Cooking Adventure!

Diana went home to Santa Cruz this weekend, so I have had no one to hang out with and listen to my inane ramblings… I did have a recipe though and a mother who wanted to make sure I made it. The recipe is for Kitty Litter Cake.

Yummy, no? By the way that is a real cake that you can eat, a cake which I made today. I’m posting the recipe here at the end of this entry, and I’ll also tell you what I changed.

So I can’t eat cake out of a litter box, no matter how good it tastes, so that’s out as is the scooper, next I got rid of the ‘turds’, heated tootsie rolls. I want my meals to be aesthetically pleasing on some level and fake turds are not pleasing in any sense of the word, ever. On a side note, I want anything I own or look at to be aesthetically pleasing. I know this statement destroys all modern and post modern art, but such is life, this cake is ugly and so is your art. Also, the recipe called for baking two cakes separately and then crumbling them together. I am lazy, so I mixed my two boxes of cake mix and cooked them together and then crumbled them. I also don’t know how they got the cookies to look like find sand, unless I used the wrong cookies, the recipe is kinda vague. Oh, and soy milk might not be the best thing to use when making instant pudding, mine never set up quite right. So, the second picture is how mine turned out, don’t say it’s dark I used a flash! A complete visual catalog of the ingredients can be found here. All in all it took two hours to make, mostly because the cake recipe was so large and then I had to let it cool before I could crumble it. If I could do things again I’d try to get the Oreos smaller and save more for the topping, maybe a little more pudding as well. Oh, and not use 1 box of white cake and 1 box of chocolate, spice cake would have been better, too chocolaty.

All in all it was fun and I enjoyed making the cake, it doesn’t taste phenomenal but it’s largely a gag dessert anyway, so I wasn’t expecting much. It’s nice and sweet and when it comes to cake isn’t that what matters?

Here is the recipe and all the directions I got with it with my notes, I’m leaving out the lame story that comes with it:

Cake Ingredients:
1 box spice or german chocolate cake mix (I didn’t find spice or german choc cake mix at the co-op so I went with just chocolate)
1 box white cake mix
1 package white sandwich cookies (I assumed these were Oreos)
1 large package vanilla instant pudding mix (I don’t think I had enough)
A few drops green food coloring (I Skipped this, see aesthetic comments above)

Serving Dishes: (I skipped all of this, again see above
1 new cat litter box
1 new cat litter box liner
1 new pooper scooper

1) prepare and bake cake mixes, according to directions, in any size pan. Prepare pudding and chill. Crumble cookies in small batches in blender or food processor (I did this by hand). Add a few drops of green food coloring to 1 cup of cookie crumbs. Mix with a fork or shake in a jar. Set aside.

2) When cakes are at room temperature crumble them into a large bowl. Toss with half of the remaining cookie crumbs and enough pudding to make the mixture moist but not soggy. Place liner in litter box and pour in mixture

3) Unwrap 3 tootsie and heat in microwave until soft and pliable. Shape the blunt ends into slightly curved points. repeat with 3 more rolls. Bury the rolls decoratively in the cake mixture (don’t ask me what the difference between burying decoratively and just simple burying is…). Sprinkle the remaining white cookie crumbs over the mixture, then scatter green crumbs lightly over top.

4) Heat 5 more tootsie rolls until almost melted. Scrape them on top of the cake and sprinkle with crumbs from the “litter box”. Heat the remaining tootsie roll until pliable and hang it over the edge of the box. Place box on a sheet of newspaper and serve with scooper. Enjoy! (it goes without saying I did none of this, I guess it’d be a good gag at a Halloween or April Fool’s party).

Ruminations on Ashputtle

One of the books I bought at the used bookstore in Eugene, OR was a collection of the Brother Grimm’s fairy tales. I’ve been flipping through the pages randomly looking for fodder and boy is there a lot of it. Either living in the 18 century was much more surreal than it is in the 21st, or the Brothers Grimm knew some sick fucks. Take for instance that most famous of disneyfied story, Cinderella, except her name isn’t Cinderella, which at least sounds pretty, and really what 5 year old, No, what grown person raised in a first world country knows what a cinder is? So you can ignore where her name comes from. The “ella” adds a little sophistication to the name. Ashputtle though? Nothing attractive about that name, I can’t think of a worse name than Ashputtle, Ingrid and Gretchen are pretty bad, but Ashputtle? Worse name ever!

So the story starts with a rich man’s wife dying. The dying mother tells her daughter that she should pray to God for anything she might need and He and herself would watch over the girl. We never learn her real name. The rich man remarries, having a nice wife must have been really boring because he married a crazy bitch. Who of course had two daughters who also happen to be crazy. Crazy is just the beginning though, all three of these women are also vindictive, shallow, spiteful, on and on. The two ugly girls in the Disney movie don’t come close to what these two were. Worse than this though is the apathetic father, who does nothing to protect his first daughter?! Where is this man? When his daughter is forced to pick food out of the ash in front of the fireplace, and then forced to sleep there and wear the same clothes over and over? The man is pretty much a non-event. I guess it is true that Men will do anything for a little tail… Sigh. He does provide a branch of the first tree he brushed against on one of his trips, which Ashputtle takes and plants on her mothers graves. She waters the branch with her tears and it grows into a tree, which she visits everyday. The birds that live in her tree provide her with anything she wishes for. Which is nice I guess, too bad she never wishes to get out of her shitty life. Which just goes on and on… Until the prince of the realm holds a ball to find the most beautiful woman in the land, who will become his wife, because this is how royalty finds its next member… Do you see any beautiful people in the House of Windsor? Of course not, because every royal is inbred. Their the human equivalent of show bred dogs, and about as clever which is apparently why they’re all still swimming in the same stinking, shallow genetic pool, common blood would corrupt it. It is nice to see that someone besides fundamentalist Christians are sticking to obsolete ideas… That is a completely different subject though, back to the folktale.

The Prince throws a ball, the step sisters get Mommy and Daddy to spend ridiculous amounts of money on them so that they can impress his Highness. Ashputtle though can’t go because she looks like a extras reject from a made for television Dickens’ drama. Lucky for us readers Step-Mom is crazy and though she has no intention of letting Ashputtle go, for all she knows they Prince has some sort of dirty slave girl fetish, she pretends that if Ashputtle can complete impossible tasks she may go. So she dumps bags of dried lentils on the floor and tells her she has to pick them all up. Then the stepmother disappears confident that there is no possible way her step daughter can collect them all, having all the confidence of a James Bond super villian. Ashputtle has the birds clean up the mess and takes it back to her step-mom, who now dumps two bags and tells her to clean up, again she leaves?! Again the birds save the day, again Ashputtle is hot down. Then everyone goes off to the ball leaving Ashputtle at home. Ashputtle goes to her tree and cries and through the magic of trees that grow on your mother’s grave, a beautiful dress and fancy shoes fall down and she goes off to the ball, where she has a grand time and makes the prince fall in love with her, it gets late, Ashputtle wants to go home so she runs away. Prince follows but loses her, this whole thing repeats itself two nights in a row, each time Ashputtle gets a fancier get-up, each time she escapes, the third night Ashputtle loses one of her shoes because the stairs were covered in pitch. The prince shows up at the house of Ashputtle, cause he knows she lives there, he followed her twice to it before she disappeared…

At the house he tells the Mother and Father that he is going to marry one of their daughters if the shoe fits, which is gold by the way not glass (both being equally ridiculous as choices for cobblers). The eldest step sister tries it on first, and you know it doesn’t fit, what you don’t know is that crazy step mother tells her own flesh blood to cut her toe off?! “You won’t need to walk when you’re queen”. So she does?! I don’t care how much I love my mother I’m not cutting myself just because she told me so, even if I do get to be queen! (Don’t read in to that statement). So now the shoe “fits”, the prince takes the girl away to the palace but on the way those birds tell the Prince to look at the his bride to be’s foot. He sees the blood and turns around. Wash rinse repeat with the younger step-sis, except cut your heel of this time. Now the prince wants to know who is left, no one the father says and now I’m quoting from the actual text, “There’s only a puny little kitchen drudge that my dead wife left me. She couldn’t possibly be the bride.” Again, give this man Father of the Year award!

So the Prince and Ashputtle get married, and the step-sisters get their eyes picked out by birds at the wedding, beautiful. I love how at the end the story tries to teach a lesson, their eyes were picked out for being false and wicked… Nothing is said about the step-mother and father, so I guess being piss-ass poor parents is okay, in fact it should probably be rewarded. Just don’t try to cash in on your step-sister becoming Queen after you were mean to her, cause then you lose your eyes. Recap: shitty, scarring, permanently damaging parenting is okay. Trying to much of of the in-laws eyes PECKED OUT BY BIRDS!!

Gotta say I love that message.

Getting Lost

After work last night I came home and ate dinner, it was delicious. Then I went on a walk with Diana. We decided to take a walk along the green belt in Northern Davis, we’ve walked there before, it is very nice, calm and cool at night. So we parked close to my old place (on Isla) and started walking. We paid no attention whatsoever while we walked. We were just enjoying the sights, our conversation, and the company of each other. We took about a half hour walk and then decided to head back to the car, in a round about way. In short, we got lost! For the record this isn’t the first time we’ve been lost in the Green belt, every time we go we get turned around. We came out on Anderson, but didn’t realize we had crossed under it earlier, so we took a right when we should have taken a left. We walked to the end of Anderson, stood there a while trying to figure out where we were and how we got there, turned around and eventually found our way back to the car…

This is a bad sign, as Diana said, “We’re not going hiking or camping unless we have topographical maps, compasses and can orient ourselves correctly.” Getting lost in our own town is one thing, getting lost in the wilderness is another! What is sad though is that I like to think that I know where the cardinal points are, that I have a good sense of direction, but everything around me tells me that isn’t the case! Oh, well, good thing we have maps!

I bought books!

So I had twelve dollars of credit at one of the local book dealers here in town, Bogey’s Books. This isn’t the best used bookstore in town. The owner doesn’t know where anything really is and he isn’t the nicest guy, definitely needs to work on his customer support skills. Diana and I (Hi, Diana!) recently found another local bookstore in town, right next to the Co-Op. Sweet Briar books, was a nice little bookstore, the proprietor of the store was friendly and helpful, she was able to help with all of our questions. The only trouble we had was with some dick customer who felt that he could say whatever he wanted to whoever he wanted. I wanted to use a brick on his head, Diana, always the wiser, dissuaded me. We bought a couple of cook books and then moved on…

Back to Bogey’s, I had 12 dollars of credit and I wanted to get as many books as possible. I originally had planned to pick up a copy of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged but they only had a mass market copy that I wasn’t willing to pay 4.80 for. I ended up in their sci-fi/fantasy section, where I found a number of the books that are on my immensely long list of books to read, one of which I got for 50 cents! Score! I grabbed Foundation, Rendezvous with Rama, Wit’ch Fire, and Childhood’s End. I took them up to the register and he totaled me up, it came to 12 dollars and 70 odd cents. I had about 12 dollars and 60 odd cents in credit. He looked at me, I looked at him and he said good enough. I don’t know why I’m so excited about getting these books, my backlog only continues to grow. That list to the right, the one that lists maybe 7 or 8 books, is only the beginning of a very long list that has no real end in sight…

In other news, there is no other news for now! Of course things are happening but I’m not going to post them until something happens.

%d bloggers like this: