Two Hugely Important Links For You To Enjoy At Your Leisure

1. "Excerpts from The Bilderberg Group Cookbook"

2. "In the Dreams of Goats" part 1

A Delicious Berry Tart

You Better Watch Out, part iii

From the casebook of Beverly Sweet, owner and proprietor, Beverly Sweet: Cakes for all Occasions.

Part i

Part ii

iii

I smell gasoline and roasting marshmallows, strong enough almost to make me choke. It’s hot.

“Elfs,” says a voice, “is shit.”

I hear a door opening behind me and there’s a burst of frigid air. Hands reach under my armpits, dragging me out into the cold.

“Lollipop house, gumdrop car, driving on sidewalk. Shit!”

I’m lying on my back in the snow. My head aches. In front of me, bent and mangled, the taxi is starting to burn.

“Okay now, my friend. You can stand up?” He steps in front of me, an old man. Even bundled up in multiple layers, he’s implausibly thin.

“Uhn.”

“Is good.” He reaches down and starts pulling me up by my left hand. “Right hand wrist is damage. Maybe broke, maybe sprain, no good.” I’m standing now. He pats me on the cheek. “Will be okay. Now we go.”

“I remember  your face. We hit you.”

“Almost hit. Stupid elf is drive on sidewalk.”

“The elf! Mackerel, I forgot. Where is he?”

“He’s run away. Find elf police, maybe elf hospital. Shit.” The man snorts. “You can walk? Now we go.” He turns and starts off down the street.

“Wait, where?”

“Elf hotel. You stay there, yes?”

“Yes, but—”

“Is shit. Come.”

“But—”

“Stay here, maybe we die from freeze. Maybe wolfs come, maybe bear.”

“Bear?” I stumble after him.

“White bear, very bad. Wolfs is many, but bear is clever.”

“Are you joking?”

“No no. No joke. Bears like you, very fatty.” He turns and pokes me in the stomach. “Like Santa Claus, bowl full of jelly. Hee hee.” His laugh just sounds like his regular voice, saying “hee hee.”

“Who are you?”

“Yul. Is Yulnr. It says mister Yul man.”

“What?”

"Just Yul is okay. Now we go.” He walks on ahead a few steps then stops and turns. “Christmas,” he says, “is shit.”

Building, dwelling, thinking

A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing.

--Jon Bon Jovi, "Ride Cowboy Ride" (1988)

Lego Cake

This was for James' sixth birthday back in, I don't know, January or something. "Hey, why are you only posting about it now?" Well, look, it's just been a crazy year, okay? "So is blogging about children's party cakes no longer a priority in your life?" Hey, let's just, shut up, okay? Let's just do this.

It's a Lego cake, obviously. If memory serves, each block had three layers: chocolate-vanilla-chocolate, with chocolate buttercream between the layers and around the sides, and then rolled fondant on all the surfaces.

I usually use a ganache to get the sides really smooth and flat before I lay on the fondant, but I think I skipped that step this time around so the cake wouldn't be too heavy. As a result, the edges aren't nearly as sharp as I would have liked them to be. This is a cake that, quite frankly, does not stand up to close scrutiny, which bothers me. The kids at the party didn't seem to mind, though. Bunch of philistines.

The Legos on top were our present for James. In case you haven't kept up with recent Lego trends, that's the Final Battle: the Golden Dragon set from the Ninjago series. It includes the Golden Ninja, which, depending who you ask, makes it really awesome. You can make that green ball-thing shoot out of the dragon's mouth, which is fun I guess. Honestly, though, call me an old crusty curmudgeon, but this is exactly how I feel about Ninjago:

You Better Watch Out, part ii

From the casebook of Beverly Sweet, owner and proprietor, Beverly Sweet: Cakes for all Occasions.

Part i

ii.

The cab driver is an elf: middle-aged, golden buckles on his shoes, absurd green hat, an elf. His name is Mackerel, or so says the laminated ID card posted on the back of the driver’s seat. Judging from his manner, he enjoys being an elf and doesn’t care who knows it.

“You must be just tremendously excited to be here in Santa’s kingdom!”

“Mostly I’m tired.”

“Yes, so much excitement can be positively exhausting!” He giggles. “Even after twelve years living here myself, sometimes I just can’t contain my excitement.”

“That’s nice.”

“It’s too bad you’ve missed Christmas. Santa’s kingdom is at its very most magical around Christmas time! Though of course we’re all very busy then.”

“I imagine so.”

“You might be confused about why it’s dark now.”

“I’m not.”

“Here at the North Pole, it’s dark six months of the year, all winter long.”

“Yes, I know that.”

“It’s January now, so it’s night all the time. Then, during the summer, the sun never sets! It gets low in the sky sometimes, but then it just heads right back up again! Can you believe such a thing?”

“Yes. It’s a well-known fact.” We’re off the main road now—if there is a main road—and it’s deep black outside. The car’s headlights are a pair of enormous translucent gumdrops. More whimsical than functional, they cast a pale blue aura over the falling snowflakes.

“Are all the cab drivers around here elves?”

“Oh, yes! Santa loves us all so much he reserves any profession responsible for public safety for only his very best friends!”

“That’s you elves?”

“Yes! We and Santa are ever such good friends!”

“And how often do you see your friend?”

He giggles again. “Silly down-worlder! We don’t have to see Santa to be his friends.”

“Sure, but how often do you see him?” We’ve entered a small town, two-story gingerbread buildings dim under candy cane street lamps. The elf pauses a long time, like maybe he’s finished talking.

“You might be wondering what time it is.”

“I’m not. I want to know—”

“Here so close to the North Pole, all the meridians converge. Clock time as you know it doesn’t even exist! Now what do you think about that?”

“Very nice, but what I want to know—”

“It’s every time and no time here in Santa’s kingdom!”

“So if you’ve never—”

“WE ELVES ARE SANTA’S VERY BEST FRIENDS IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD!” He releases the wheel and looks back over his shoulder to emphasize the point, a mistake. The taxi jumps the curb. A figure stumbles out of the darkness in front of the car. His face is visible for an instant, blue and surprised in the gumdrop headlights.

Part iii

You Better Watch Out, part i

From the casebook of Beverly Sweet, owner and proprietor, Beverly Sweet: Cakes for all Occasions

i

Everyone says that clearing immigration at the North Pole is a royal pain in the ass—worse than LAX, worse than Tel Aviv, even—but Mr. Kang’s connections must have pulled a few strings, because as soon as the elves see the name on my passport they just wave me through. Within thirty minutes of touchdown, I’m hailing a cab from the curb outside the international terminal. It’s dark out, even with all the airport lights, and I feel dirty and irritable from the flight. There’s a light snow falling, dusting the ground like confectioner’s sugar.

Part ii

Incidentally...

This is off-topic, but as far as I'm concerned, if I can't lick it, it's not art.

A Public Service

Okay, so A LOT of loyal Vanilla Gorilla readers are currently looking for work in the tertiary education sector in the Kansas City metropolitan area. As a service to those readers, we offer the following links to the human resources departments of a collection of local colleges and universities. Enjoy!

• Universityof Missouri–Kansas City.
•  Johnson County Community College.
• Metropolitan Community College.
•  Avila University.
•  Baker University.
• Graceland University.
• GranthamUniversity.
• KansasCity Kansas Community College.
• Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences.
• Park University.
• Rasmussen College.
• RockhurstUniversity.
• WilliamJewell College.
• KansasCity Art Institute.

Banana-Cardamom Coffee Cake

OK, everyone and their cousin knows that I love the banana bread recipe in the Miette book, but I've been making that one all the time recently. So when I saw we had a bunch of overripe bananas today, I figured I'd try something a little different. I took the cardamom coffee cake recipe from the Moosewood book, added mashed-up banana to the nut mixture and substituted mashed-up banana for the sour cream as well, and--HOLD ON--did you read that right? Can you DO that? Can you substitute banana for sour cream?!? Am I serious???? Friends, I have never been more serious. I substituted mashed-up banana for sour cream. It was a frankly rash and capricious gambit, one that may lead us into disaster, shake this precious little world of ours to its foundations.

We'll know when it comes out of the oven in a half-hour or so. Pray for us.

*** UPDATE ***
Just took it out of the over. Too hot to eat, but I had some anyway. I don't think the substitution had any negative effects. It's very light and moist, not gooey like I was worried it might be.

HOWEVER. I think I put in too much cardamom. The recipe called for 1 tablespoon of ground cardamom, which is what I used, but my cardamom was freshly ground in a mortar and pestle, more flavorful than the store-bought pre-ground stuff, I think. In retrospect, I should have thought of that and put in a bit less. Not a disaster, but a little disappointing.

Doctor Who Cake

This was for Tilo's 8th birthday. He wanted a Doctor Who-themed cake. The concept is that the Tardis  has crashed into a frilly birthday cake that is being attacked by daleks. Like so:

If you aren't familiar with Doctor Who, he travels through time and space in his tardis, which looks like a blue police box, fighting stupid robot-things called daleks:

It's a three-layer chocolate cake, vanilla buttercream between the layers, with a thin covering of dark chocolate ganache, and pale yellow buttercream on top. The tardis is chocolate cake with the thin ganache covering and then rolled fondant. The daleks are fondant as well. I like the way the fondant contrasts with the buttercream, so the tardis and the daleks look as if they're an alien imposition on the cake. In retrospect, I wish I had done the piping in pink, to make it look even girlier.

Nose-Whistling "Jingle Bells"

Huh? Huh?

More Trouble for Jonah Lehrer:

New allegations have emerged that the public apology Jonah Lehrer released yesterday over fabrications in his book Imagine had itself been cobbled together from earlier public apologies issued by Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair and Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Lehrer, 2012:

I want to apologize to everyone I have let down, especially the people I worked with. I hurt my editors. I hurt my family. I hurt my friends. I hurt my readers.

Glass, 2009:

What I did hurt the people I worked with. It hurt my editors. It hurt my family. It hurt my friends. It hurt the readers.

Lehrer, 2012:

The quotes in question either did not exist, were unintentional misquotations, or represented improper combinations of previously existing quotes. 

Blair, 2003:

About those quotes: some of them didn't exist, some were unintentional misquotations, and some represented improper combinations of previously existing quotes.

Lehrer, 2012:

I am a journalist. With the exception of being a wife and mother, it is who I am. And there is nothing I take more seriously.

Goodwin, 2002:

I am a historian. with the exception of being a wife and mother, it is who I am. And there is nothing I take more seriously.

Honestly, it's like that guy's not even trying anymore.