Birthday update, or, Candy Saves The World!

My day of cake-bakery very nearly turned into an episode of I Love Lucy.

Up until now, I had been mixing all my cake batter (from a mix) and cookie dough and homemade icing by hand, using a wooden spoon twirled between my palms. But, as this was my first cake-from-scratch, I got a little electric mixer.

This was the first time I've used an electric mixer since, er, ever.

The thing does not have a speed which I would characterize as "Slow."

As far as I can tell, its settings start off at "Fast," move on from "OMG" to "WTF," and culminate in AAAAAAHHHHHH RICKYYYYYYYYYYY!!!"

So of course as soon as I started beating the dry ingredients into the sugar-butter, THE FLOUR STARTED FLYING!!! My kitchen was enmisted in a fine white powder! And not the kind with street value! Visibility was down to one foot!!! COULD I make it through to the Batter Side??? Would there be any batter left in the bowl when I was done???

The answer was Yes!!! Batter was achieved! Cake was accomplished!!! And it did, in fact, look like something approaching a castle!... if a castle had been somehow left in the same pasture with the Great Ziggurat of Ur when it was in heat. But no archaeologists were on the scene to complain.

The frosting process got a little sticky (HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA...*sigh*)-- the hot temperatures and high humidity didn't allow the buttercream to do anything but look blobby. So I ended up cementing the whole castle shape together with royal icing made with an extra egg white and liberal cream of tartar, then when the structure dried I just spackled on the frosting like adobe. (If you're paying attention, now we've got a Mediaeval Castle/Mesopotamian Ziggurat/Adobe Mud-hut.) Since the stuff was too liquidy to do any fine detailing, I made it look more building-like by using candy. Red Twizzler architectural detailing, Dots for the battlements, and Whoppers around the rim like so much insanely boulderlike landscaping. And, not too bad a look, as it turned out! Wonderful Son was pleased, and that was what counted. :) He got to put the final dots on the towers, and that made his day.

Pictures were taken!!! As soon as I quit being lazy I will put one up. The party was fun, the kids played without getting horribly taxed and worn out, and a good time was had by all. This was the most fun birthday party yet, and as the kids get older, I think they're just going to get better and better. :)

There are days when being a parent is like being one of those people who voluntarily sleeps on nails and walks through burning coals. Then there are days like this, when everything was sunshine, cake, and presents. For me, the company of fun adults and happy, awesome, interesting kids was the best present, ever.

Once more, into the breach!-- with cupcakes.

I... am not a good cook.

Oh there are some things I have learned to do well. But, when it comes right down to it, cooking scaaaaares me. There's this HOT thing that can BURN me!!! And I have to go NEAR it! On purpose!!! It's just WACKY MADNESS, I tell you!!!!! :D

Once I get a recipe or method I like, though, I find I enjoy it. I love, love love cooking curries, for instance! There's all this fiddly little obsessive-compulsive stuff I can do with my hands, like peeling garlic cloves, separating coriander stalks from the leaves, adjusting spice ratios and such. There's a lot for an Aspie to love about this-- once one gets acclimated. :) Personally, until I am acclimated to a task, I always go into it with copious anxiety... which sounds like a dreadful way to go through life, but actually, it kind of turns extremely mundane aspects of life into this HUGE ADVENTURE, so, it's pretty fun on balance. :) OMG DOING DISHES!!! OMGLAUNDRY!!!! See, I can confess this to the blogosphere-- I would not tell people face-to-face what a HUGE DRAMAFEST I find daily life tasks to be, because it is silly and embarrassing. But it is also my SECRET GUILTY PLEASURE! MY ENTIRE LIFE IS SEEKRIT OCCUPATIONAL THERAPY!!! :D :D :D

:ahem: Anyway.

Today's adventure: OMGBAKING!!!

Baking and I have a checquered history. There are so many things that can go wrong when one bakes, and I think I have discovered just about all of them. Shockingly, I am awesome in a chemistry lab, though, so learning more about food chemistry has helped! Now I can view baking rationally as a BIG HUGE ACID-BASE REACTION in my STOVE where the object is to produce zomgBUBBLES!!! so that the cake RISES and is FLUFFY and not all masonrylike and flat like my first cake turned out. (Oh, yes, I managed to screw up a CAKE MIX. That took supreme inattention, yes yes!)

I have since learned not to screw up cake mixes, huzzah! So now the next step-- what's on tap for today is my first-ever scratch-made cake. I have made cookies from scratch, so I think I'm up to the challenge.

The recipe: Yogurt Sponge Cake from this book called Birthday Cakes from Love Food (R), an imprint of Paragon Books Ltd, 2007. Recipes by Oliver Trific, which is just the best name ever and cannot POSSIBLY be his real name and if it IS, OMG!!! Best name ever.

I am going to use this recipe in an attempt to make 18 cupcakes. Wish me luck. I'M GOIN' IN!!!

(:runs into kitchen yelling battle-cry while waving cookbook overhead:)

Random Numbers

Number of miles walked it takes to kill a panic attack (for me): 3

Number of cupcakes which must be baked by Friday (by me): 4 dozen

Number of paintings needing to be painted in order for me to feel I've accomplished something in my life: 1 more than I've currently painted, as always.

Big Mama is watching you!

Wonderful Son has gotten the idea that we are watching his classroom via YouTube. :)

Some things on my mind today

1. How do you tell the difference between a genuine bipolar "I'm starting to mood cycle again so pls adjust my medication, kthx" and "I'm under a lot of stress and being an asshole about it, I need to suck it up and cope" ?

I've been suspecting the former, but the more I think about it, and the more I took in a prescription-strength dose of Sunshine, Fresh Air and Exercise today, I really think it may be the latter.

In which case, my 'prescription plan' is certainly helping. It never fails to amaze me how much more bearable everything seems when copious amounts of sunshine, fresh air and exercise are in the picture. It makes me wonder how much of human well being, nay, even human CULTURE, is due to endorphins. Just feeling your body MOVE, feeling the raw physical CAPABILITY in your sinews and blood and bones, it's pure magic, and it seems to me that nothing will acquaint you with yourself faster. I wonder how much of the total low self-esteem or "I gotta go FIND MYSELF" in the world is due to not enough time spent getting one's body up and moving. It is so easy to get lost in thoughts and worries... just being purely present in PHYSICAL EXERTION is such a relief!

Also, it's a great help in recognizing that a diagnosed disorder is no excuse for being an asshole. It's part of the social contract we humans forge that we all have to learn to cope with our baggage enough to be nice to one another in social situations. This includes not snapping at Spouse and Child when they talk at you at the same time. ;)


2. My blood test results came back. They were all right, but not what I was hoping for. I wanted to see my total serum cholesterol drop 45 points. It didn't. It did, however, drop 20 points. I need to remember that. It's an accomplishment, and I shouldn't beat myself up over it not being a HUGE accomplishment.

So after a brief period of whining, punctuated by the consumption of a few Easter candies, I decided I need to see this as not the end of the four months of lifestyle changes, but rather as the beginning of the next four months. I lost sixteen lbs. over the last four months and am capable of walking much greater distances without my feet blistering up.


3. If there are two slices of leftover pizza in the house, and you've already eaten one of them, the surest way NOT to eat the other is to get the hell out and take a long walk and reward self with black coffee. :) I call this the Perky Theorem of Pizza (Non-)Consumption.


4. Generation Rescue is jerks. Thanks to awesome Science-Based Medicine and to various awesome Sciencebloggers for handling the debunking. Gives me the will to live. And the energy. From not having to wade through all the GR garbage myself.

DESSERT OF GODLESSNESS!!!

So, according to my internet pal The Advice Goddess, the Pope gave a Good Friday speech that evokes some pretty powerful imagery! BEWARE the rise of Secularism, mah peeps, 'cause you may get stranded in the... DESERT OF GODLESSNESS!!! Oooooh, just like the Israelites in teh bible but 'cept without the manna!!! Or was it matzoh? 'Cause I'd just as soon eat sand. (HAhaha, ok, just kidding. Like many non-Jews, I ADORE matzoh with a passion and have been known to eat a whole box of the crackers myself, denying it to wailing infants beneath my feet like the baby-eating atheists of myth and legend... er, or something like that.)

What the Pope really means, of course, is that we should all BEWARE the RATIONAL THINKING, lest the DESERT OF GODLESSNESS subsume the ENTIRE WORLD, just like Kurt Vonnegut's ice-nine!!! Only DESERT!!!! ZOMG, HEAD FOR THE HILLS AND SAY TEH HAIL MARYS!!!!!!!! :D :D :D

Advice Goddess ALSO imagines something lovely... a DESSERT of godlessness! Now THERE'S a concept I can support!!!!

So, let's hear it! Your idea for the perfect DESSERT! OF! GODLESSNESS! Even if you're not an atheist yourself-- let your imagination run wild! After all, I've never been a Christian, but that didn't stop me from crafting an ELABORATE EASTER CARD, lovingly hand-drawn in Number Two Pencil with ALL THE BUNNIES I COULD CRAM INTO SIX SQUARE INCHES to give to my utter best friend in all the world, my bosom-sister... whom my mom informed me does not celebrate Easter. The stunned horror, the OUTRAGE, of my six-year-old self CANNOT be overstated. "But it's the CHOCOLATE BUNNY holiday!!! WHAT KIND OF SICK FREAKS DENY THEIR CHILD CHOCOLATE BUNNIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIES??????"

I very nearly started the Chocolate Bunnies For Jews movement. If only I'd had access to a printing press.

CLEARLY, my perfect Dessert Of Godlessness would involve frolicking chocolate animals. LOTS of them, all living together in peace and harmony and CELEBRATING the CHOCOLATEY GOODNESS of their chocolatey DNA!!! On a... SHEET of GREEN ICING, all piped up to look like grass. OOOH OOOH, and the frolicking chocolate animals would be arranged in clades according to phylogenetics!!! YEAH! And the lines representing the phylogenies would be, um, LICORICE laces! And all the cute little frolicking chocolate animals would include the transitional chocolate forms!!! NO, WAIT! That sheet of green icing is green icing over a SHEET CAKE, a LAYER CAKE with each layer being a geologic stratum, and baked into each layer are the CHOCOLATE FOSSILS of a given geologic era!!!!!!!!!!!! OH MY GOD I HAVE TO MAKE THIS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So, a pair of genes walk into a bar...

(Small digression before I even start the post, which has GOT to be a new record-- I have 6 blog followers??? When did THAT happen??? :D Yay, thank you guys for your support! It makes me all the more motivated to keep blogging during a difficult time.)

So, my son, King Of Echolalia, brought home the phrase, "'Cause that's how God made you" from school the other day.

I was a mite concerned. Wonderful Husband and I want to raise our Wonderful Son to think critically, not to mindlessly accept pat, cop-out platitudes as explanations of how and why things are. Also, WS is SO good at imitating voices that I knew exactly which of his class's educational assistants said it. I know her to be a very religiously-minded woman, but I also esteem her as a responsible educator, head and shoulders above SO MANY educational assistants that I have encountered, with classroom sensibilities on a par with trained teachers. This made me wonder what had prompted such a, well, a cop-out response, and one that evoked religion in a public school, no less!

There was some questioning, in the indirect, inductive manner often necessary to prompt ASD kids to remember and cough up the detail you're specifically asking about. I never got it out of him myself, but Wonderful Husband uncovered the root of the matter.

He was asking her WHY he is beige while all of his friends are brown.

I am inescapably reminded of the Steve Martin movie "The Jerk," in which he cries, "YOU MEAN I'M GONNA STAY THIS COLOR???"

He is one of, seriously, five caucasian kids in his large elementary school. He wants to look like Frederick Douglass when he grows up. I hope he isn't getting a complex about his superficial differences. (He should save it for a complex about his GEEKERY, like the rest of us!!!!! KIDDING, kidding.)

Knowing the question really made me understand both the EA's response, and the fact he asked HER, not me. Because if he had asked me, I would have obsessive-compulsively babbled about phenotypes and molecular genetics. The kid is five. He has NO respect or care for things too small for him to see.

So! Since CLEARLY I can't rely on my own lecturing capabilities, and would REALLY super-rather dislodge the "'cause that's how God made you" explanation from his developing mind, can anyone suggest a resource or way of explaining stuff like skin color and eye color and hair color that DOESN'T compel him to reply mid-way with, "Are you done talking yet, Mommy?" :D

A tune for the time

The name of the song is "God's Gallipoli" by Poi Dog Pondering, and it's been spooling through my head for the past two weeks or more. It's not a happy song; it captures the bittersweetness of life and the all-too-often sucky end of life-- so it pretty much is right on the point of what I've been thinking and feeling since my father's hospitalization. Worse yet, the tune is spectacularly catchy, the lyrics poetry, and the beat is exactly, EXACTLY the pace of my exercise-walk. Thus I cannot get the flippin' song out of my head. So I'm going to inflict it on everyone who reads this in hopes of throwing my callous, officious, heartless exterior into sharp relief.... er, or something. :) On the bright side, I measured my waist at 27 inches yesterday, which I thought I'd never see again. At least I'm channeling all this obsession over death into, um. Leaving a beautiful corpse?

Ok, now I'm just being silly. ;) I've actually been working on getting my cholesterol down into the "Gee, maybe we won't have to medicate you after all" level, as some of you may recall. My followup blood test is in a week, so I will be sure to report! Now that I've been confronted with how strongly stroke runs in my family, I've been triply motivated to eat right and exercise daily, in hopes of selecting a death strategy of (C) Drop dead on the track at age 90 of a heart attack during a 30 mile run.

Yeah, I'm definitely going through the "anger" phase of grief. But there is hope on the horizon for my twos of poor beleaguered readers left! My son's birthday is coming up at the end of the month, and I have planned a cake that will either be AN AWESOME WORK OF ART or ANOTHER CRAP-TACULAR WRECK!!! Hooray!!!! I can't WAIT to see which it will be, myself! :D


"God's Gallipoli" by Poi Dog Pondering

Sloping head bent to the wind as always.
Slugging it out 'til the end, the boxer
going over the top, in God's Gallipoli.

Set me up Joe, body lean but mind obese,
maple angel leaves once shifted in the trees
when light was a truly wondrous thing.
But now they crackle under my feet
like the old life's longings
of sailors once robust
in buttons and coats now just mud and bone
and teeth beneath me.

Grist for star dust, the bone crushing rock of ages.
Cancer took the spring from my lover and gave us forever Autumn.
No thoughtless smoke now, no blind drink.
No idle lunches dreaming of a whole 'nother world of things.
It's down to brass tacks and saline sacks,
Vincristine injections and early detections.

Take me in one swoop God don't let me dwindle.
I watched the light leave my mother's bed-sick eyes.
She's so scared-- once gone, I kissed her cheek,
and the cold of her skin held on my lips.
It's hard to think, "So this is how it ends?"
stretched out on a bed sheet,
sorting through a wreckage of regrets.

Back in the ring now,
with eye held just high enough to see the prize.
Head bend forward at hip into wind as always.

Slugging it out 'til the end, the boxer.
Going over the top, in God's Gallipoli.

You know the thing that haunts me the most
are all those crystalline moments,
where adrenalin and light filled my belly and head.

And the moon winked as if to say yes.
And I ran in the cold night and sweated and it felt good.
And I could hit the nail on the head
and drive that fucker home.

Going over the top, in God's Gallipoli...