Date with the Night

Does squishy do it for you?  It doesn't do it for me.  I'm a crunchy girl - I like my toast crispy, my peanut butter chunky and anything fried to be verging on the charcoal.  Mmmm... charcoal.  Texture is such a massive thing to me, I almost can't eat things when the texture is off.  That's not to say that all my food is crunchy; I like to eat soft things, slurpy things... it's just squishy that I have a problem with.

Which is why my unholy love affair with the humble date loaf is so fundamentally strange.  Of course, the version that I make (the Edmonds version) has walnuts in it, so it does have that kind of contrast-y texture.  I really dig that contrast-y texture.  I've even done a bit of an experiment where I substitute about half a cup of the flour for a half cup of cocoa, but I made a mental note not to do that again, because it made it kind of dry and weird.  Not brutally unpleasant, but just not really great.

Dates and walnuts - the gin and tonic of the baking world, that's how well they go together.

So that's all the baking that I've been doing.  It's nice to have a project though, so I've been madly looking up Lego cakes for the Lad's birthday in June.  He's going to be an *ahem* significant number, as I've already mentioned, so I'm going to practice my fondant icing skills so I can be all "Man, this is super easy! I should have been a baker... or something." when it comes time to do the actual Lego cake.  Just a recommendation though, if you are a beginner cake decorator (like myself), for the love of Great Grandma's Spatula don't look up on the internet "Lego cakes", because you will be so disenheartened (is that even a word?  Whatever) by the professional efforts of professionals that you will really start to question your sanity in volunteering to make a cake in the first place.

In other news, your humble writer here has just had her 29th birthday.  The Lad made a big fuss of me, and my parents even came to town specifically to take me shoe shopping and out for lunch, which was all totally lovely.  I didn't do any baking for my birthday, because quite frankly library school is really sapping my strength when it comes to the domestic arts.  I bought myself a vinyl edition of Queens of the Stone Age's Rated X (the tenth anniversary of Rated R), and also managed to find the Distillers' self titled album and Fight Like Apes' Fight Like Apes and the Mystery of the Golden Medallion. 

Maceo is also doing good: well actually, he's a pain in the arse. I have all these scabby scratches on my hands to prove it, but I really just wanted an excuse to post this cute-ass picture of him.  This is the look he gets right before he tries to claw your face off.  He's going in for his de-manning on Tuesday, so maybe that will settle him down a bit, but I really have my doubts.  Boy is a crazypants.  Speaking of pants, I saw a good interview by Ellen DeGeneres of Tina Fey a few days ago, and have subsequently ordered her book, Bossypants.  Dunno if it will be any good, but the interview was really funny (though Ellen did make it patently obvious she'd never done improv before... yikes), and they're both really charming women.  Though Lord knows when I'll get time to read it, because it's taken me about three weeks to get half way through the first trade book of Fables: Who Killed Rose Red?  Probably doesn't help that I'm reading about three other books at the same time though.