Portal Cake!

Today I made a Portal cake but failed at making jelly. This is a very sad day.

My brother finished his AP exams today, and as he is going to college next year, this is a graduation/belated birthday/end-of-high-school/congrats on [college name]! cake. I wanted to make a Team Fortress 2 cake but I couldn't figure out what object to make. Pyro? Sandvich (in other news, I got a Dalokohs bar yesterday!)? Natascha?

So, I stuck with Portal's black forest cake, even though none of us like fake cherry flavouring or maraschino cherries. My brother likes orange juice though, so there's orange juice in the cake and jelly. He also likes coconut, so the whole cake is covered in chocolate coconut ganache.

Unfortunately, he has not eaten the cake (and I don't think he will) because he had a bad day with bad news and dinner was ruined.

On the bright side, this means that the cake is now mine. Look at the lush back yard. It's been barely a week and the lawn needs mowing again.

The cake recipe is from here.

Changes I made:
1. I substituted 100 g flour with whole wheat flour, and 15 g with wheat germ. No one will notice!
2. Instead of 240 ml of milk, I used 120 ml milk + 120 ml orange (put in LAST--acidic, reacts with baking soda).
3. I used 1 tsp baking soda instead of 1/2 tsp.
4. Less sugar! ~250 g instead of 400 g.

I made three layers because I only have 17-cm diameter cake pans (6.69-inch, as opposed to 9-inch). Later, I realised that the Portal cake only has two layers!! Boo. I used all three layers in the end though. My cakes weren't flat, so I shaved off the cake tops until they were parallel to the bottom of the cake, meaning that each layer was thinner.

The first and only "black forest cake" I've ever had was on my 10th (or 11th?) birthday. We bought it from ParknShop, and although it was labelled as "black forest cake", it was actually a chocolate swiss roll with jelly and cream filling. I wanted to emulate that, so I made cherry orange jelly for the filling of the Portal cake. However, although the jelly set, it was extremely watery and had the consistency of thick jam. A lot of it oozed out so I ate it. I'll just pretend it's chocolate cake "infused" with cherry orange flavouring...

The chocolate ganache recipe is from here, although I changed it up a lot.

All you have to do is simmer the heavy cream and throw in all the chocolate, and then all the coconut.

100 ml heavy cream (but maybe fatty milk will suffice?)

150 g dark chocolate chips

150 g shredded coconut (sweetened...but you should use unsweetened)

You MUST wait for this to cool down as much as possible before you spread it on the cake or else it's just going to drip/fall off. As it was super sticky, I couldn't figure out how to ice the cake with it. It turns out that you can scoop some ganache onto the back of your giant spoon, and spread it UPWARDS onto the sides of the cake. After an hour or so, the ganache will be solid enough that when you poke it, only some oily substance gets onto your finger (as opposed to a glob of ganache).

This coconut ganache gives a great "Portal"-esque texture to the cake. Initially, I was going to make a zillion chocolate shavings to press onto the cake. I am EXTREMELY glad I didn't have to endure that tedious task.

The white icing is fat free yogurt + powdered sugar + coconut, in a ratio of 1:6:6. You only need a tiny bit. The red blobs, which are supposed to be maraschino cherries, are actually gum balls that we are never going to eat. We only had 7, so I cut one in half (to make two halves).

We don't have real candles so I used a peppermint stick thing taped to a paper flame that says "congratulations!" on it. I took a lot of pictures because this cake looks really pretty (and tastes good, according to me and my sister, who ate a lot of cake scraps and icing).

My Brain Isn't Fried!!

...But my food is.

Today I did absolutely no work. I had an extra half an hour of spare time because we finished comp sci recitation early, and I had an extra two hours of spare time because we got out of bio lab early. My Thursdays usually go from 9 to 2, then 4:30 to 7:30. Today, however, I had all this extra time! Perhaps I should've done some homework. I used it very unwisely, but very wisely all the same; I slept, I read The Hobbit , I went to Quiz Bowl, I watched Robocop ... and I fried apples!

At 10pm, my dorm house had Fry Night; there were fried Oreos, fried apples, fried pop-pastries, and one fried cherry pie [which I fried!]. I wanted to fry an orange, but apparently oranges are too watery...

So, here is a fried Oreo. Since the kitchen table area apparently lacks lights, I had to use flash, and with oily hands and people swarming around picking up food, picture-taking was a bit difficult. I'm quite unhappy about this image, but I can say that the oreo cream was literally dripping, and it looked like icing. The cookie was moist, and the batter was...well, fried batter. 90% oil.

The rejects...

...tasted great too!

These are a close up of the fried Oreos; they look so perfectly elliptical!

After a while, I decided to help out at the fryer, and this reminded me of Spongebob although I don't think I've actually seem him frying fries; he does have a deep-fryer though [I think?]. J, who had been at the fryer, had burned himself a bit when the oil splattered on him, which made me scared to use a wooden stick to flip the fried items over... but I did it anyway, so now I smell like fryer oil. It was fun, though!

I made a few batches of stuff, and this was the last batch; the huge thing in the middle is a cherry pie. A pre-packaged oblong cherry pie. I couldn't flip it over with a wooden skewer/stick, so I had to use a knife, and it was seriously difficult to manoeuvre it, with oily hands. I thought this was really fun, though, and a few specks of oil did fling onto my arms but they were really minuscule, so it's alright.

I really loved the fried apple; it reminds me of fried apple pie which I used to adore in HK, from McDevil. It was perhaps more enjoyable than the fried Oreo, to be honest. I accidentally ate some fried pop-pastry, because I thought it was just an abnormally small piece of fried Oreo. It tasted like melted pop-pastry, and I decided just to finish the rest of my chunk instead of wasting it, despite the fact there were PHO and HFCS in it. Oh, that reminds me; today I was eating a calzone and realised that there was small cubes of ham in it...because I suddenly tasted ham. I suppose that was a bit upsetting. Oh well...

Here is the fried cherry pie...cut into pieces because it was really huge. I didn't eat it, though. They also tried to fry chocolate but the batter kept slipping off or something.

I'm really glad I went and helped out. It was all delicious and fun, and I have to say I did have an amazing day!

[THR]ICE CREEEEAAAAAM!

In an attempt to make its environment more swanky, 1920 Commons has decided to refurnish and update its locations of foods. The fruit bar has moved to where the nacho bar used to be. The nacho bar and soup have moved to where the fruit bar used to be. They're both displayed rather prettily, and they look less cluttered.

The bread section has switched with the dessert section; now, the dessert has a black-table backdrop rather than a white-table blackdrop, which I suppose more elegant too.

They've also stocked Original flavoured ["Original" has been a flavour for a long time] soymilk rather than Vanilla [read: sugar] flavoured soymilk.

The ice-cream bar now has to share space with the waffle maker [which used to be next to the soup, because it, of course, was completely logical to put a waffle maker next to the chowder...], but I think this makes college kids squeal with happiness. In addition, there is now caramel syrup, marmalade [labelled "pineapple"], strawberry jam, chocolate syrup, SHREDDED COCONUT, and walnuts in syrup stacked in sticky containers near the ice cream.

This change took me quite by surprise.

I ate at Hill today and there was no noticeable change there...so why did Commons decide to ka-boom and polish everything?

It did seem to make people happy, especially the ice cream area.

That was Tuesday night. Yesterday night and tonight at dinner, Commons had moved stuff around again; the dessert, nacho, fruit and soup had all switched places. Commons also has delicious pre-packaged breadsticks from NJ, even though they claim to be "Real Italian" or something...

I think they're trying to test out where the best placement is for... themselves [i.e. best places to put food without having a huge mess to clean up from us students dropping stuff]? For us [so that we walk more and use more Calories]? It's true that changes make people more interested and more likely to lurk longer/more frequently. That's why companies always make new flavours of stuff, and restaurants always have different "FEATURED!" or "SPECIAL!!" items.

At the beginning of my first semester here [what?! Second semester already!?!?], I figured, hey, if I eat ice cream using a cone, I will "save" a bowl and a spoon. That means that energy will be saved, because dishwashers won't have to use energy to clean the bowl and spoon, and chemically cleaned water won't have to be pumped and used and re-cleaned.

However, my logic was pretty bad because the cone itself took a TON OF WATER AND ENERGY to make, not to mention package and transport! Think about it.

The cone: grow flour and other ingredients on a field from a seed to plant. Pick plants, process them, cook/shape them.

The packaging [in a giant cardboard box, with plastic wrapping, perhaps]: grow trees, cut trees, process trees, shape card, fold/glue/staple card.

Transportation from factory to dining hall: more energy.

Now, if we used a ceramic bowl and metal spoon [not disposable!], the energy to create the spoon and ceramic bowl would be invested evidently [synthesising, packaging, transporting], but once it is in the dining hall, every use only uses, say, 1L of water and a bit of dish soap. It is much less than the energy used to synthesise a wafer cone.

However, a paper/plastic [and, please NO, styrofoam] disposable container would be the same as using a wafer cone, although I think that the wafer cone would be more energy efficient because the wafer cone is digested, leaving no trace of garbage.

The digested cone is excreted as heat, water, and in poop, perhaps, and consumed by bacteria and someone cycled back into the soil or water.

So, I suppose the way to conserve the most energy in this circumstance would be

1. Consume less of everything and stop wasting stuff!

2. Use a reusable bowl and spoon.

3. If there are no reusable utensils, use the wafer cone.

4. As the last resort, use disposable utensils [oh how I dislike them!]

PIE FOR MY PI!!!

Monday Night [13th]: PIE!!!!

Study Break by my dorm house!

There were myriad pies of all shapes and colours and burns...

Oreo (3)

Coconut (2)

Chocolate (2)

Peach/mixed fruit (1 or 2)

Berry (2?)

Cherry (?)

Pumpkin (2)

Pecan (2)

Apple (?)

More? 18 total... x 12 slices each

And the coconut pie crust tasted like bacon. I am serious. I honestly doubt that they used lard, and the aluminium containers were new... so the crust really shouldn't've tasted like bacon.

Maybe, relative to the coconut and custard, the crust was bacon flavoured.

AND FUDGE! I didn't eat any cookies but the fudge... the chocolate fudge tasted a bit on the chocolate side rather than the soft, gooey side of fudge that I'm used to [I'm guessing there were no marshmallows in this batch]. The white fudge was literally gritty powdered sugar stacked into cubes. It was densely packed sweetness. Sort of like compact chunks of aspartame without the aftertaste [not that I would know, but they really don't give that much sweetener in those little packets, since each artificial sweetener is ~200? times sweeter than sucrose].

It's in a bucket.

BEST PIE EVER. I love chocolate pie. I actually also love key lime pie.

Actually, I like pie a lot more than I like cake, but cupcakes are much easier to draw.

I brought my coconut, cherry, chocolate, and fudge back to the computer lab because I had to study/write an 8-page final. The pies mixed together was... interesting. I liked the cherry chocolate combination.