It’s Furious Balancing

Yes, gentle readers, it’s another cooking post.  Fret not; there is no pork involved in this one.

I have made cupcakes.  From scratch cupcakes, mind you, and there’s a back story.

One of the recent additions to my blog roll is Cake Wrecks (“When Professional Cakes Go Horribly HIlariously Wrong”).  When I discovered it, I spent more than a few hours reading through the archives; Jen, the blogger, is quite the humorist.  A side-bar advertisement there caught my eye a few weeks ago.  Despair, Inc. — famous for it’s demotivational posters — was selling Valentine’s Day candy conversation hearts.  They’re marketed as Bittersweets and I knew right away that I had to get them.

They did not disappoint.  When I had the lovelies in my eager little hands, my first thought was, “What can we make with these?“ 

Cupcakes.  Lemon cupcakes with icing and a snarky heart on top.

The Lemony Cupcakes of Snark

Cupcake Ingredients:

• 1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened
• 2 cups sugar
• 3 eggs
• 2 teaspoons grated lemon peel
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour, sifted
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 cups sour cream

Frosting Ingredients:

• 3 tablespoons butter, softened
• 2 1/4 cups confectioners’ sugar
• 2 tablespoons lemon juice
• 3/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/4 teaspoon grated lemon peel
• 1 tablespoon milk

In a mixing bowl, cream butter and sugar.  Beat in eggs one at a time.  Add lemon peel and vanilla.  Mix well.

Combine dry ingredients and added them to creamed mixture alternately with sour cream.  The batter will be thick.  Fill greased or paper-filled muffin pan with 1/4 cup of batter.  Bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 25-30 minutes or until a toothpick inserted near center comes out clean.  Cool 10 minutes; remove to wire racks to cool completely.

For frosting, cream butter and sugar in mixing bowl.  Add lemon juice, vanilla, lemon peel, and milk.  Beat until smooth.

Frost cupcakes.  Add snark as desired.

Sometime between my last blog post and this blog post, there was this spate of Internet Craziness — Testosterone-Fueled Internet Craziness — about Barbecued Bacon Logs.

It all started with a post on a BBQ blog a few days before Christmas.  Someone had contacted the bloggers about a recipe for barbecued bacon, and the bloggers rose to the occasion.  In spades.

I first found out about it via The New York Times online edition, but a  Google search I did today had over half a million hits.  The Bacon Explosion has turned into a full-blown Internet meme and now appears on YouTube and Wikipedia.

I know several guys that had the “I Must Make This” response to the recipe, The Husband among them.  I figured that it would be an amusing thing to do over a lazy winter weekend. Why not?  There’s a lot of text out there on the ‘Net about this recipe, so I don’t hope to add anything to the dialogue.  I do, however, have some WIP and FO photos.  Pork Pr0n.  It was darned tasty.

Yeah, I know I’m supposed to be writing a post about sock knitting, but I’d rather procrastinate.  How can you blame me when I’m surrounded by Bad Influences?

One of the gals over on the Knitters for Obama forum on Ravelry put this video together.  I love the photos from overseas she’s incorporated.

I will admit that this is not my ballot.  It’s either my brother’s or sister-in-law’s, more than likely my sister-in-law’s.  I was far too tired this morning to think about sneaking my camera into a voting booth.

Yeah, I’m slacking on the blog writing and posting a meme instead. This election is giving me anxiety fits, and I’m using that as as excuse.

You Are 88% Democrat

You are a card carrying Democrat, and a pretty far left one at that! There’s no chance anyone would ever mistake you for a Republican.

I love this interview of Sen. Joe Biden.  I’m sure I’ll watch it a few times during the next nine days.

There is no doubt in my mind that this is the best time of year.    A phrase I recently discovered is Winter Finding – the time between the autumnal equinox and the first of November.  The intolerable heat and humidity of the summer is over and we’re running headlong into frost.  Light becomes muted.  The days smell cleaner.  I keep telling myself that I need to get out and photograph the changing leaves, but between doubting my ability as a photographer and the swiftness of the season, I don’t think that will happen.

Said a blade of grass to an autumn leaf, “You make such a noise falling! You scatter all my winter dreams.”

Said the leaf indignant, “Low-born and low-dwelling! Songless, peevish thing! You live not in the upper air and you cannot tell the sound of singing.”

Then the autumn leaf lay down upon the earth and slept. And when spring came she waked again — and she was a blade of grass.

And when it was autumn and her winter sleep was upon her, and above her through all the air the leaves were falling, she muttered to herself, “O these autumn leaves! They make such a noise! They scatter all my winter dreams.”  –Kahlil Gibran, The Madman

There’s nothing like autumn and its soft decay to bring out the pseudo-gothy Miss Havisham-y part of my personality.

This is the Vintage Velvet scarf I’ve been working on the past two weeks.  I cranked it out in record time — record time for me, in any event.  One of the reasons it went so quickly was because I truly dislike the yarn.  I wanted to be done knitting with it as soon as I possibly could so I wouldn’t have to handle it any longer than I had to.

It’s Muench’s Touch Me, a rayon microfiber and wool blend.  It sheds like a mangy cat, has no stitch definition to speak of and, being chenille, it worms.  While chenille yarn is pretty and plush, it is a bitch to work with — its tendency to worm being the major problem.  I can’t explain exactly why chenille does what it does, but there’s an explanation here.

In a fit of pique, I stayed up until all hours one night last week to finish this scarf and felt it.  I had never before thrown yarn into soapy hot water with such heartfelt abandon.  I was ready to drown this thing.  It was loose and loopy going into the washer, and I was praying that the Felting Gods would work their magic.

They did.

For this pattern, you need to use the yarn it calls for — not any chenille yarn will give you the same effect.   The wool core of the yarn constricts and tightens, and the fluffy rayon bits come together to give the scarf its crushed velvet patina.  A trip through the dryer lifts the nap on the velvet.

Project Notes  – Vintage Velvet

Pattern: “Vintage Velvet” from the book, Scarf Style

Size: After felting – 54 inches by 5 1/2 inches.  Since I stretched and pinned it for the final blocking, there was remarkably little shrinkage.

Yarn: Muench Touch Me, 5 balls, in Slate Blue

Needles: Denise Interchangables, U.S. Size 8.  They are my least slippery needles, which is important when working with chenille.

Mods: None

Other Stuff: I would gladly pay through the snout to buy this yarn in another color for the same project.  However, before that happens, I need must let the horror of my first experience fade.

I’ve got a love/hate relationship with my insomnia.  While I adore the wee morning hours, it definitely puts me on a radically different schedule than the rest of the people I live and work with at GMT -4 hours.

There are a few enjoyable things about the warmer weather.  Click the pretty flowers for the Big Shiny Pictures.

***

Today, a Friday, is a pre-scheduled Mental Health Day for Laiane.  Since (a) my boss is on vacation this week, and (b)  law firms are notoriously slow in the summer, it seemed like it was time for some Planned Relaxation.

Unlike a lot of women, I don’t suffer from the “let’s take care of everyone else before I take care of myself” thing.  I indulge myself, gladly.  Today has included:

• Chocolate cake for breakfast.
• A nap on the couch with a purring kitteh curled up under my chin.
• Knitting.
• Online shopping — Some birthday presents to indulge my friends and some organic cotton sheets to indulge The Husband and me.
• DVD watching — Red Dwarf in the morning and a few episodes of Planet Earth for this evening.
• Oh, and a LOLCat.  It is Friday, you know.

But we do have lots and lots of cherries.  Our capricious cherry tree in the backyard is apparently very happy with itself this year.

Very happy as in “well-nigh deliriously happy to the point of absurdity.”  There are a few other local people I know with cherry trees, and they’re reporting the same.

Click the pictures to enlarge them (but you knew that already).

But first, the answer to yesterday’s query: The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass. “Inspection of Concrete, or, Barbaric, Mystical, Bored” is a chapter title and references the graffiti scrawled by a German soldier in one of the (pre-invasion) Normandy bunkers.

Today’s pop quiz is also book related, but it’s much easier since it’s multiple choice.

This morning, while browsing the monthly catalog from Quality Paperback Book Club, I found a book that caught my eye, made my heart beat faster, and which I just had to have.  Which was it?

(a) The brand-spanking-new translation of War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy). “Early release paperback,” granted the bottom one-sixth of a page on page 10 of the catalog; or

(b) The Nymphos of Rocky Flats (Mario Acevedo), the first book in a new mystery series featuring Private Investigator Felix Gomez, who came back from his military stint in Operation Iraqi Freedom as a vampire. Full-page color insert and featured with its companion volumes, X-Rated Bloodsuckers and The Undead Kama Sutra.

Words fail me.