Speaking of Cake

Posted by Shoshana

I’ve got a friend up here in Iowa who has an awesome blog called Roasting Rambler. He is an unassuming chef, in that he absolutely thrives on creating masterpiece food but would never become a professional chef. He is constantly exploring the far reaches of food, creating and tweaking recipes and finding interesting combinations of ingredients. Not only that, but he is tapped into this amateur chef online community and shared a recipe for chocolate cake with Reese’s all over it. I mean all over.

He thinks this idea is disgusting. But I, on the other hand, think it is divine. I can’t wait to experiment with this cake for my husband’s birthday.

On another note, he is taking a statistics class right now. Summer school statistics is torture. I tried it once and nearly failed. I have more hope for him, though. He’s a smart cookie.

My brother thinks that we have all gotten too old to be able to grasp the language of statistics. It really requires an additional brain hemisphere to comprehend the depths of statistics. I hope once I am done with grad school I will not have to try to train my brain to understand the basis and fundamentals of a one-way ANOVA or a chi-square test. But I will always remember what a p-value is!

Piece of cake

Posted by A.

It’s funny how you can sit next to someone at work 40 hours a week and still know so little about them. In the two years I worked at the Home News copy desk with Craig, we became close friends. But I had no idea I was sitting next to a regular Betty Crocker.

While I knew Craig had decorated cakes in the past — a talent he learned from his mother — it honestly never occured to me how amazingly elaborate these cakes were until my last day at the newspaper in October 2006, when he made me this haunted house cake:

It’s like something out of Ace of Cakes! Here are some more examples of his amazing talent. You can also read his recipes and cooking tips on his blog Ketchup and Butter Sandwiches:

Craig’s comment: “This is ultimately a very basic chocolate cake, decorated with ribbons and ribbons of fondant. In the center is a chocolate orange. I really wish I could remember where I saw the pattern for it.”

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Craig’s comment: “This cake is on the cover of Rose Levy Berenbaum’s ‘Cake Bible.’ The leaves are very time-consuming, but a lot of fun. Melted chocolate is painted on rose leaves. After peeling away the leaves, their imprint is left behind.”