The Comps: A Narrative Through Food

I decided the week before our exams started that I wouldn't upload any photos from my camera. "It's the comps!" I thought, "No fun of any kind!"

That turned out only to be partly true. For the first two weeks, I worked about 7-8 hours a day, every day, and I wrote a LOT in that time. But by the end of the second week, I was physically spent and really stressed. My body figured out a new way to manifest that anxiety in my skin:






Nope, not a sunburn.











That picture doesn't really convey how red my skin was (and that's good, it's less gross). Basically, it looked like I had a sunburn on my chest (just above my tank top) and neck, but I actually had some kind of rash. You can also sort of see the irritated skin around the corners of my mouth. A doctor at UWO gave me some stuff to put on it, and after I kind of hit a bottom with my stress after week 2, it went away. That seemed like a big warning sign to me that my 8-hour a day method was not working out.

So I took some time away from the exams each day, I was more liberal with break time, and I still finished with a couple of days to spare for final tweaking and editing. I guess I won't really know how it went until I know if I've passed, but I know for sure that I couldn't have finished them at all if I'd continued that way for all 4 weeks.

Today I uploaded the photos I took on my point-and-shoot camera during the comps, and of course, they are mostly food pics. So here's a very random account of some stuff that happened during the comps and just afterward.

Our last pre-comps meal: cajun catfish, hot crash potatoes, and whisky glazed carrots (based on this recipe, but with WAY less butter).















At one point during the exam our friend Dana had a party, so I made some vegan chocolate cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, and iced them with very non-vegan peanut butter cream cheese frosting that was left over from the Easter cake we made.

















It was nice focus on something other than the exams and get out my cake deco kit. I was particularly proud of how the piping turned out on these! Also, I've had some hits and some misses with this cupcake book, but the basic chocolate cupcake recipe seemed pretty solid. I'll probably make these again.























Here they are perched on top one of my many piles of books for the comps. I ended up checking out probably 30 or so books and I initially stacked them in little piles in the living room.





Note the laundry, clean but not folded. That was the way of things during the comps.













Unrelated to the comps, John and I decided to get a small table to put some potted herbs on, and didn't find one we liked. Instead, we bought this new-to-us bookcase and figured it could do the job.


















The herbs looked nice on it, and I realized that I could put my books for the comps on it. Win win! But that window doesn't give the herbs enough light, so they went to live in the kitchen/balcony. Still, the new bookcase is probably our favorite piece of furniture.

John and I planned all our meals for the comps in advance, including this little number: grilled cheese on bread from the farmer's market, and roasted tomato and garlic soup. Nothing like comfort food when you have to write 60 pages in 4 weeks.


















Tuesday we had a brunch with a few friends to celebrate the end of the exams. It involved mojitos in some glasses I bought at Goodwill (score!).

















I've also been experimenting with variations in iced tea, including this one with either mint or basil, plus frozen raspberries. I usually add 3/4 tsp of simple syrup. It's easily spiked with whatever alcohol you prefer!
























So there you have it...a super random post about what we've been eating and doing for the past few weeks. I may write more about the comps themselves another time, but it's still hard to turn my brain off after thinking so intensely for 4 weeks. John and I have a lot of fun stuff coming up in the rest of June and later on in the summer that I will be sure to write about here. John and also joined an ultimate frisbee league, and I have some pictures to show off that I took with our fancy new camera (thanks, John's research grant!). Hope you're enjoying the summer so far!

Easter Brunch for Dinner: Chocolate Peanut Butter Cake

A few weeks ago John and I had a small Easter potluck with some friends. He and I made two quiches (one of which you can find here - I LOVE this recipe), since pie crust comes in 2-packs, and I just don't bother to make my own. Other people brought mimosas, fruit salad, and a hash brown casserole (yum! I ate so much of it).






















And we also made dessert. This is Smitten Kitchen's Chocolate Peanut Butter Cake.





















Ugh. This cake. It's unbelievably good. Let me give you the run down: sour-cream-chocolate cake, with cream-cheese-peanut-butter frosting, layered between the cakes and the outside. Also, check out that fabulous frosting job John did. That's right - John iced this cake! And I think he's pretty good at it.

Still, the thing that takes this cake from a good idea to unbelievable is the peanut butter-chocolate glaze.





















Full disclosure: that's only half a cake! We ate the first half at the party, and I put the other half back in the fridge for leftovers. As much as I would have loved to just eat the entire thing myself, we knew we had to get rid of it. So John brought the cake to the other TAs he had to grade tests with, and we passed off the rest to other friends. It's so rich that after a pretty thin piece my stomach said, "that was amazing, but please stop." Still, I'm so glad we made it! It's heaven for someone who loves the peanut-butter-chocolate combination like me. It's a little time intensive, but so are most cakes like this. Definitely worth having for a party, and dangerous without one.

Melted Snowmen Cookies

This week as I was reading my food blogs I came across a post about using marshmallows to make melted snowman cookies. It didn't really look too difficult and after I watched about 10 youtube videos about piping with royal icing, I thought it would be fun to give it a try.

For various reasons, however, I got kind of lazy. Instead of making royal icing in a few colors I just bought some cookie decorating supplies. What could go wrong?! This is a moment of foreshadowing: we learned that gel icing tubes are probably not right for this kind of detail. Still, the regular white icing we used worked fairly well and I'm pretty sure all of it is vegan. So if you made some vegan sugar cookies, this would translate fairly easily (making royal icing vegan surely involves lots of chemicals, but apparently no animal parts).




The set up.











Part of the point was to use up a very old package of Betty Crocker sugar cookie mix, and in order to make them big enough, I was only able to get 5 cookies out of it (the fifth didn't survive the transition from cookie sheet to cooling rack). Still (more foreshadowing), the gel icing doesn't look super appetizing, so it's not like these are actually going to get eaten, and I think our attention spans held out just long enough to do all 4.









Gillian came over to watch a movie and decorate with us.







That's my little snowman, just after I gave him eyes. "Purple" turned out to be a sort of light blue, and it pretty much made our snowmen look possessed. The gel didn't really hold its shape very well, so their stick arms kind of bloated up.
















Here's Gillian's, before his face was finished. Check out those creepy "purple" eyes!
















John decorated the fourth cookie. As he says, in fairness, he had the most practice. But this fourth cookie is the only one that I think looks endearing, as intended.
















Look how much mine looks like a scary clown. "Merry Christmas, boys and girls! AHAHAHAHA!!!!!"
















John's first snowman is even scarier. Note how his eyes are oozing down his face, and he's apparently having a nose bleed.















John's second snowman just looks pleasant in comparison to our demonic ones.






















Love the ear muffs. Here's the whole gang:
















After the gel sort of spread we decided that Gillian's (far left) looks as though his throat was slit, with blood dripping down. I think with royal icing and finer tip they would have turned out fine, and the whole thing was pretty fun! I guess I have a certain habit of making Christmas desserts look evil - recall last year's gingerbread robot monsters.


Since I didn't really bake any of this from scratch, here are some links, including a very clear tutorial on how to make these snowmen:

Post with pictures and instructions
Snowman Cookie Tutorial

Evergreen Cupcakes

John invited me to come to his final class women's studies class so that I could watch his presentation. I've joined him and his classmates after the class at the Grad Club a couple of times, and we went with them to the Santa Clause Parade, so I was looking forward to seeing them. I decided to make some cupcakes to bring to the class.



















Red velvet cupcakes seemed Christmasy (and it's my favorite kind of cake). But we're out of red food coloring, and my car was trapped in an ice cave, so I had to use what I had. And what I had was green.


















Last year when I was in a similar situation, I used blue dye and called them Blue Jean Cupcakes (in keeping with the fabric theme). This year, I wasn't sure what to call them...Elf Knicker cupcakes? Green Velvet (I'm guessing that's what elf pants are made of)? It looked more like a mossy green than anything, so I called them Evergreen Cupcakes, since that sounds more appetizing than "moss cakes."

The cancellation for Wednesday's class came in while I was making the icing for these cakes. I decided to finish the job and just bring them to a Christmas dinner party we went to for John's anthropology class on Thursday.










Well, yeah, I ate one. To make sure they aren't poison ivy! Ha! Get it? Poison ivy? They're gre- oh, nevermind.








The recipe is the same one from the Martha Stewart Cupcakes book I've linked to before. Here it is again. They're delicious!

Cake Decorating

**Note:** this post is pretty much about cake decorating. I wrote it partly to share with you, and partly for myself, to have a record of a cake that went right. If you have no interest in cake decorating, you may want to come back later.


This week my church choir had a party and we were instructed to bring either dessert or a salad.
While I feel like I've learned to love salad in a new way since leaning vegetarian, I can't pass up the chance to make dessert - especially when it's going to leave my house. I cut up the left overs and put them on other people's plates so we didn't take any home.


Exhibit A.
This is a "pink" velvet cake, pink because I was out of red food coloring. The recipe (found here)was from the Martha Stewart Cupcakes book. I've used it to make two 9" round cakes in the past, which is why I did that again. I'm not sure that every recipe works this way, but I trust this one as cupcakes or cakes.
When we cut into it, the color was so dark that it looked red anyways, and people asked me if it was strawberry. Like cornbread, red velvet cake seems like one of those things some Canadians know all about while others have never heard of it. The reviews were positive, and I think I spread the good news of red velvet cake to a few people.



















I wanted to share a couple of things I've learned about cake decorating over the past year. My knowledge is by no means extensive, but I've got a few tips for people who can't bake like Brown Eyed Baker but still want to make a nice looking cake.

Returning to Exhibit A, the icing still has a few uneven spots in it, and you can kind of see the lines from where I moved the spatula around. That said, it's pretty smooth, and those lines are a lot less noticeable to the naked eye. To make the cake smooth, I used these:



















#1. An off-set spatula. This guy is good for smoothing out smaller areas and for the sides of this two-layer cake, since it's taller than the cake itself. I especially find this one helpful when I'm working on the edges along the top of the cake.












Note: clean enough to see my camera in its reflection.
















#2. A bigger icing spatula. I've looked on the internet for its proper name, but "icing spatula" is what I've come up with so far. This guy is good for getting a massive amount of icing on the cake at once and for making big passes over the top of it, with as few lines as possible.


Speaking of icing, I have learned a couple of things that are helpful here.

First, make sure the cake has cooled completely. Like, really cooled. Once in the fall I was pressed for time and the whole was ruined because I tried to start icing it too soon. To expedite that process, stick the layers in the fridge. In general, another rule I've learned is that the fridge is your friend.

The next idea is from smittenkitchen.com. She recommends putting on a "crumb" layer of icing first. This isn't a neat looking layer, just a thin amount of icing to keep all the crumbs in place. Once that layer is on, put the whole thing back in the fridge for 10 or 15 minutes. Then, when you take it out, it's much easier to spread the room-temperature icing over it and make the whole thing smoother.


The last stage of decorating this behemoth was the piping. I'm not exactly a piping whiz or anything (see also, here), but it's something I've learned to do over time from watching other people.* My approach to this cake was "keep it simple," since once piping seems to be going well, I tend to go over board and pipe myself crazy.
Part of the purpose of the piping here was to clean up the edges of the cake and the rim on the bottom. I just added a wavy shape to the bottom and little star shapes to the top, both with the same tip.
























I used this piping bag (above) from the Martha Stewart kit I have. You can buy this type of thing at most craft stores, Bulk Barn, or do it the Alton Brown way and just cut a hole in a ziplock bag (though the environment won't thank you). My only tip here is to roll down the sides of the bag so that you can put the icing in as close to the tip as possible. Now that I know to do that it seems extremely obvious, but it took me a long time to get here. The story of my life.






















I chose this tip because of the similar shape it had to one in the Martha Stewart Cupcake book. In the back of the book she included this helpful page:





















The tips don't match exactly to those in the kit, but it's close enough to be helpful.

And so, the finished product, Exhibit B.




















The rings of piping are a little inconsistent, but it's way better than my previous two attempts.



















As you can see, I had enough time on my hands this week to bake a fairly large, elaborate cake, and then write a long blog post about it. Our summer reading club starts this week, and my weird class scheduling situation for the fall mandates that I get a lot of reading done this summer. So who knows if there will be more fancy cakes. That's kind of the great thing about summer, though - you can study for three or four hours and still have a lot of the day left to bake cakes or go to the beach, instead of doing more homework or grading papers.




*TV.