I was super productive today, but unfortunately I didn't write anything - instead, I was taking care of all the business/volunteer stuff that I'd neglected in my push to send my manuscript to my editor (and yesterday's talkfest, which ate into my work time). I finished the proposal for a workshop for a convention next year, and got some big name people to do it with me, so that was awesome. I spent the past five hours dealing with the last edits for the awards ceremony script and burning/ripping music to strip the DRM and make sure it would play for the show tech crew. I wrote a guest blog post that is going up on some site on Saturday. I looked at what I'm supposed to teach in class tomorrow and promptly decided to deal with it in the morning.
But the best two things were that I got a massage and baked a cake. The massage had slowly moved from luxury to necessity, since my neck is well and truly fucked, and it's been getting harder and harder to sit at my desk and work (or sit anywhere, really) since it hurts all the time. So I booked a 90-minute massage with someone I found on Yelp who happens to be a block and a half away from my apartment and also had great recommendations for her deep tissue work. And she was *awesome* - possibly the best massage I've ever had. And my neck didn't hurt for, like, two hours afterward, although I've promptly undone her efforts by spending the whole night at my desk. But hopefully this is a first step toward fixing it, and since I won't be sitting at my desk all next week while I'm at the conference, maybe everything will get better.
The second issue was the cake that I baked - it was a delicious disaster. I'm stressing over how to make gluten-free Olympic Rings Cakes (tm), and I thought I should do a trial run, so tonight I made the traditional blue ring - a blueberry cream cheese coffee cake (what Adit calls next level cake, since it's delish), although I left out the blue food coloring that I would use for the actual event. I substituted a gluten free vanilla cake mix that I bought at Whole Foods for the usual vanilla cake mix I would have used instead, but kept everything else the same. However, the baking times stymied me - there seemed to be no correlation at all between the baking times on the GF mix and the regular mix, even though theoretically there should have been some similar ratios for different types of pans, etc. And I was deathly afraid of overbaking it, since a gluten free cake could turn into something truly dry and dire if it's overbaked.
So I baked it for what I thought was a good approximation, checked it with a toothpick (apparently in the wrong part of the cake, as I discovered to my horror moments later), and thought it was done. I took it out, flipped it onto a wire cooling rack with a cookie sheet underneath it, and poured the glaze on top (a simple, not too glaze-y mix of blueberry juice and powdered sugar). However, the cake slowly seemed to be deflating - and upon further investigation, a bunch of uncooked cake batter was falling out of the middle of the ring and oozing through the cake rack. Damn. So I tipped the cake back into the pan (unevenly), scraped the cake ooze back into it, and baked it for another fifteen minutes. Despite that disaster, it actually tastes pretty good (although it's lopsided now) - so now that I have the cooking times down, I think the Gluten Free Olympic Rings Cakes will be a success! I will probably still make funfetti, though - I can't sacrifice funfetti, or I might as well die.
And now I must go to bed so that I can get up and go to the dirty east bay tomorrow -- goodnight!
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