Vanilla Cake, White Frosting
Feb. 25th, 2002 02:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckI baked a birthday cake for Scott on Saturday. His birthday was Sunday, and we spent the day with his family. I made the cake to feed to the various friends who stopped by for role playing sessions on Saturday. We didn't get rid of all of it, but I managed to keep myself to one small piece.
Amy gave me a lift to the grocery store Friday to get the mix (I feel a bit wrong using a mix since I was brought up that it's better to cook from scratch, but I don't have the time or patience to make a proper from scratch cake. I also would never use up all of the ingredients I'd have to purchase). Scott likes white cake with white frosting, so that's what I got. I was a little startled by the array of choices in that direction: vanilla, French vanilla, cherry vanilla, butter cream, cream cheese. I went with French vanilla. Scott says now that that's his favorite flavor, but I'm not certain that he wouldn't have said that regardless. His mother's convinced that his favorite frosting is an egg white based concoction that requires quite a bit of work, and he's been trying to figure out how to tell her not to bother for quite some time. Since I'd assured her that I wouldn't be eating the cake she made, she used the egg white frosting.
I used an oil substitute and an egg substitute. The oil substitute consists pretty much entirely of ground prunes and tends to make things moister and to lengthen baking time. The egg substitute is a powder made from potato starch and tapioca that tends to dry things out. The two balance fairly well. I mostly used the oil substitute because we had it on hand, but balancing out the "egg" was a bonus. My allergy to egg whites is bad enough that I use the substitute pretty much all of the time in baking. (My sister-in-law, Suzanne, discovered it a few years ago and bought some to use in baking for family gatherings since her father needs to be very careful about cholesterol.)
At any rate, the cake looked and smelled good. I had to bake it about 10-15 extra minutes. I ended up using almost a full container of frosting on it. It came out just a little dry and not quite as sweet as I'd expected. Two of the guys who came over Saturday evening ate two pieces each, but the third wasn't able to have any because he's allergic enough to barley that enriched flour's fairly toxic.
Amy hasn't gotten the notes from the last couple of Amber sessions done yet. Both have been note-intensive sessions during which there was a lot of conversation that she tried to get verbatim. She's visiting some in-laws this weekend and will need to visit her parents after that, so I'm not certain she'll have them done by next session. I'm working on coming up with a good way to let the player characters escape from their current predicament. I don't want to make it easy, but I need to do something or the situation will get boring. (For those interested in following the game, the website is: http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~lcarter/amber/ )
We went over to Matt's for anime on Thursday and ended up arriving before he expected us. Fortunately, he didn't have a problem with that, and we figured out that he'd misread the e-mail we'd sent him, so it wasn't our fault. We watched more Hana Yori Dango, and the episodes were quite a painful as I'd expected in terms of bad things happening to the characters. It's a high school soap opera, so that's no big surprise. We also decided to watch some Blue Seed and to keep the combination for the next few sessions since having something more action oriented will balance things a bit.
Friday night, Amy and I got Justin to watch the last four episodes of Utena. She needed to leave right after it ended, so we didn't really discuss it which is a pity because I wanted to hear her theory as to what Chu-Chu is. She and I did threaten Justin with the movie, but we've given him fair warning that it makes no sense. Maybe we can do that next week.
I've finally finished rewriting the bit of story I was working on for our writers' group. We're scheduled to meet next week. I gave printed copies to Tony last night for him and for Amy (she no longer has ready access to a printer, and his is broken). I still need to e-mail copies to Justin. We're planning to give each other both the rewrites and a bit of not yet reviewed material for critique. I don't know if we'll end up having time to do both, but I'm getting both out in hope that it'll happen.
Amy gave me a lift to the grocery store Friday to get the mix (I feel a bit wrong using a mix since I was brought up that it's better to cook from scratch, but I don't have the time or patience to make a proper from scratch cake. I also would never use up all of the ingredients I'd have to purchase). Scott likes white cake with white frosting, so that's what I got. I was a little startled by the array of choices in that direction: vanilla, French vanilla, cherry vanilla, butter cream, cream cheese. I went with French vanilla. Scott says now that that's his favorite flavor, but I'm not certain that he wouldn't have said that regardless. His mother's convinced that his favorite frosting is an egg white based concoction that requires quite a bit of work, and he's been trying to figure out how to tell her not to bother for quite some time. Since I'd assured her that I wouldn't be eating the cake she made, she used the egg white frosting.
I used an oil substitute and an egg substitute. The oil substitute consists pretty much entirely of ground prunes and tends to make things moister and to lengthen baking time. The egg substitute is a powder made from potato starch and tapioca that tends to dry things out. The two balance fairly well. I mostly used the oil substitute because we had it on hand, but balancing out the "egg" was a bonus. My allergy to egg whites is bad enough that I use the substitute pretty much all of the time in baking. (My sister-in-law, Suzanne, discovered it a few years ago and bought some to use in baking for family gatherings since her father needs to be very careful about cholesterol.)
At any rate, the cake looked and smelled good. I had to bake it about 10-15 extra minutes. I ended up using almost a full container of frosting on it. It came out just a little dry and not quite as sweet as I'd expected. Two of the guys who came over Saturday evening ate two pieces each, but the third wasn't able to have any because he's allergic enough to barley that enriched flour's fairly toxic.
Amy hasn't gotten the notes from the last couple of Amber sessions done yet. Both have been note-intensive sessions during which there was a lot of conversation that she tried to get verbatim. She's visiting some in-laws this weekend and will need to visit her parents after that, so I'm not certain she'll have them done by next session. I'm working on coming up with a good way to let the player characters escape from their current predicament. I don't want to make it easy, but I need to do something or the situation will get boring. (For those interested in following the game, the website is: http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~lcarter/amber/ )
We went over to Matt's for anime on Thursday and ended up arriving before he expected us. Fortunately, he didn't have a problem with that, and we figured out that he'd misread the e-mail we'd sent him, so it wasn't our fault. We watched more Hana Yori Dango, and the episodes were quite a painful as I'd expected in terms of bad things happening to the characters. It's a high school soap opera, so that's no big surprise. We also decided to watch some Blue Seed and to keep the combination for the next few sessions since having something more action oriented will balance things a bit.
Friday night, Amy and I got Justin to watch the last four episodes of Utena. She needed to leave right after it ended, so we didn't really discuss it which is a pity because I wanted to hear her theory as to what Chu-Chu is. She and I did threaten Justin with the movie, but we've given him fair warning that it makes no sense. Maybe we can do that next week.
I've finally finished rewriting the bit of story I was working on for our writers' group. We're scheduled to meet next week. I gave printed copies to Tony last night for him and for Amy (she no longer has ready access to a printer, and his is broken). I still need to e-mail copies to Justin. We're planning to give each other both the rewrites and a bit of not yet reviewed material for critique. I don't know if we'll end up having time to do both, but I'm getting both out in hope that it'll happen.
