Why is Saturday afternoon television always so disappointing.  Yeah, maybe some people actually go out and do stuff on Saturday afternoons, but are they really the ones that networks should be catering to?  What about all the lazy bum grad students out there who were up really late putting together their teaching applications and who just want to lay on their bums and watch some quality programming?  I realize that if you put something like Katie Brown’s Workshop on at time when there is anything else watchable on tv (good movies on Telemundo included) that no one would ever watch it.  But for the love of god, why must my Saturday afternoons be defiled by the lame antics of this mildly-retarded Martha wannabe?  Do I not suffer enough already?  What have I done to deserve such cruel punishment from the television gods?

You now those times when you go to the grocery store and you buy a lot of junk and you feel that little twinge of embarrassment when you stand in the checkout line and you can feel everyone looking incredulously and disdainfully at the junk you’re buying? Well, now you can always tell them, “at least I’m not buying ten boxes of cake mix.”

10 boxes cake mix
6 cans frosting
6lbs powdered sugar
3lbs crisco
3 bags mini marshmallows
64 oz vegetable oil
4 tubes decorative frosting
Good times!

As my last post may have suggested, it’s birthday season. And for some reason (possibly the lack of birthday present ideas) I decided I would make two of my friends some special, fancy-pants, custom birthday cakes. Granted, all they said was, “hey, we should all get together and eat birthday cake!” But that got the wheels in my crazy little head turning and soon I had come up with *brilliant* birthday cake ideas. Of course by “brilliant” I mean, impossibly ambitious birthday cak eideas. But once the seed was planted, these cakes became and idée fixe in my mind. Even though reason and logic would tell me that I was a fool to undertake such a crazy enterprise, I could not be stopped. So I bought the unconventional size cake pans. I bought the 10 boxes of cake mix at the store. I bought the black food coloring and I made the marshmallow fondant. And today, I made cake #1.

I already had an idea for what kind of a cake I wanted to make for Friend 1 when she made a special request. She wanted a cube cake. Yes, you did read that correctly. She wanted a birthdday cake in the shape of a cube. You see, she’s turning 27 and well, that’s a perfect cube. Heck, I told you we were nerdy! Anyway, I couldn’t turn down a special request like that, so a cube cake it would be. But of course, I still wanted to incorporate the theme that I had already picked out…

Friday evening: made the marshmallow fondant

Mmm, melted marshmallows!

Today, 11:30 am: baking begins

Only 3 more to go.

3:30 pm: cakes baked, assembly begins

Hmm, gray frosting?

4:30-5:00 pm: fondant disaster begins

How was I supposed to know it was too dry?

16oz of buttercream foundation.

5:30 pm: badly applied fondant tears, makes ugly corners

Panic ensues for the next hour.

6:00-7:30 pm: attempting to save the cake with desperately improvised decorating techniques

Legos + frosting ‘paint’ = stamp the fondant!

Final pictures of the mystery cake shall be revealed after tomorrow’s unveiling :-)

As promised, the cake was unveiled today and now you get to see pictures of the final product :-D More pictures with the lucky birthday girl coming soon.

Just to put it in the proper context…

And for comparison’s sake…

Other, not properly cuboidal borg cakes.

The Borg

If I thought that Britney or any of Britney’s fans knew Ghost in the Shell from Taco Bell, this new video might not have broken my heart quite so much.  

But its legacy will live on in photos forever. I have to say that some of the video game inspired cakes at Kotaku really put my little Borg cake to shame (even Martha’s getting into the game!). But I still think it wasn’t too bad given that it was my first fondant adventure. Maybe someday I’ll gain some magical artistic powers and make my cakes even better! Until that day, more pics of the borg.

The birthday girl prepares for assimilation.

The first cut is the deepest.

That is pure cakey perfection, if I do say so myself!

Seriously. How could I have never heard of this before? Sure, I don’t really ever play board games. But maybe I *would* if I had this game. I mean, this isn’t just a board game. It’s a board game that comes with 100 freaking plastic zombies. Holy crap!! Let me say it again in case you didn’t catch it the first time:
100. Plastic. Zombies. Holy. Crap.

Click for bigger image.

Did I mention the player pieces carry shotguns?

Things have been relatively quiet here, cheese curd quest aside. And now that spring break is over and a new quarter begins, I’m sure that things will be quite busy, since I’m TAing a class this term on Tolkien. This means that I finally had to read the LOTR trilogy, which I believe I did in record time (for me). And now that I’ve done so, I found that while I enjoyed the second and third books more than the first, the whole thing still just isn’t my cup of tea and I’m not entirely sure why.

I don’t know if it’s something about the fantasy genre in general. I don’t really think of myself as inherently opposed to it–I like swords and magic and evil monsters and whatnot. But I admit having more of a penchant for sci-fi, where there’s usually more of an attempt to explain the world logically, and an interest in causes and consequences rather than the more destiny-oriented story lines you find in fantasy. At the same time, I do like ancient epics like the Iliad and Beowulf, and I did like the Harry Potter books, which were also clearly fantasy.

I think the bigger problem for me was the characters in Tolkien and the fact that they’re all more archetypal than believable psychological beings. Now, I’m sure that there are people who would take issue with that statement, but for me all of the characters fell flat. I recognize that the characters do exhibit some growth over the course of 1000 pages (unlike in The Hobbit where Bilbo spent pretty much the entire book being a whiney antihero). But I couldn’t help but feeling that they were all distant, stilted, and predictable. I had a brief moment of hope toward the end of the third book (spolier coming up if anyone other there still doesn’t know the story) where I thought Tolkien could redeem himself. I wanted Sam to have to throw Frodo into the Crack of Doom to destroy the Ring. Because you *knew* Frodo was not going to be able to give the Ring up. But no, predictably, Tolkien choose not to present Sam with a psychologically difficult choice and he let Gollum do the dirty work, which not only made for a happy ending for all, but also conveniently brought Gollum some semblance of redemption despite all his treachery.

Anyway, I’m not really saying Tolkien should have written the books differently. I’m mostly just trying to put into words why I disliked the books. I’m hoping that if I can come up with thoughtful ways of articulating my disappointment with the trilogy, maybe I won’t get lynched by 60-some LOTR-loving undergrads in the class.

As a way of celebrating my completion of LOTR, I played Portal this weekend and finished it on Sunday. for those of you who aren’t in the video game know, Portal is a sort of bonus game that was bundled with the release of Half-Life 2 and it’s two expansions. It’s received a lot critical acclaim, and I agree that it was fun for the most part. The portal guns were innovative and fun to use. The game had a great and somewhat twisted sense of humor to it. And the puzzles were, for the most part, challenging but not so much so that they were frustrating. That is until the end. I really got turned off by the last level. I think it was mostly because you got used to these relatively short little levels and then there’s this long, complicated level that take about half an hour to complete. I know it made sense in terms of the story behind the game, but I found it a bit frustrating. Then again, maybe I was just in too much of a hurry to finish. I was also a little turned off by the final boss fight. There were times where even though you knew what you were supposed to do, it wasn’t clear exactly how to do it. I guess you could call it old school in that respect–it brought back a lot of the memories of the frustrating Nintendo games of my youth.

But the best part of the game, in my opinion, was the Jonathan Coulton song in the credits. I love Jonathan Coulton’s songs and it warms my hear to know that there are video game developers out there who love him too.