What caused the extinction of the dinosaurs? Lego.

I guess that Finn liked dinosaurs for longer than 15 seconds. Looking back, we managed to accumulate a number of dinosaur related books, a stuffed stegosaurus who shares his bed with him and occasionally joins us at the table if we are eating salad (he's vegetarian), and approximately 800 million small plastic dinos of uncertain genus and species, which I shall call "spikosaurs" , the etymology of which will be readily apparent to anyone who has had to walk across Finn's floor in the dark. Still, we're not into dinos too much any more. Not that he dislikes them, it's just that there's little room for anything else in his head besides lego, either building, playing or whining for me or his mom to find lego instructions on the computer for him to "read" and "covet". I suppose there's no actual need for " " around covet - unlike the reading, which is aspirational, the coveting is very, very real).

Nevertheless, at the time of his birthday some months ago, he wanted a dinosaur cake. Lisa being rather pregnant and tired, she decided that the dinosaurs themselves could be represented by a selection from the menagerie that dwells in the boys' room, and she made a volcano cake in order to, as Finn would say, "extinct the dinosaurs so they are bones." The coolest part of the cake was that she built in a depression atop the cone, and put in a small glass bowl. When it came time to light the candle, she put in some chunks of dried ice and poured on some water, creating some nice eruption-like atmospherics. It was actually a little hard to see at the park, but the kids all really liked watching the dry ice fizzle. I'd like to think that I did contribute in some small way to the cake, insofar as I was the one who had to drive to the random gas-station/truckstop in west oakland that sells 10 pound chunks of dry ice. I can't imagine too many of lisa's pastry oriented competitors roll down there too often.

The party was a big hit with Finn's classmates. They hunted in the sand pit for dinosaur eggs (each contained a small spikosaur - my gift the the parents of his friends), had a dino themed treasure hunt and went at trays of plaster of paris encased dinosaurs (more spikosaurs - you're welcome people) with hammers and screwdrivers. The hammers were a big hit - while none of the kids displayed the patience and restraint of future archaeologists, they were certainly focussed - most ignored the dinosaurs and spent up to half an hour ensuring that every piece of plaster of paris had been reduced to dust before moving on to the next activity.

I can't believe that Finn's five already, and that the dino stage has already come and gone. Tune in next year for the lego cake, or whatever it is that will have swept into the imagination of the six-year old to be. Just please don't let it to be bakugan.

On tonsils and princesses

I'd like to say life moves quickly, but I'd just be trying to justify the slow pace of my blogging. Life moves on at its leisurely pace, with perhaps a touch of urgency brought on by the impending arrival of our newest cake afficianado, but I still can't manage to keep up with it in terms of blogging. So I'm going to compromise by writing about some stuff that happened recently, while posting pictures of cakes and pastries of yore. If you're lucky, I'll tie them together thematically at the end of the post. (hint: you're not going to be lucky).

So the biggest news these days is that conor had his tonsils out last week. He was one excited kid, waking us up the morning of (and the morning before, actually) at 5 a.m. to ensure that we wouldn't miss the operation. I'm informed that he was charming and perky all the way through, and confounded us with his ability to look cute even in hospital garb (see photo below). I arrived at the hospital just in time for his awakening from anaesthesia. Lets just say he was somewhat less perky. In fact his first words, croaked out amid screams of agony were "You are savages! You are savages and you are torturing me!!!". The dire imprecations that he hurled at the nurses were softened somewhat by his swollen throat and general grogginess, as they later confided that they had thought he was calling them "sandwiches".



Since the operation, he's been out of school and largely enjoying it. He's had a pile of new books to read, more TV to watch than he has in the previous five years combined, and visits from neighborhood kids bringing him icecream. Over the weekend, even his much loved first grade teacher Mrs Flanagan stopped by to chat and gave him a joke book and a star wars guide. The downside for conor has been the near constant throat pain that he has been enduring. The downside for the rest of us has been (i) his carrion scented breath, and (ii) his inability to swallow has necessitated (to his mind) his carrying around a small pink plastic dish that he refers to as "my spittoon". It comes to the dinner table. It sits by his bedside. It rests, precariously, on the couch as he reads. It is beyond gross, and I say this as the family member who has been permanently deputized to clean up after our elderly neighbor's spastically-coloned cat.




OK, now, how to link this to the cupcakes. Ummmmm, yeah. Well, Lisa made these for a friend of a friend's daughter's 3rd birthday party. From what I understand, she likes princesses, so Lisa made some snow white heads and tiaras out of fondant.

Sorry readers, i think you're just going to have to accept inapposite pastry photos as I go through the backlog of the last few years.

It's been a while...

but, considering my audience consists of two people, one of whom is the subject of this blog, and the other of whom lives across the street, it's not like you've missed much guys. Also, we have a much larger baking project underway, in the strictly metaphorical sense of the word, which should serve as a fairly good catch all excuse. It having been a while since I've done this, i don't want to sprain a writing muscle, so I'll just put up a photo of some of the eponymous she's creations.



Also, on the newsy weekend front, we drove up to Tomales Bay, bought ourselves a sack of oysters and then headed to Dillon beach. Rather than launch into an extended narrative, I'll sum up using quotes and paraphrases from the crew.

A+P "Snarf, gulp, snarf, burp".
L "Oh my god, I can't believe you're eating all of those oysters in front of a pregnant lady! That's so unfair!"
A+P "Snarf, gulp, snarf, burp".
A "I don't trust some* people. Case in point, I just knew those meth heads were going to lose the keys to their minivan"
C "Can I have another oyster? Can I have another oyster? Can I have another oyster?"
L (junior) "Can you cut out the gross bits?"
A "The gross bits are the oyster. Why don't you have a hot dog?"
P [Refrains from telling L what gross bits are in a hot dog]
Q + F [sounds of of digging for 3 straight hours]
P "We should take some home for B. I feel so terrible that he has to work today, we should at least bring him some oysters."
A "OK, I guess I'm kind of full now."

* A did not actually use the word "some" here.



Lisa and the boys

Iron Cupcake SF gets a taste of the East Bay

That's right, the eponymous she has recently shaken off her cupcake production torpor. Was it the urge for sweets? Nope - she's currently forgoing sugar and, this hurts me to even mention this, booze. Was it a desire to be more creative? Perhaps - though we both spend a fair amount of time coming up with creative threats in order to motivate our children to (respectively) do their homework and stop cutting every single piece of paper in the house in to 1 inch squares and leaving them in piles all over the living room.

Really, what got her rolling again was the opportunity to throw down against the cupcake masters (or, if we're really going to be precise about our genders, cupcake mistresses) of San Francisco at the Iron Cupcake meetup (http://www.meetup.com/Iron-Cupcake-San-Francisco-Challenge/). The meetup is monthly, and has a theme ingredient - being October and all, this month's secret ingredient was beer. I thought that this represented a lot of interpretive opportunities for an East Bay entry. One could try a steam beer cupcake, representing Oakland's brewing past; a Singha and ginger cupcake, representing its immigrant present; or perhaps even an Old English cupcake delivered to the event in a Toyota fresh from a sideshow, representing what the rest of the world thinks of Oakland. Instead Lisa played a little with the rules, and delivered this:



That's right, it's root beer flavored cupcakes, with vanilla ice-cream frosting and a little straws to make a miniature pastry version of a root beer float. Now, being married to the baker, and a big fan of root beer, I'm more than a little biased, but these were awesome. Confirmation comes from my younger son, who had two time outs [or is it 'times out'? Note to self - reread collection of William Safire columns] this evening, both coming after he ran into the kitchen and shoved a cupcake into his mouth, knowing full well the consequences (for what it's worth, the consequences were 2 time outs and confiscation of his recycling flow charts, plus no truck related bedtime stories).

And it turns out that my larcenous son and I were not the only big fans:

Time like an ever rolling stream...

Having my first child at a fresh faced 28 makes me somewhat of an outlier in the bay area. Not to the point of where prim matrons cluck and tsk when I walk the streets with my soiled progeny, but still, at 35 I'm youngish for the parent of an (almost) 7 year old and a 4 year old. I'd always thought my relative youth was an advantage in relating to my kids, particularly in keeping up with their interests. I'd smile with thinly concealed disdain as some doddering mother (or was it grandma?) would ask if my son liked "Thomas the Train". I knew it was Thomas the Tank Engine. I knew the words to a vast majority of the songs, and enough characters that I could tell stories without once having to return to set pieces motivated by Henry's aversion to ever more improbable scenarios that might render him dirty. I assumed that this hipness to the three year old mind would grow as my children grew. To bastardize Terence (the dramatist, not the tractor) - I was a [young] man: I held that nothing [kidlike] was alien to me. I would always be cool and know what my kids liked.

And then there were Bionicles.

I wish I could put into words how befuddling I find their mythos. But then, I don't have to, as the good folks at Lego have done this for me. Please enjoy the following (I can only assume the stilted dialogue is due to the difficulty of finding a good translator of Bioniclese).

"The Turaga told an ancient tale of the Bohrok: the Toa must collect eight different types of krana from each of the six types of Bohrok in order to defeat the swarms. Despite villages being ravaged, the Toa and Matoran bravely fought the bugs. The Toa discovered a Bohrok nest and placed their Krana into niches within the tunnels, halting the swarm but unleashing Cahdok and Gahdok, the Bahrag twins. They commanded the Swarms. The Toa created an energized protodermis cage which traps the Bahrag, finally halting the swarms."

Trust me when I say that this is among the more comprehensible paragraphs.

As Conor fell for these creatures - insecto-robotic, crypto-polynesian incomprehensibilities, I felt all my smugness slipping away. I don't know what a Mata Nui is. I didn't realize that Toa Pota is not only a female, but god forbid an attractive one. I just don't....get it.

And so here I sit, sipping my prune juice and filing my bunions. However, I am somewhat comforted in that my spouse retains some semblance of hep. And as proof of that hepness, allow me to present the bionicle cake that she made for Conor's sixth birthday.








Oh. And don't even get me started on Bakugan.

Because we don't just obsess about cakes around here

Adding to the litany of implausible non-excuses, another reason for reduced cake blogging has been Lisa's learning to knit, which has led to a reduction in cake output as the household's knitted hat production has ramped up.

I'll put a reader poll to the side on cakes vs hats, but throwing out some thoughts:

Hats:
1) less calorically dense than cakes
2) babies like them
3) one doesn't feel compelled to brush one's teeth after wearing a hat

Cakes:
1) often topped with candles, whose guttering flames remind all creatures of mans dominion over the beasts of the field
2) babies like them
3) one doesn't feel compelled to check the nearest reflective surface for hat-head after eating a cake

I'm not one to be too forthcoming with my editorial biases, but I'll note that pretty much all of the hats are too small for my head, but to date none of the cakes have proved to be too large for my stomach.

She still does, in fact, bake cakes

How to summarize the last nine months or so? Lets see. Finn turned 4. Conor graduated kindergarten. Summer was largely unstructured and hugely enjoyable, and She made a lot of cakes.

But instead of the unpleasant prospect of abasing myself before the readership with pathetic and, lets face it, rather transparent, excuses for not writing, I'll do what I do best and draw attention to other people's misdeeds.

Lets take our friend Joe. Good guy, great father, and devoted husband who is planning a 40th birthday party for his wife. His call to the cake hotline three days before the party goes something like this:

"Hey, Lisa, y'know Kari's party. It would be great if you could make one of those cool cakes."

"What kind of cake? What's the theme? For how many people"

"Oh, I don't know. Something cool. Maybe in an italian/cowboy/hoedown theme. And could it serve 150?"

The eponymous She took this all in stride and, after a quick run to Costco to purchase approximately 2 1/2 US adult male heart attacks worth of butter, put together the the Hoedown Italiano cake. The bottom layer is yellow cake, the middle chocolate, and the top was made of both such that when you slice it there's a checkerboard effect. In keeping with the theme, the bottom layer was patterned after cowhide, similar enough to the Dell box that Michael Dell himself is seeking a slice in return for use of his IP, the middle layer is patterned after a bandana (and looks fantastic), and the top is done in fondant in the colors of the italian flag. Because our love for cheap italian stereotyping has no limits, the top of the cake is a spaghetti and meatballs motif, done in buttercream, ferrero rocher and ollalieberry jam.



















The party was a blast. Kari loved the cake, the kids all danced to the country band, and Finn learned that mixing warm sprite with vigorous do-si-doing leads to projectile vomiting.




Finn, as you can see, is ever ready to help.