Let Them Make Cake

Here's one of my guilty pleasures: watching Is It Cake?, a competition for hyper realistic cake artists who try to fool the judges with their art. It's a guilty pleasure because while I love to bake I can't eat cake because of all the sugar that's usually involved. All three seasons are presently available on Netflix, but I think season three is my favorite.

It's a fun show, and the usual cut-throat nastiness of competition productions is completely missing. I don't know if it's just the nature of cake artists, but the contestants are all supportive of each other and cheer each other on. Trying to guess what is cake and what isn't is insanely hard, too. I'm right only about half of the time. The combinations of cake, filling and icing are also amazing. In this season one of the contestants made a strawberry and fennel cake -- I would never have put those two flavors together, but everyone seemed to love it.

What I like most about the show is the inclusiveness; there are all shapes, sizes and colors of contestants, each with their own backstory. This season's cast included a Sikh young man from Canada and a Venezuelan native who immigrated to the US, and both were enormously talented and wonderful guys. Also, the winner is special to me for reasons I won't say because it will spoil the grand finale, but I was super happy about them winning. Anyway, if you want to watch something fun, try an episode.

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Fell Off the Wagon

I did cut up that plastic dollar tote to make into something stronger, but got caught up with work and set it aside. Then last night some hand-dyed silk and pretty threads called my name, and, well . . . Felt SO good to do some handwork, except my neck began hurting about an hour into it. I tried changing the way I sit and work, but it's pretty obvious that the doc is right.

Old Loves & Such

My guy kindly bought me my favorite Chinese take out the other night, and my fortune cookie offered up an interesting story starter: This sounds sweet, right? Only the first thing I thought of was an old love coming back from the dead . . . . must be October. In other lovely news, my favorite hand-dyed thread artist, Lorraine from Colour Complements , is moving her business from Etsy to her own web site. Many of my favorite sellers on Etsy are leaving due to the whole "free shipping" coercion debacle, which has also soured me on the site. To show support I did a little shopping at Lorraine's web site and got in these: I love her threads and trims; you simply can't buy anything like them anywhere. Her work makes my specialty thread box look like a treasure chest: At night I'm spending just as hour working on quilting the scrap project runner, and I'm making slow progress: I'll keep quilting the runner while I try to decide on a design for t...

T-minus Day

This was our little Thanksgiving dinner last year, when it was just the three of us. Time keeps whittling down my favorite holiday; this year it will be just me and my guy, and we likely won't even have a turkey.* That will be a first in 35 years. I feel about Thanksgiving the way other people do about Christmas, and while it's a lot of work it's my favorite holiday. Of all the Thanksgivings I've had in the past sixty years, only three were truly terrible: one when I was a kid that I don't talk about (#1 most miserable); the time I roasted two turkeys together and hosted fifteen people whom I cooked for and served with zero help (the largest and #2 most miserable); and the one I spent in basic training (the #3 most miserable.) I have no pictures of any of those, thank heavens. In addition to doing all the cooking I'm the one who takes all the pictures, washes all the dishes and puts away all the leftovers. I suppose no one else cares because to them it...

Valerean

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