gonna stay amazed,
my fingers movin’ so fast I’ll set the place ablaze
There’s no killer app I haven’t run
At Pascal, well, I’m number 1
Do vector calculus just for fun
I ain’t got a gat but I gotta soldering gun
Happy days is my favourite theme song
I can sure kick your butt in a game of ping pong
I’ll ace any trivia quiz you bring on
I’m fluent in Java Script as well as Klingon

I’ve been browsing, inspectin’ X-men comics you know I collect ‘em
The pens in my pocket I must protect ‘em
my ergonomic keyboard never leaves me bored
Shopping online for deals on some writable media
I edit Wikipedia
I memorized Holy Grail really well
I can recite it right now and have you ROTFLOL
I got a business doing websites
When my friends need some code who do they call?
I do HTML for them all
Even made a homepage for my dog!
Yo! Got myself a fanny pack, they were having a sale down at the GAP
Spend my nights with a roll of bubble wrap
POP POP! Hope no one sees me gettin’ freaky!

I was in AV club and Glee club and even the chess team!
Only question I ever thought was hard Was do I like Kirk or do I like Picard?
I spend every weekend at the renaissance fair
I got my name on my under wear!

I guess I’m not TOO white and nerdy. Though, here are some notes.

• π—I only know pi to 8 places.
• mayo—I don’t order all my sandwiches with mayonaise. Certainly not PB&J.
• I don’t have a gat or a soldering gun. But I DO have a glue gun.
• Greatest American Hero has a better theme song than Happy Days, imho.
• My dog does have his own website. Because why NOT?!
• I don’t think Andrew would appreciate me calling him a roll of anything. And I do hope no one sees me getting freaky.

I’m sorry it has been so long. Let’s not argue like this again. I’ll try to be a better friend. In upcoming news, I’ve joined Le Tour de Fleece! I’ve also joined a team, Marnie’s Fleece Bottom Girls. I’m quite excited. I hope it’s not heresy to say I don’t really care so much about the Tour de France. I’m just stoked to have an incentive to SPIN every day. I told/asked Amy at work to ask me about my spinning, so I will be guilted into following through.

I have tomorrow off, so maybe I’ll be able to post more then. No promises, however, because a day off doesn’t always mean a day of leisure. (Lay-zure-ay.)

And now, a photo of Zero. Because I love him, and I love this photo.

I have been truly awful about updating here. I could make a lot of excuses, but instead I’ll just point to the name of the website. Lazychick. Yup. However, I have been busy. I mean, I have had a wedding to plan.

Yeah. We ran off to Newport Beach and got married and it was a wonderful day! Here are a couple photos.

There are many more photos in my Flickr Set.

Now things have settled down somewhat. Nothing has really changed, other than my last name. Though I’ll probably still be holding onto my “maiden” name for some purposes. Further posts will have to wait a little while, though, as right now I’m hungry and the timer just went off, so I have samosas to eat!

I’ve stolen this idea from Bubbo!

The BBC’s top 100 books, which have you read?

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien I read about half of the series.
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling I can’t believe this is so high up on this list!
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Bible Bits and pieces.
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman The first two books. And I worked on the video game based on the movie.
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare Many, but not ALL of them.
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien Better than TLotR.
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell I’ve watched the movie and that’s enough for me.
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy Only made it about halfway.
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis Only some of them.
34. Emma – Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown What an overrated, trite book. Yawn.
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52. Dune – Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley My mom takes Soma!
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens I read about half, then I sensed it was only getting worse, and didn’t want to deal with the sad ending I foresaw.
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses – James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession – AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert I started it…
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare I guess this isn’t part of the Complete Works?
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo I read this as a girl, only to find out it was abridged. I’m not reading the whole thing. Far too depressing, and I don’t enjoy his style of writing.

38?! Wow, I’m surprised it’s not more. I think if there were more 19th century English lit on there I might have scored higher. I’m quite surprised at some of the titles, along with their placement on the list. I object that there’s no Fowler on there! The Collector is one of the best books I’ve read, up there with Lolita, certainly. And WTF, the DaVinci Code? Seriously? What about Tom Jones? Or ANYTHING by Neil Gaiman? Or the Iliad and the Odyssey? I mean, seriously.

I was tagged! (I feel so special.) Sara tagged me with this 6th photo thing. Unfortunately, I’m not tagging anyone else, because I don’t think I have quite enough readers. Here are the rules: open the 6th picture folder on your computer, open the 6th photo and blog it. Write something about it.

I broke the rules. My 6th folder didn’t have enough photos in it. So instead, you get the 6th photo from my 7th folder.

I LOVE this photo. It’s from April 18th of last year. At this point, we had Zero for 12 days. Here, he’s licking my ear, and it tickled. He still likes to do this sometimes, and it still tickles. (It’s a little grosser now, because he has much more drool and slobber, but it’s still quality puppy and mommy time.) Right now, Zero is laying next to me, waiting patiently for me to be done with the computer. He has changed my life in so many ways, and I love him more than I thought possible. I’m sure those are two sentiments I’ve expressed before, but I am continually struck with the truth of them.

I loved his little puppy kisses, and I do miss them, now that they’re gone. Sure, he’s still a puppy, but his kisses aren’t quite so little. ~_^

I wanted to take him to the dog park today, but when I got off work it was pouring rain. Instead, One will have to be content with the trip to the pet store. He got some Frosty Paws and more beef bones. You’ll have to imagine the photo of him, for now. Both cameras in this apartment are out of battery power. We managed to get a few photos of him, but they will have to wait until tomorrow.

My book challenge for the year has started off well. For the first book, I picked Out. I had been given this book as a gift several years ago, and never got around to reading it. I started it the other night, and got about 40 pages in when I knew it would not be a book I finished. I thumbed ahead a bit and read some more; it got worse. Then I read the ending of the book. Worse still. Not the writing—that was great. The subject matter was just too gruesome for me. So I put down the book, and donated it to the library the next day. Yay! That’s one less book on my bookshelves. Now I’m reading The Scarlet Letter. Can you believe I’ve never read it before? The teachers of my English classes didn’t pick many of the “usual” books. (I also never had to read Macbeth!)

So right now, Zero is sleeping, Andrew is playing Oblivion, and I’m about to pick up my Frost Flowers and Leaves shawl and start knitting. Oh, and I’ve got some yarn dyeing in the oven! Tomorrow is going to be a great day!

I’m not sure if I have the day quite right, but here’s my silent poetry.

Observation

If I don’t drive around the park,
I’m pretty sure to make my mark.
If I’m in bed each night by ten,
I may get back my looks again.
If I abstain from fun and such,
I’ll probably amount to much;
But I shall stay the way I am,
Because I do not give a damn.

By Dorothy Parker

I adore Dorothy Parker. She has so many great poems. There’s a fantastic little one about Oscar Wilde.

If, with the literate, I am
Impelled to try an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it.

Pound pound POUND! What is that noise above me? It sounds like someone is PURPOSELY running and stamping their feet in the apartment above me.

I sit quietly, listening.

“OUT! I want you OUT!”

More stomping. More stern talking.

Oh. The OTHER neighbor’s cat has gotten into the upstairs apartment. (That’s what happens when you encourage your cats to run around outdoors, and then all leave your doors open.) How to get a cat out? I guess you stomp your feet and give a stern talking-to. Without thought for your downstairs neighbors, of course.

Whoa! What’s that radio I hear? It sounds like it’s INSIDE my apartment? Huh. Oh. Wait. Upstairs lady is down in the basement. And her radio is on down there. And it’s loud. And seems to be placed right below our in-floor heater. How considerate, but talk radio really isn’t my thing.

Guess I’ll just turn up the volume on my computer. And put in headphones.

In no particular order.

• I find it easier to compose these entries in HTML, rather than the “rich text” visual editor. Maybe because I’ve had a website since the late 90s?
• I asked Andrew to make me a drink tonight. It was strong.
• I’ve started to think that perhaps interpersonal communications devices should have the ability to have breathalizers hooked up to them. Drunk dialing is a known problem, but there is also drunk commenting and drunk blogging, which should also be avoided.
• As far as drinking goes, I am a lightweight.
• My heating pad makes my back itch. I learned a cool word once about itchiness: formication. (That’s an ‘m’ in there.)
• Interestingly enough, the dictionary installed on my computer (American Heritage 4th Ed.) doesn’t have the word “formication” in it. It’s a word that describes that feeling of your skin crawling, if I recall correctly.
• I bought a crab from Lunardi’s for dinner. It was great. We ate it with fava beans and nice chianti green beans and ciabatta.
• I accidentally typed “crap” in the sentence above. hahah!
• I really like Beavis and Butt-head. Yes, still.
• Zero made it through his first day of doggy day care today! He was really happy to see me tonight, but I might have been happier to see him!
• Maybe it’s because I don’t have any children, but Zero is almost like a baby for me. I never thought I could love a non-human so much!

Last night I started a new knitting project. I fell in love with Ysolda’s Whimsical Little Knits collection before I even saw it, and bought it straightaway. When I saw the Icing Swirl Hat, I thought I should make it. And I realized that ball of Rowan Cork (sniff, I still miss that yarn!) in my stash would be perfect. So I cast on and started knitting. I pulled my copy of Legends II off the shelf to read while I knit. Why not read one of the books on my to do list? Because I’m an idiot. Anyway. It wasn’t until I RAN OUT OF YARN that I realized my ball of Cork wasn’t a complete ball. It must have been a partial ball, left over from when I made a sweater in that color. Suck. Now I don’t have the yarn to make that hat. And now I want the hat.

The good news is that Ysolda released another pattern in that collection today, and I’m sure I have enough sock yarn to knit it! It’s a cute shawl called Ishbel, knitted in either sock or laceweight yarn. OMG. Maybe I should use some of the Malabrigo sock that I have to knit it. O_O Aww, but I have only Solis and Abril, and I don’t think this shawl wants a multicolor. It wants a semisolid, like some of the Sundara I have. Hmm. Or that fantastic skein of Fleece Artist in Ruby Red or whateveritscalled. OMG. Or in the new cashmere lace/sock yarn we got at the shop. O_O Holy cow that would be awesome.

So I have at least unofficially joined that book-along. But I haven’t started reading. Why? I guess I have to pick a book. I could start with the longest, but it’s a large hardcover and Andrew is watching some show that I think is too distracting. I think it was Lao Tzu who said that a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. It’s so true, of journeys, of books, and of knitting projects.

I’ve picked up my Frost Flowers and Leaves “chuppah” again. I took it to knit night tonight, and it got a few drops of red wine spilled on it. I hope it comes out. But if not? No big deal. So now I think I will pick up Human Being by Christopher Morley and sit on the couch and read and knit. It sounds like a good way to spend what’s left of the night.