This is the End.

A final hello to you all.

I'm finishing up this here blog.  I guess I'll have it stick around for a while, but I'm not baking so much as I used to, and I guess my priorities have changed.  It's been a blast though, and I've learnt a lot, so thanks for reading my whitterings, it's been nice to see the stats climbing up at least.

I've started a new blog, the Lone Wolf Book Club, so if you want to you can head over there and take a look around.  It kind of takes on from this one, but the Black Crow Bakery became less about the baked goods than it was about everything else.  LWBC is strictly about books and reading related stuff.

Okay guys, I'm signing off now - happy trails,
Lola

There will Never be a Better Time

It seems like I haven't made cupcakes in a very very long time.  And since I'm meant to be writing my second assignment for my Masters paper right now, as we speak, what better time to make cupcakes?  These little beauties are vanilla with vanilla-maple frosting.  For some reason (maybe I over-mixed them?) they turned out a little tough, but when you've got a noseful of frosting, who really cares?  They came out kind of pretty too.  See?

Polka-dots - good for the soul.

I was just meant to go in to drop off the Hellblazer and the Love and Rockets that I'd borrowed from the public library (which, sad to say were slightly overdue... heh heh), but you've got to walk past the science fiction and fantasy section to get to the comics at my public library.  Uh oh.  What did I see out of the corner of my eye but Perdido Street Station, by the inimitable China Mieville.  It was too good an opportunity to miss - I have read Un lun dun and Iron Council already, and really enjoyed them both.  I think because Perdido is such a weighty looking tome, I always get put off getting started on it, but the holidays will be coming up soon, so I figured the universe was trying to tell me something.  I really love the world building in it so far, and Mr. Mieville doesn't shy away from the big words, which I really like.  Expand that word power!  I'll let you know how I get on with it. Just as an extra treat, here is an interview with China Mieville conducted just after Un Lun Dun came out.  He's ridiculously cool and super talented.

Oh, and here is a link to one of the blog things that I follow, Cakehead Loves Evil - shes' running a thing called Cupcake Tuesday, and truly, the submissions blew my mind.  I can't even believe that I'm showing you this link, because they make my attempts look like shit.  Though, she says huffily, I bet those cupcakes don't taste very good.  *sniff*

Mama!  I need to borrow your opposable thumbs!

Well, that's enough pretending that I'm doing work.  I'd better actually go and do some - I'm trying to get into it again, really I am, but I think that I lost my mojo for this course during the holidays, because I'm kind of struggling to get back into it.  I'm sure it's around here somewhere...

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.