Green Lantern Cake!

So we tried to surprise our friend for his birthday but then he ruined his own surprise party by inviting people out for drinks. Asshole. Anyways we all hung out and I made him a cake:

In brightest day, in darkest night...

It's a fun-fetti cake-in-a-box under there. It was going to be a Spiderman cake, but then I didn't have any food coloring but I had leftover green... so Green Lantern yaaaaay! He's a comic book fan all around and DC is doing slightly better things these days than Spiderman anyways so.... I made the lines for the symbol with chopsticks and the lid of the icing tub. I felt pretty good about it. 

And then he drunkenly fingered the cake

See the fun-fetti?

And then we call ate cake with spoons stolen from the ice cream place after three people bought milkshakes right before they closed and a good time was had by all.

Observe decimated cake.

And then I ate cake for the rest of the week.
The End. 

Yay Dinner

Last week we had a nice impromptu dinner gathering. My friend Woz walked back to my apartment with me, where we found my Bestest friend still there playing video games on the giant-ass TV. I was contemplating dinner as Bestest and Woz chatted about games which sounds like a foreign language to me. I realized I had an overabundance of eggs from various "I'm making this thing! Oh it needs eggs, I don't have eggs, I'll just grab some eggs here..." which happened for three different things recently and resulted in three different cartons of 6 or less eggs chillin out in the fridge. What the hell to you do with that many eggs when you don't want an omelet? Make quiche, that's what. Having never made a quiche I decided it would just be the newest step in my culinary adventure and I embraced it wholeheartedly. (Granted I haven't made much of anything, so pretty much anything is a culinary adventure, but I like it that way.) Woz and I went to the store while Roomate was on his way home from his real-person job. I got an onion, mushrooms, and swiss cheese. And threw in the rest of the leftover broccoli for some color. Oh and hooray for pre-made pie crust. It doesn't sound like my idea of fun to mess with the lard or shortening necessary for good homemade pie crust. Eugh. I'm such a wimp. Whatever. Quiche takes a while to make, by the way. We were all pretty ravenous by the time it was done... also note that in typical me-fashion I also managed to have too much filling (resulting from too many eggs in the first place goddammit) so I made two quiches. It's just TOO HARD to cook in small portions! It's just impossible to cook for just one person some days. Augh. I eat like crap mostly because of that. Anyways Woz had bought a cake at the store (it was cheap and looked good at the time) so roommate, bestest friend, Woz and I had quiche and cake for dinner. With Virgil's root beer, also provided by Woz. 

I was practicing my cake-writing skills. They have not improved. 

The quiche might look like nothing special in this picture and more like vomit-pie, but I am assured it was quite good. Well until a few days ago when my Roomie and Bestest informed me that the quiche gave them stomachaches. Woz and I escaped this somehow. I don't quite understand. I think they are stomach-wusses, because Roomie takes meds for serious-business heartburn and Bestest gets tummy aches from fake pancake syrup. That, or Woz and I have the Iron Stomach feat, and get +2 to poison resistance. 

Oh, I pull Dungeons and Dragons references to real-life situations all the time, by the way, so if you're not interested in that sort of thing, you should probably not read this here bloggy thing. 

Adventure in boxed cake

I decided to make a cake for my boyfriend's birthday last week. I've never made any sort of cake before, and since I was short on time, I figure it would be better to make the boxed type rather than from scratch in case I were to mess it up. So I went and picked out a nice box of chocolate mix and some vanilla icing and some green drawing-icing. And more eggs, because I forgot that we still had two other containers of eggs from previous incidents of "oh this recipe calls for eggs, I don't have those right now." Obviously they made these for stupid people, which is great, since I don't know what I'm doing with cake. Dump all ingredients in bowl, mix. Grease pan, that's probably important, I'll do that too. I hope my oven likes me today, doesn't burn my cake... I've learned now that I set my oven slightly below what it says, and put the timer for possibly even less than the recommended time, and slowly add time on until it's done or it even the littlest burn becomes a screechy-fire-alarm problem. It's interesting cooking here. Stupid electric oven. But the cake came out fine. Granted it looked like a small hill rather than a nice flat sheet cake, but whatever. I waited to ice it, because that's what you do, right? I even waited longer than I really had patience for. Alas, even with my extra patience, I failed at icing it nicely. It just picked up all the crumbs and distributed them even thru the icing, making it look as though there were sprinkles on my cake. Sigh. Then the "happy birthday!" Turns out that's hard too and sorta blobbed at points... it it's the thought that counts when making a surprise cake for someone, so it really doesn't matter, especially since my boyfriend will eat just about anything.
Cake:

I don't know, I think it looks edible at the least. I thought it tasted fine. For boxed cake.

Pie is superior to cake.

So I made a pie on Monday. And by that I mean two pies, because I didn't know that one can of Libby's pumpkin makes two pies. Sheer luck that I got two pie shells at the grocery store beforehand rather than just one. I'm going to put this out there: I was terrified of making pie. Our oven at this apartment tends to burn/crisp up  unwatched things and set off the shrieking fire alarm so I have to hold the big box fan at it until it shuts up. Plus I've never made a pie before, ever, not even watched someone make a pie. Please understand my fears here, as the most ambitious thing I've made in the dessert world before was cookies. It's not that I don't think it'll be fine really, it's just that I create these horrible pie-death-house-fire situations in my head that I get a little worked up about sometimes.
Surprisingly? Pie is not that hard. I mean. I haven't tried making it from pumpkin that I cooked myself yet, and I didn't make my own crust, and... oh. Well those are the hard parts, basically, so I just took the easy way out and ended up with perfectly passable pie. I only had small problems. I ended up with just a little too much of the actual filling and had nothing to do with it (aka didn't know what to do with it) and dumped it sadly down the drain. Then as my first pie was baking, a third of the edge crust fell off and took some filling with it. I narrowly avoided alarm-sounding burning and scraped it off the pan I had smartly placed under the pie tin. (I get to pat myself on the back for that one. Yay common sense baking!) Then I wasn't exactly sure what a pie should look like when it's done, so I poked it half a million times with a knife. It ended up like this:

 But then I kind of knew what I was doing and my second pie came out like this:

Second pie much prettier. Who to give the pretty pie to?! WHAT DO I DO WITH AN EXTRA PIE? Good problem to have, but a problem nonetheless. I thought, I shall give it to my best friend's family! They have done so much for me, and they would like a pie! I shall surprise them with my pie skills! (cough cough) I was very joyful.
And then her mother made pumpkin pie on Tuesday.
I have eaten far more pie and ice cream in the past three days than I ever have at a single Thanksgiving.