Adventures in Austin - Part 1

Say it with me, yayyy for middle-of-the-term trips!

Thanks to a symposium, I now find myself living it up in Austin courtesy the beloved brother. Lacking the presence of a sympathetic audience or the ability to constantly send live action updates, I feel I must commit all my brand-new experiences to some form of posterity - even one that nobody will read.

• Have you ever noticed how the bread-coating on a breaded beef sandwich combines with the citrus bits inside and makes it taste a little like a lemon tart?

•  On a storage shed, what might be the best sign ever (with the exception of the falling cow and maybe this.): "FalconBox. It's a box...you put things in it!"

• Over the course of several valiant attempts to achieve facestuffing with chopsticks, I give fervent thanks for the five-second rule and my hair now smells of fish sauce.

•  Somehow, knowing that the green jalapeno-flavoured powder on your tortilla chips was achieved by mixing blue and yellow together makes it a little bit grosser.

• Was the architect who designed Frosty Bankums (nothing gets hurt by some cutification) intending for it to look like an owl (or an elephant)?

• After lunch at 4 and a delicious vanilla latte, can I still do justice to a Cajun dinner? Yes, I can!

Green Tea Cake with buttercream and fondant roses

Green Tea Cake with buttercream and fondant roses, originally uploaded by azara.s.

So, being the goofball I am, I missed one of my best friends' birthdays. To make it up to her, I'm planning a small party - the two of us, some food, some tea and a lot of catching up.

This is especially fun because both my equipment and supplies are limited...luckily, the all-purpose store on campus in this tiny town has a decent variety of ingredients.

Their latest stock included fish sauce and flat rice noodles, along with some tiny frozen prawns. I decided to take advantage of that, and the menu for tomorrow includes Pad Thai, and Green Tea Butter Cake with buttercream icing and fondant flowers.

I'm especially excited since this is my first time using fondant. It's this amazing marshmallow fondant recipe that I can't bring myself to taste out of fear of sugar shock, but which is ridiculously easy to make. The fondant roses got better with practice, and they're nothing that well-greased fingers and work surfaces can't handle.

Lacking cake decorating ingredients like luster powder or flower nails, everything got done pretty much by hand - and the trusty hand blender.

Find the dry fondant recipe at eHow (I cut it down to 1/8th and still had lots left over), as well as the green tea cake recipe; and the buttercream icing is from Wilton's classic recipes (I replaced the vanilla essence with green tea paste).

Black Flowers

Yo La  Tengo earworm day today. Black Flowers...lovely lovely lovely. Makes me want to find a piano and pretend I can play.

Black Flowers, from "I am not afraid of you, and I will beat your ass"



I'm singing la la la la la...

Home

A long lazy Saturday draws to a close. Just realised that 2010's apparently a big deal - new decade and all. I figured it would only be a big thing for the planning commissions.

Reached the halfway mark on my holiday. Sniff. Wound the day down with the bro's cooking, leftovers for dinner, sampling the effect of Cointreau on Christmas cake (and off it) and quality time with dad and his music collection, especially Winehouse and "Valerie".

Going to sleep now, amid an abundance of Christmassy love.

Home's the best.
 

Coldplay in my head

So you lost your trust,
And you never should have, you never should have,
But don't break your back,
If you ever see this,
Don't answer that.

In a bullet proof vest,
With the windows all closed,
I'll be doing my best,
I'll see you soon,
In a telescope lens,
And when all you want is friends,
I'll see you soon.

So they came for you,
They came snapping at your heels,
They come snapping at you heels,
But don't break your back,
If you ever see this,
Don't answer that.

In a bullet proof vest,
With the windows all closed,
I'll be doing my best,
I'll see you soon,
In a telescope lens,
And when all you want is friends,
I'll see you soon,
I'll see you soon.

I know you lost your trust,
I know you lost your trust,
Don't lose your trust,
I know you lost your trust

Mass Hypnosis. I use it all the time.

Eunice Kathleen Weymon was born in 1933 to a Methodist minister and a handyman/barber in North Carolina. She became an incredible musician and singer as well as a passionate civil rights activist.

She explored an entire spectrum of emotions, diving from intense highs to melancholic lows in both her music and her personal life - the High Priestess of Soul was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder somewhere in the mid-1960s. Her voice...Hm. Her voice. Just listen.



Nina Simone's obituary in The Telegraph is here.

Paris Sunrise #7

Leaving you tonight with some Ben Harper, and The Fray.

"There are certain people you just keep coming back to...sometimes the hardest thing and the rightest thing are the same." 

- The Fray, All at Once