looking back

So I *almost* did it. I missed a single day blogging in April, but I nearly made up for it with two posts in one day a few weeks later. It was good practice, even if it didn't exactly mean I shared something scintillating every day. I will do my very best to NOT take a month off now. But I'll be glad that I can delete that 10 pm daily alarm that says, "BLOG!"

I will say, it was entirely unlikely that you were going to hear from me today. It's 7:30 pm and I'm still in my nightgown, nursing a colossal hangover. Emma Talent Night was, of course, a total blowout, and I drank too many berry vodka drinks much too quickly. It was super, super, super fun, of course, and I've been told that I didn't *act* that drunk, so that's a relief. I appointment myself one of the official photographers for the evening, and got some pretty great shots that got progressively blurry as the night went on. I'm sure just technical problems with my camera, right? But the fun wore off when I woke up on our bathroom floor at 4:15 am. These are probably details I could have spared my parents. But it's possible that my mom was doing a little drunk texting of her own, as I received this at about 10:30 pm:

G p frkn good no tlk yet posl yr m

Thanks, Mom. She was at a Glen Phillips show. Obviously.

You will most likely NOT hear from me tomorrow, as we'll be out of town for the first time in over a year! We're Hotlanta bound in the a.m., cruising by the Holy Mecca (I mean IKEA) and then checking into our very posh hotel that we got for a song because they just opened yesterday! Woot! Then on to Emily and Neil's wedding of amazingness, and I'm just super excited. We'll be home Saturday afternoon, hopefully in time to catch the last of the Market Celebration at the Farmer's Mkt. That seems like good karma, right? Plus, Snowballs! Then Scott Miller at Mercy Lounge Saturday night, YAY. I'm looking forward to the brief road trip with my Boo, it's not an experience we share very often and I think we're both ready for a minibreak.

Happy Quite Nearly May!

about that frosting...

So Casey and Trent have the same birthday (wild, right?) and they alternate years getting to request a birthday cake. Casey is all about strawberries and whipped cream. This is Trent's year. He wanted CHOCOLATE. I set about tracking down the most chocolate chocolate cake I could find.

I found this cake on Epicurious (always my go-to when I want something that has already been road-tested). 1277 reviews and 91% of them would make it again? That's a hearty enough recommendation for me! I made the cake layers on Saturday with some hot Drew's Brews coffee from Sip. They came out absolutely gorgeous (I went with three 9" layers instead of the recommended 2 10"), dark and slightly sticky. I wrapped them up and managed to not alert Charlie Murphy the Chocoholic Cat to their hiding place.

Sunday morning I made a quick ganache for the frosting, according to the recipe, but I wasn't wild about the results. The cake itself was already so dark and moist and gooey, I thought a simple drapey ganache would be too homogenous. I stuck it in the fridge to chill and consulted Agnes when we popped by the Walden Market before lunch. We discussed the pros and cons of whipping a ganache or incorporating whipped cream. I thought I'd see how spreadable it was after the chill and play it by ear.

When we got back to the house (a mere two hours before the birthday party was scheduled to start, poor planning on my part...) that ganache was a solid unstirrable mass in the fridge. Oops. The spatula was sticking up at a perfect vertical angle. Hmm. Time to apply all of my dessert-making problem solving skills.

First I whipped the solid ganache with a hand mixer. This didn't go great. The bowl wasn't big enough for much movement, and the chocolate, while lightening significantly, clung to the beaters and was still not really spreadable. So I went WAY outside the realm of reason and popped that bowl in the microwave at half-power for a minute. It came out totally uneven and kind of lumpy, actually quite ugly. UGH.

So I went with my last resort and whipped up probably a cup and a half of whipping cream. I partially folded it in to the lumpy and runny ganache and then put the hand mixer back in there and whipped until everything was evenly mixed and fluffy. Gorgeous!



Now I'm off to Emma Talent Night! It's a shame I didn't manage to pull together a Baking Demonstration. Clearly, the skills!

the lies I tell to my diary

Sorry friends, you're looking at another half-ass post tonight. I'm in the throes of a battle of wills with my iPod and my poor decrepit iMac (aka The Jukebox). Why won't they talk to each other? Why won't they be friends? GAH.

I need my own personal Reggie for nights like these. Austin doesn't seem too concerned about my technical problems. I have important mix cds to make!

from the swamp

I had planned on bringing my readers a cautionary tale (with a happy ending) about making a fluffy chocolate frosting out of bittersweet ganache. And also a recipe overview of the Brazilian Black Beans (with beets, quinoa, pineapple and cilantro). But the truth is, my eyes are closing while I type. We had to be up early (again) to take Kenzie to have her stitches taken out, and then it was a busy day at work.

Then tonight I met Casey at the Belcourt to see Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, a film we loved absolutely to pieces as little girls. All the songs were familiar, the choreography (which is really fantastic) recalled crystal clear memories, but the storyline was horrifyingly un-PC. I just typed an incredibly long recap and realized it was just a bad idea. Let's just say this is probably the last movie to endorse kidnapping as a mating ritual, sans irony. Although maybe the whole movie was completely tongue-in-cheek-wink-wink, and it went over my head just as much this time as it did when I was nine.

In-depth foodie talk tomorrow, complete with pics, I promise.

the procrastinator, on Sunday afternoon

what I should be doing:

- whipping cream
- whipping the ganache in the fridge
- folding the cream into the ganache
- frosting the very, very, very dark chocolate birthday cake
- boiling macaroni noodles
- stirring into the hot macaroni: cheese, butter, sour cream, evaporated milk, eggs
- mixing up the banana bread batter
- baking banana breads
- applying wrapping paper to the case of beer in the garage
- making quinoa
- sauteeing garlic and scallions with vinegar and jerk sauce
- tossing black beans in the garlic jerk sauce

what I am doing:

- finding things to look at online while parked at the desk in our office. because it's cooler in here. and there are no ovens on.

At least the potato salad is finished and ready to put in the car. We're taking that, a very chocolate cake and macaroni and cheese to Casey and Trent's for their birthday dinner. I also roasted some beets with herbs and butter, and those, along with the jerk-seasoned black beans and quinoa, should make up my lunches for the rest of the week, with some pineapple, cheddar, cilantro and sour cream. Yum!

mental note to self

You know how they say you pay for what you get? And you get what you pay for? This apparently applies to appliances. This morning we were stuck at home with the FOURTH (fruitless) repair visit for our refrigerator. Our huge, nice, posh, glamorous, nearly brand-new refrigerator, the one that we would never have been able to afford if we hadn't bought it at the Sears Scratch and Dent store. A 25-cubic foot Whirlpool fridge for under a grand? Lucky us! Right?

Ugh. Today we had the pleasure of being informed by the repairman that the replacement part that we'd received (and had to wait a week to have installed) was unnecessary and not going to fix our problem. We also got to listen to him get in a bitch-fight with the tech support on his speaker phone. Then he called his supervisor to rat out the other combatant in the verbal squabble. Charming. He (and the tech support, and the supervisor) was stumped by our fridge's inability to maintain a proper temperature, and decided to blame the problem on faulty wiring in our electrical outlet. This is entirely likely, since there has yet to be an example of UNfaulty wiring in this house, other than the new outlets installed by my dad, but are you telling me that it took the FOURTH VISIT before someone checked the outlet? So now we have to bring in an electrician, have the outlet repaired (or have it confirmed that the outlet isn't the problem) and then sit tight for another two weeks until our next service appointment. Awesome.

The good news is, as with all the other visits, the fridge is plenty cold and making ice like a champ since they reset all the operations. It will probably work for another week or so and then start warming up. We threw away two garbage bags' worth of food out of the freezer this morning (last summer's peaches, sad). I dearly, sincerely wish we'd just not bothered with the bargain-hunting and just bought a perfectly fine appliance from Home Depot for the same price and infinitely less trouble. Lesson learned.

Friday Video

Because I don't know what tonight holds (other than meeting baby girl Stella Jeanette Cecil!) and because this made me bounce up and down in my chair with glee, I'm going the lazy route and posting a video today.



Thanks to Yewknee for the video alert. Happy Friday!