Beast of the Yeast

I don't feature enough pizza on this blog.  Don't you think?  As far as I'm concerned, pizza is the Perfect Food.  I mean, it's bread, with anything you want on it.  How could that not be perfect?  Okay, so sandwiches are bread with anything you want on it, but I guess the sandwich is a good representation of the phrase 'familiarity breeds contempt'. 

Invasion of the Killer Brains

Wouldn't that be a great title for a B-movie?  Maybe it already is... but anyway, I'm trying to retrain my brain.  Hard ask with a brain such as mine, but if I'm going to be studying again next year, it's good to get used to reading in an academic type format again... goodbye, sweet novels, I knew you well.

So, that having been said, I'm reading some pretty interesting stuff at the moment.  I mean, it doesn't all have to be stuffy toff reading!  Okay, so I am reading Karl Marx's Theory of History: a defence by G.A. Cohen... maybe not everyone's idea of exciting bedtime reading, but still... makes quite the change from Sookie Stackhouse, that's for sure.  And Fight the Power by Chuck D from Public Enemy (they are touring out to lil' ol' EnnZed next year, and I've always meant to read this book... every time I check it into the library, I try to get it out, but it always has a hold on it.  Not this time though).  Also I've just started Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Theory by Patricia Melzer.  Which is super interesting, though it's mostly about SF-type films rather than books.  I'm not fussy though.

Digressing back to SF-esque writing now, despite Ray Bradbury scaring the pants off me when I was a kid (I didn't sleep properly for nearly a month after reading Something Wicked This Way Comes), I still love him.  And I love him even more after reading this article, which was published in the New York Times in June 2009. There has been a lot of kerfuffle in the library community about closures and restrictions and price increases and stuff.  It would be real easy for me to go, 'Aww, that's just the States'... but the fact is that the recession has affected the whole world, which creeps me out no end, you know, how it really is becoming like the economic version of Chaos Theory, where a butterfly flaps it's wings in the Amazon and Wall Street crumbles.  I know it's a lot more complex than that, but it just seems that way to me.

Scary Shit... Look out for the Dust Witch!!

Mean Little Cookie

I was overcome last week.  You know when you get an idea, and it just sort of burbles around in your head and you practically have to act on the idea in self-defence, just to make it go away?  Well, my brain conjured up an mental image of me, eating a cookie with Fat Ass emblazoned on it.  Not that I think my ass is fat or anything, certainly not.  But before this degenerates into a post about my buttock region, here's a picture:

I just want to (butter)fly

Damnit, now I have that stoopit Crazy Town song stuck in my head.  No way to start a day (I'm eating weetbix with one hand and typing with the other - how do you spell 'milk on the keyboard'?)

Anyway, things are looking a tad busy for me today, so I thought that I'd finally get around to posting about these wicked-ass cupcakes I made for my friend Sara's birthday.  It was an important birthday, plus she's pregnant at the moment, so I wanted to make a big fuss out of Sara-the-person-who-likes-stuff, rather than Sara-the-pregnant-lady.  So the scene was set for cupcake action!

And here they are!  The flavour is chilli-chocolate (Evil Sara introduced me to the taste exploooossssion which is Lindt chilli flavoured chocolate, and now it seems that a chocolatey treat just isnt' right without a nice big smack-your-face blast of chilli), and the little butterflies that you see on the top are made from sugar cookie dough.  Again, the cakes were just made with the chocolate variation on the white cake recipe, which is totally my go-to recipe for cupcakes - I doubt if I'll ever use another (unless it's the sour cream and white chocolate recipe, which should be coming up in the next post).  I got the awesome teeny butterfly cutters from Cakestuff, and the lady who runs that shop should be given a niceness medal - every time I've interacted with her (albeit over the emails) she's always lovely, which was even better this time because they accidentally send the wrong thing first up.  But they fixed it super-promptly, and I got to keep the wrong thing too!  Noice.

So that was baking adventures.  Well, last week's baking adventures - I'm in the middle of a bit of a secret squirrel operation at the moment, so you'll just have to wait to see how that turns out (can't wait until that is done, looking forward to having a sense of achievement, rather than a sense of trepidation and 'biting off more than I can chew'edness).  Mum and Dad are coming down for a visit next week, which should be real fun, haven't got anything planned, in fact I'm almost praying for kind of shitty weather so that we can just blob around (invariably, it's always a bit rank on the weather front when they're down here though... *sigh*)

The weetbix in my bowl has now become sludge, so that must be the signal to finish up here.  TTFN, y'all.