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Day’s Verse:
“Take heed, keep alert; for you do not know when the appointed time will come.”
Mark 13:33
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I made a chocolate layer cake with vanilla frosting and studded it with M&Ms; of various sizes (I like the peanut butter ones best). I have dubbed this cake Meteor Cake, because of the M&M; impacts. Unfortunately the two pans I had, although both marked 8x8x2, did not actually match in size. As it turns out, that didn’t end up mattering because when I flipped the first finished cake over to plunk it on the cooling rack, it fell out in a pile of large pieces. The second one slipped out as easily as diarrhea from a dysentery patient.

Those two cakes cooled their chocolaty heels on the rack for a day or so while I puzzled over how to make frosting without cocoa or baker’s chocolate. I woke up this morning with the shocking, nay, earthshaking realization that not all frosting is chocolate, and after that everything fell into place. I even jockeyed the sad pieces of the first cake into a semblance of something square, barring the pieces Ian and I ate yesterday. All disasters considered, the cake has turned out alright. Even the vanilla-frosting-from-the-Internet recipe produced a substance close enough to vanilla frosting that I can’t complain. But if anybody has a vanilla frosting recipe that actually tastes like vanilla and not powdered sugar, I would gladly accept it.

Although I have not expanded my cooking repertoir greatly, somehow the recipes that used to turn out for me have stopped working. I have nothing to lose now by trying new things, and plus I’m getting sick of eating:

Pasta
Stroganoff
Pasta
Salad
Pasta
Potatoes
Pasta
Chicken
Pasta
Breakfast for dinner
And, for variety, Pasta

Sometimes we adventurously try enchiladas or Snow On the Mountain, for some ethnic diversity. But I’m certainly ready for more interesting food. Help rescue me from a morass of starch! Save me from an endless heap of noodles! Send along your favorite not-too-difficult (I’m no expert chef here) recipes and we’ll try them out. You may even read about that very recipe here, if it turns out interestingly.

PS – I added a few new buddies under the weblogs page. Check them out!