I decided about a year ago that my way to fame and fortune was going to be becoming a YouTube celebrity. But what, really, do I have to offer? I thought about it and realized I have sharable cooking expertise: in particular, I know how to cook Tex Mex. Care to learn how to fry a taco shell? Watch this video.



Next in the series: rolling enchiladas, making taco meat and making country-style gravy.

Yesterday's sunshine faded away while I was naping, and with it my motivation to do anything. It is terrible that I'm so weather-dependent. So as the daylight hours trickled away, suddenly there became less and less things we COULD do and only the things we had to do: visit my friend Josh in central London.

As it turned out, we went for Dim Sum to China Harbor (or something along those lines, right where Gerrard Street hits Gerrard ... Avenue or something, across from China China) in keeping with our former Sunday tradition of afternoon dim sum. While the selection was good and the food was not bad, the fact of the matter is the bill came in at 36 pounds, and when I asked them to total it in front of me, it recalculated at 19. I'm not sure if it was just an addition error or the fact we had a little suitcase with us that made this happen, but I was pretty pissed off.

Then off we went to Josh's. To my surprise, he had two cardboard boxes PACKED full of canned Mexican food for me - more than we could carry home in one trip! So we loaded up our little suitcase with refried beans, red enchilada sauce, cans of green salsa - things I'd been out of for months. But the excitement of all of these goodies was too much, and Josh got a hankering for Mexican. Well, so be it. Off we went to Oaxaca, even though J and I weren't all that hungry. It worked out fine, though - the guy at the door recognized me from December, when I lost the button off of my big coat, and very kindly treated us to a round of drinks to compensate me for my loss. Yee hah! As usual, the food was delicious, even though I wasn't at all hungry (but somehow managed to fit in a taco and lots of guacamole anyway). Now we are stocked with the goods and I'm ready for a taco party again! All I need are some corn tortillas ...

My butcher ran out of lamb chops, so tonight I'm bringing home lamb steaks. How should I cook them?

(PS: also bringing home fresh cherry "toemahtoes," which got the butcher a little song from me, and some yummy looking pasta that was 60P a bag. Plan was lamb, salad, and spinach risotto, but I'm flexible ...)

So it turns out I really do still know how to bake a cake. I'd consider it a bit of a miracle, all things considered - by which I mean the fact that it was broiled for part of its life, that the butter separated from the rest of the ingredients, that one of the layers was cooked in a frying pan.

Broiled cake It tasted really good, too, nice and moist. Maybe the coconut makes it like that. The icing was so indulgent, butter blended with cream cheese AND some cream added into the whole mixture. If you look below the cut, you can see me icing it before I cut the final inch out of the bottom layer - I figured it would be better to frost the raw edge of the cake than have it have the big uneven lump coming out of the bottom.

(Click the cut link to see a picture of me frosting the cake. Doesn't it look better in the other picture?)

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I was also frustrated by the fact that somehow my cake carrier was left behind in the move. Where it is shadowdaddy has no idea. It's a fantastic piece of deco aluminery, layered shiny silver sides with a curved black top, sitting perfectly on the edged circular bottom (where the cake would rest) and of course a HANDLE on top of it al to make it easy to tote yer cake to a picnic or Quarterly Feed or what have you. We searched the apartment high and low and it was nowhere to be found. While there are still two boxes of Mysterious Stuff in which it might be hiding, my gut instinct is that it's probably hiding in the basement at my brother/sister-in-laws house, to which I say Foo, because I've had that thing for about 15 years and I think this is the first time I actually needed it to carry a cake to an away event rather than just cover it and keep it from collecting dust!

At any rate, I am certainly good at improv, and one pie pan, three Tupperware shot glasses, one large swatch of aluminum foil, and a glass pie plate later, and the cake was ready to rock, or at least to go to wechsler's birthday party. spikeylady and ciphergoth were very kind to fill in as hosts during this rain-filled day, and we had scores (or sixes, at least) of other guests: bathtubgin; the entire booklectic contingent, including the very small and fun one and asrana for a total of five; werenerd and some_fox with their houseguests, one of which was weegoddess, for a total of about 6 (they moved fast, I'm not 100% sure how many people came with them, though there was an [Bad username: aster13);], whom I very much missed last night; and a late arriving babysimon, who missed the singing of the happy birthday but most assuredly got some cake.

Wow, it's 60 outside and raining sideways. Brr! I've actualy fished out some sweats and an Expedia baseball jersey. I'm cold!

The cake was a big hit; 3/4 of it was gone. I covered it back up as best as I could, yet somehow with not as much success as the first time, as all the angles were off and the pie plate seemed to be sliding sideways. wechsler then turned to me and said, "It appears that your cake will not be foiled a second time." Oy. Clearly the boy is suffering the ill effects of SOMETHING. And he liked the book of Goon Show (a Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers radio show) scripts I bought him; I can hear him in the back room reading it and giggling as I type. We headed back to our place at around 4:30 or so, as nearly everyone seemed to be struggling heavily with last night's indulgences and naps were called for all around.

Time for a Pimms or something for me, and finally for some sitting down and relaxing, the first time all weekend when I can really relax and do nothing for a while. I love that the sun will be shining for another three hours, even though it makes for difficult DVD watching. Perhaps a round of Boggle is called for.

Okay, so I'm trying to bake a cake, right? And ... well, I've got some serious challenges to deal with here. Not the recipe, oh no. I made this Italian cream cake when I was in seventh grade and it was great. Delicious, really. A great cake. I know I've got a winning recipe.

What I've not got, however, is the tools to do it correctly. First, NO cake pans. That's right, none. As a blue-ribbon winning pastry cook (admittedly against other Girl Scouts and teenaged participants in the Johnson County Fair), I cleaned up in many categories. But when I moved here I decided I'd get rid of the mangy kit I had and get new ones.

However, trying to do this 30 minutes before every shop on the high street closes is a bad plan. Woolworths had no circular pans, Robert Dyas only had two in the size I needed, and the Shop N Save was cash only (and I had none). Crap! I needed three! Okay, whatever, a two layer cake, I can do it.

Once home, as I bravely soldiered through creaming a cup of butter/shortening and the sugar together with a fork, I realized I was missing another crucial element: my mixer. Goddamnit. Of course I don't have it, it was electric and I gave it away with the rest of my soon to be non-functional appliances. Shit, shit, shit. I added the eggs in, then the milk, then realized ... the butter had totally fragmented in the bowl and wasn't sticking to anything any more. Man. To be honest, it already looked like a baking disaster in the works, and that was before I poured it into the two cake pans and a (wait for it) frying pan that was about the right size.

Shortly after they made it into the oven, I realized I'd forgotten the most critical element of my cooking repertoire; my brain. What went wrong? I'm not used to using this oven, and I set it on broil. I figured it out when I smelled the cakes burning about 5 minutes after I put them in. Well, hey, at least the one in the freaking sauce pan, which I put in the weird extra oven this thing has, was looking alright.

Anyway. Hopes are low, and it'll likely be making its way into the garbage some time around midnight tonight, and there's no time to bake another. Oh well, at least I didn't go try to buy one at the Maison Blanc up the street; 5 people were hit by its marquee and put in the hospital this afternoon. Me, I was only frustrated and proven USELESS and a bad cook.