Too Much Dessert

The hell there ain’t.

I currently have portions of three different cakes plus half a batch of those oat things I like so much in my dessert arsenal. I can’t keep up. Production exceeds demand.

Traditionally, were this capitalism, that would lead me to seek new markets. But I am mostly the only market for my baked goods. Joe samples them sometimes, but Julian eschews most of them because of a dairy allergy.

Pretty much everything I make has milk in it.

So I have no idea what the hell I am going to bake later tonight… but it sure as hell won’t be a dessert. I am growing tired of my usual biscuit recipes, so I will likely seek another, simpler one. Or something else of the petit pain variety. Muffins of a non-dessert kind, perhaps, or a simple bread.

Things really took a turn for the crazy last night. I was halfway through putting together my fave chocolate cake recipe when I suddenly realized this recipe is for two full eight inch cakes. It was far too late to correct it, so I had to just go with it, and I ended up with two choco-mint cakes of roughly equal size.

Hence my having three cakes. One is that molasses one I talked about yesterday, and the other two are choco-mint. One choco-mint has a vanilla glaze on it, and the other has some leftover chocolate icing from the last time I made it.

I am pretty sure the remnants of the molasses cake will not get eaten. It has two other, much tastier cakes to compete with, and by the time I am done of them, it will probably have dried out beyond edibility.

Which brings me to another problem : I have no way to preserve an iced cake. With a plain cake, you can always just cut it into squares and store them in a jar. But if you tried that with an iced cake, all you would get is a huge mess.

So I suppose I need one of those cute little pedestal things with the plastic lid over it. I don’t know what they are called. But I have seen them in bakeries and in restaurants where they like to show you the yummy cake you can order a slice of.

Yes, I totally ended a sentence with a preposition there. It’s something you’ll just have to get used to.

What kills a city?

I watched a documentary called Forgotten Planet : Abandoned America today.

It was about the various abandoned places all over America. There’s tons of them, which has always amazed me. The entire idea that all that makes a town or city could be just… sitting there, unused, freaks me out. It seems so harshly wasteful. I always imagine that the right people could exploit this obvious resource and turn it back into a town again.

This is obviously not true. If it was, I am sure capitalism would have figured it out by now. But it is how I make peace with the whole idea in my mind.

As seems to always happen when I watch docs lately, I found this one both interesting and aggravating. It was aggravating because, for one, the narrator delivered all his lines like he was recording the voiceover for the trailer for a horror movie, and come on dude. It’s abandoned communities. They are creepy, but they are not actually frightening.

So that was grating.

The other annoying thing, and this is less the doc’s problem than my advancing age making me cranky and impatient and set in my ways, was they kept talking over and over again about “These are the streets where children once played… ” and “during its heyday, this factory produced twenty cars a day” and I am like… “We get it! There was people, now there’s not. Get to WHY already! What the hell killed this places?”

The most mind-bogglingly boneheaded decision, though, was to do Detroit second last. They actually had a story about some abandoned boom town (of which there are hundreds) after it.

You can’t make something FOLLOW the story of the death of what was once the fourth biggest city in the USA. (Apparently, it was once known as “the Paris of the Midwest”, which makes me snicker every time. )

And they didn’t even refer to what the hell happened to Detroit once! The other segments all gave an explanation for what killed the town… mines ran out of ore, gold booms ended, everything got contaminated, and so on.

But as for the biggest murder mystery in the world, the Case Of What Killed Detroit? Nothing. And I am dying to know.

So what else is new?

Not a lot, I guess. Not looking forward to the last episode of The Colbert Report this week. Final episodes always just about kill me emotionally. I always end up a sodden sack of ALL THE FEELS IN THE WORLD. My slightly hidden sentimental nature takes over and I am just a wreck by the end of it.

It has to be done, of course. Nothing good ever comes of refusing to see things through to the end. The end might be painful and emotional but it serves a function.

Watching a final episode is almost like watching the funeral of the show. (A little melodramatic, I know, but I was raised by television. ) Funerals are sad, but you need that ending ritual in order to process everything.

And the thing is, final episodes are always bittersweet. They are sad because it’s ending, but they also celebrate the show and remind you of all the good times you have had with it.

Also like a good funeral, come to think of it. Damn, no wonder I get so verklempt.

Anyhow, this too shall pass. I have been through this with enough beloved shows that I know the drill. I’ll get super emotional, I will be bummed out for a little while, then I’ll get over it.

And that’s how it’s supposed to work, right?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.