If I knew you were coming, I'd have baked a cake.

Oh, there is nothing better than spending the whole afternoon in the kitchen on a breezy fall day.

I have recently taken on the assignment of baking a wedding cake for a friend from work. Like, a proper one. With tiers and whatnot.

I expect I was asked to undertake this sort of thing due to the success of a cake I baked for another work friend, Juliana, who was married this summer. Observe:

It's the one in the center. I used the red velvet recipe from the NYT, which was actually from Elisa Strauss's (a fellow Vassar girl, whom I've met and who's lovely) Confetti Cakes cookbook. Let me tell you, it is divine. Better than (and I hate to draw lines in the buttercream here) the Cake Man Raven's Red Velvet (sorry, Raven, more cocoa makes it better). The cake was three layers, a deep red with a perfect soft texture and moist crumb. My mother backseat-iced the cake, and had the brilliant idea of decorating with nasturtium flowers, so it turned out beautifully.

Anyway, it was pretty and delicious, if I may be so bold, and I'm sure that combined with my willingness to bake for the sheer joy of focusing deeply on a rather precise task, led to Rosamund putting aside my inexperience and asking for me to think about baking up a wedding cake all proper-like. Think about it? I confess, I spent a good half hour in the wedding section of the bookstore, flipping through photos of cakes and I was sold. The precision involved in putting together a tiered cake, icing it, AND covering it with fondant (so smooth and pretty!) is almost more exciting than I can handle.

Today I endeavored to experiment a bit with a cake recipe. I haven't found a published recipe that stirs me, so I kind of tinkered with some existing ones. I'll elaborate more on the details of this experiment once I cut into the thing and eat it, but until then, here's the trial cake, just out of the oven:



The silvery band wrapped around the pan somehow makes the cake rise straight and remain relatively flush on top when you pull it out of the oven. I have no idea how, but I'm loving it (though it does mean fewer cake scraps to eat whilst icing). Also, I got a bottle of "Cake Release" from A.C. Moore (a wonderful and slightly terrifying store), which appears to be made of liquid genius, as the cake popped right out of the pan with no fuss and no leavin's to speak of.

Stay tuned for more photos as the practice cake and the real deal progress.

Baby, you can conjugate me all night long.

I was alerted to the following music video, T-Pain's "I Like the Bartender" by Mark, who is very smart and certainly up on all the hottest new tracks. OK, so it's probably not new. But it's still awesome.

The words that speak to me most? "She made us drinks to drink. We drunk 'em, got drunk."




I expect, if pressed, young Tal would concur that dating me is very similar, glamour-wise. I wear short-shorts whilst pouring beers (it helps me show off the sweet bruises from walking into the beer cooler and knocking heavy ice buckets into myself). Also, he keeps it real by drinking triple shots of Patròn with lime. In fact, I think I might start calling him T-Pain.

In other bar news, the fall beers are in.

From our taps, I enjoy:

- Pennichuck's Big O. Nice malty flavor as ever, with a certain sweetness I'd forgotten about since last year.

- Long Trail's Harvest. Delicious, smooth, and a gorgeous dark color.

I also like:

- Brooklyn's Oktoberfest and Smuttynose Pumpkin Ale.

Top of my list to try is Red Hook's Late Harvest (while we're at it, let's enjoy the bartender character on their website. Look how he polishes glasses and points cheerily at imaginary customers out in cyberspace!)

I do not enjoy: Peak Organic Pale Ale. OK, I know it's not a fall beer, but I drank a few yesterday, and I must say, it smells suspiciously of (bad) pot. Also, when it repeats, it tastes of pot. Very weird. And kind of fulfilling people's notion that organic beers are made by stoner hippies on communes in Vermont.