Flotsam, perhaps some jetsam

License plates recently seen: Mass BIG, Mass SHEBA, Vermont RED HEN.

There are some cool photos of really small living things at this site. (stolen from a comment in tigerbright's journal... this was just too neat not to mention...)

A friend has decided to write a kid's book, has asked me to review it. I said ok, partly because I'm curious - I don't know what he's writing about, or the target age, or anything (fiction/non). I hope it's not horrible... I would hate to have to tell him that...

Scratch-and-sniff math books: I wonder what the Pythagorean Theorem would smell like? What about quadratic equations? Or would it just go with some of the application questions?
(Do they still have scratch-and-sniff books? I remember having a couple when I was little, and there were some wonderful smells I think I wore out!)
(I think this was inspired by the wonderful smell of ripe strawberries wafting through my office...)

...weasels...

(annoyance) If you were going to do something that would block off common areas of a living space for a couple of days, wouldn't you alert people in advance? Seems reasonable to me. Yet my neighbors decided to redo the front steps w/o telling anyone, just sending out an email after the fact, which I got after I came home to find the front steps blocked off. And why couldn't this have been mentioned, oh, last night as a possibility for today? (This was done by the same people who keep putting awful kitschy figurines in the back garden. I don't feel I can say anything, since they *are* doing the maintainence things I never do...)(/annoyance)

Taste experiment

Peanut butter on slices of preserved ginger is not as wonderful as I had hoped: the creaminess of the peanut butter seems to cut the spiciness of the ginger. Though I'd try flavoring something else with both peanut and ginger; I still think there's some potential...
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Vegan Chocolate Cake

I keep on finding myself making this cake for birthdays. It surprises me: I am not a dessert baker. Bread baker, yes, but baked goods, not much.

I was planning on making two tonight, one for the work birthday party tomorrow, and one for either potluck or Shabbat dinner. Unfortunately for me, I ran out of soy milk. At least there was enough for the one cake...

It's mostly a recipe from More Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin, in the essay titled "Three Chocolate Cakes". I modified the third cake, originally called Karen Edwards's Version of Buttermilk Cocoa Cake, to be vegan. (Btw, this is a wonderful book, along with her other book of food essays, so surprisingly named Home Cooking. She's a real person cooking, not a chef, and she writes wonderful stuff about food. Though I didn't care for her fiction at all.)

I like this recipe for a bunch of reasons: I'm lazy, so a one-bowl recipe is great (no melting chocolate, etc); it's actually pretty quick to mix together; it's chocolate, so almost everybody is happy with it (I have one friend allergic to chocolate. I pity him.); it's vegan, so pretty much everyone I know will eat it. (Add a name in chocolate chips across the top and it's a lovely personalized birthday cake, apparently...). And if it's underdone and really squidgy, at least no one's worried about salmonella (same thing with licking the spoon after, too).

( original recipe with my addenda here )