This started off as a cake, I swear!

I’m sorry to say I killed a cake earlier this week.  And not only that, it was a birthday cake.  Being as the Man With The Hidden Talents is a fan of both coffee and chocolate, I decided that for his birthday I’d try the Mahogany Cake out of Rebecca Rather’s Pastry Queen cookbook.  (I have, by the way, yet to make a recipe out of this cookbook that I didn’t like.)

The problem was, well, me.  I was a trifle too impatient to actually wait for the cake to cool adequately before taking it out of the tube pan.  Unfortunately, hot cake = floppy cake.  Oops.  You can imagine what happened next.  So I made the glaze and drizzled it on top.  This was the result.  I actually considered making a second cake, but frankly, it looks pretty decadent like this, doesn’t it?  I let the boy help me glaze it (somehow the sloppiness of the cake made the whole process that much more fun), and we served it up with big spoons.  I might actually have to do this again sometime.  No, it’s not exactly fit for company, but could it possibly look this sinful if it was all in one piece?

Welcome to the Christmas season, everyone!  The giant plastic candy canes erected in the park outside my apartment on November 1 are now officially allowed to be there (I’ve been giving them the silent treatment), and I am opening the doors on not one but two advent calendars.  I love advent calendars.  Whee!  Anyone want to sing carols?

Of course, there’s the dark side of December, too.  This part of the year for me usually ends up being a mad scramble to buy gifts for my friends and family and get them crammed into boxes and shipped everywhere they need to go, while imagining that I am going to start making Christmas cookies and sending them to people at any  moment.  In an effort to help out folks like me whose shopping does not begin until December 1, today I thought I’d share my favorite places to shop for, well, stuff.  Stocking stuffers, quirky gifts, things for people for whom you’re afraid to buy a serious gift but have to get something…  you know what I’m talking about.  It’s easy enough to get on the internet and find what you’re looking for if you’re looking for something specific.  If you have no idea?  That’s a lot harder, particularly if you don’t want to spend a ton.  Here are some of my favorite sites to pick up interesting little gifts and inspire me to fill out the stockings.

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After reading this article in Slate musing on why more Congressmen don’t use Twitter, I have to say that there are few things I would be less interested in reading half a dozen times a day than 140 characters worth of the fleeting thoughts of the members of the House of Representatives  or the arguably slightly saner people in the Senate.  Perhaps I’m unduly cynical, but I generally feel that a certain amount of filtering on political news is necessary to keep the battier stuff from driving you crazy.  Important points, please, not the latest on the Senator who sneezed while the leader of the opposition was making a key speech on the floor.  (The scandal!)

Twitter itself is designed to be the perfect medium for conveying the trivial.  There are people who can be poetic, meaningful in 140 characters, but not many.  I’d like to imagine that our legislators are better than the average person at this kind of thing, but frankly, we didn’t pick them for their concise force of expression, and it’s questionable whether we even picked them for their intelligence.  Do I care that Pete Hoekstra is having dinner in Grand Rapids today?  Uh, no.

Count me as another supporter for the continued existence of traditional media.  If someone is going to have to sort through that crap, by all means let it not be me.