Lemon and Almond Streamliner Cake

I first learned about this cake on Hummingbird High. Michelle, the blogger, started the post off with “You know, some cakes just don’t photograph well…” and she’s right. Lemon and almond streamliner cake doesn’t photo well. it’s beige glop on top of a beige disk. (Though Michelle’s a fabulous food photographer and manages to make it look good anyway.) The frosting looks so goopy in the picture because it’s actually custard. Custard? Used to frost a cake? Cool! The recipe was so unusual-sounding I wanted to try it out. The result? The cake tastes way better than it looks. It’s dense, sweet, and saturated with almond flavor, which contrasts well with the lemon custard on top. So don’t judge this cake by its photos. The following recipe is for what I actually baked, because in some cases I couldn’t get the real ingredients and in other cases I was lazy. Check out Hummingbird High or Google for the real recipe. The Custard

  • zest of 2 lemons
  • 3/4 cup 2% milk (original recipe called for whole milk, my store doesn’t sell whole milk in anything less than a quart.)
  • 1/2 cup sugar, divided into two 1/4 cup portions
  • 4 egg yolks
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt (original recipe called for fine sea salt. To hell with that.)
  • 2 tablespoons cornstarch
  • 1/2 cup lemon juice (that’s about two lemons’ worth)
  • 1/2 cup butter, cut into cubes and cold

The Almond Cake

  • 1 and 1/4 cups all-purpose flour (recipe called for cake flour, didn’t want to buy cake flour just for this)
  • 1 and 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 7 ounces almond paste (recipe called for six ounces, the tube is seven ounces, why not?)
  • 10 tablespoons butter, room temperature
  • 2/3 cup sugar
  • 3 tablespoons canola oil
  • 1 tablespoon vanilla extract (recipe called for 2 teaspoons, I like vanilla)
  • 3 eggs
  • 2/3 cup buttermilk

To make the custard The custard recipe looked tricky, so I got more or less mise en place before I started: IMG_1643
Combine lemon zest, 3/4 cup milk, and 1/4 cup sugar in a saucepan and put on low heat: IMG_1645
While it’s heating, whisk together the 4 egg yolks, the other 1/2 cup sugar, and the 1/2 teaspoon salt. Once they’re mixed, whisk in the 2 tablespoons cornstarch and 1/2 cup lemon juice. The milk mixture should be just barely hot. Carefully mix one third of the milk mixture into the egg mixture. Keep stirring; don’t let the eggs curdle. Return the pan to the heat and pour the egg mixture into the pan, stirring continuously. Keep stirring and cooking on medium-low heat until the custard thickens and bubbles. IMG_1648
At this point, you’re supposed to strain the hot custard to get the lemon zest out of it. I forgot to and I’m glad that I did. The lemon zest adds a nice texture to the final product. Pour the hot custard over the cold butter and stir until the butter melts in. Then chill the custard. It’ll take a couple of hours before it’s ready to frost the cake. To make the cake Preheat an oven to 350ºF. Grease a nine-inch cake pan. Mix together the 1 and 1/4 cups flour, 1 and 1/2 teaspoons baking powder, and 1/2 teaspoon salt. In another bowl, mix the 7 ounces almond paste, 10 tablespoons butter, 2/3 cup sugar, 3 tablespoons canola oil and 1 tablespoon vanilla. Use an electric mixer if you have one. Mix until it it’s light and fluffy. Mix in the three eggs one at a time. Set the electric mixer aside and use a spoon. Carefully add some of the flour mixture to the almond-egg-butter mixture, then some of the buttermilk. Alternate flour and buttermilk until everything is mixed together. (I see instructions to alternate mixing in ingredients in recipes sometimes. I usually ignore those instructions and the recipe comes out fine. This time I followed the directions. If you want to add all the flour, then all the buttermilk, proceed at your own risk.) Pour the batter in the pan and bake at 350ºF for 37 minutes. (The original recipe calls for 45 minutes. It lies.) IMG_1650
Even then, the cake came out darker than I expected. But it came out great when I took it out of the pan and frosted it: IMG_1651
And it was delicious. IMG_1652IMG_1653

A Circus of Brass and Bone by Abra Staffin-Wiebe

24161438Full disclosure: Abra’s a friend of mine. I’m going to give this book an honest review, though.

Do you have a morbid sense of humor? A Circus of Brass and Bone is great for that. A troupe of circus performers, on a return trip from a tour in India, arrive in Boston Harbor only to discover the end of the world happened while they were at sea. The book’s cast of misfits have to figure out how to live in a world where people want to know where to buy all the dead bodies, not watch a circus.

What I like best about the book is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s nominally steampunk, but the punk-y elements are woven seamlessly into the background. (Look at me! Look at me! I’m wearing a corset! is thankfully nowhere to be found.) Most of the time, Brass and Bone bears more resemblance to Shaun of the Dead than The Difference Engine. And then at times the book gets very serious and punches you in the gut when you weren’t looking.

There’s a moment near the beginning of the book where it is just beginning to dawn on the circus performers that half the city of Boston is dead. What does the narrative focus on? The skeleton man skulking around trying to steal chocolates from the fat lady. Is there something wrong with me that I was giggling like an idiot? Perhaps.

Staffin-Wiebe writes flawed characters well. Everyone in the circus has something the matter with them so they can’t get a job anywhere else. It’s tempting for a writer to give women and minority characters a free pass just to prove that they’re with the times, but in Brass and Bone, they’re just as human as the rest of the cast.

My biggest complaint is that the book went by too fast. I’m not sure if extra text got left on the editor’s chopping block or it wasn’t written in the first place, but it felt like there was supposed to be more. I think it’s especially important to flesh out the story because there are so many point of view characters. Some of them are there and gone before you ever get to know them.

There was also a moment where Lacey, the circus’s equestrienne, comes riding into New York City on a white horse. I thought white horses didn’t exist, so I Wikipedia’d that, and it turns out they’re just rare. Rare enough that I started writing this paragraph to point out a research blooper, and now I’m wondering whether there’s more to Lacey than meets the eye.

Anyway, the book is funny and it has zombie deer in it. Worth reading.

Reboot

Clearly the best character in the show.

Clearly the best character in the show.

FYI, this review contains some spoilertastic discussion of the end of the third season.

I associate Reboot with some very happy memories of coming home from middle school, plunking down on the couch, and watching episodes that my family had recorded on the VCR. What I remember is a fun action adventure show with characters who live inside of a computer. (It blew my eleven-year-old mind that bad guys could become good guys.) So imagine my delight when I was fooling around YouTube a few weeks ago and discovered that the whole thing is up there free.

What a memory trip. So many things are different from what I expected.

The CG in the first season is atrocious. The experience is like listening to a well-written radio play spinoff of TRON while watching this. Now that I can put the show in historical context, I realize that the animators made the characters blue and green to cut down on the Uncanny Valley. It helps a little. The animation gets gradually better each season until by the third, you can look at the characters’ faces to understand their emotions. The writers understood this and started to take advantage of long reaction shots. Episodes like “Web Riders of the Storm” hold up to modern day standards.

Some of the computer jokes have aged well (hidden messages in binary will always be funny), some haven’t (has anyone here ever used a SCSI port?). The character in the show can’t assume that every computer system has Internet access. Even the idea that a system crash is a real possibility is becoming outdated. I am writing this review now on a laptop that hasn’t crashed a single time in five years of operation. I think I had to use a force shutdown once. If you are just discovering this show, my advice to you is to pretend the characters live in a fantasy world that works sort of, but not quite, like a computer.

What I didn’t expect was this show provides so much to adults that will go straight over kids’ heads. Is that the Pixar lamp attacking Enzo? Look, now he’s dancing “Thriller!” That flock of bicycles is straight out of Blade Runner. There is a wonderfully dark moment near the end of the third season where the Sailor Moon team start the first few seconds of their transformation dance, and then they all die from falling debris. The main cast all have shades of right and wrong to them, and much of the third season has the audacity to focus on a pair of adults who have an implied sex life.

The show also gets high marks for its women characters. (Well, computer programs who look and sound like women…) It passes the Bechdel test left and right. AndrAIa is defined by her role as Enzo’s girlfriend. She holds her own well as a sidekick, but that’s all she is. But major props to Dot Matrix, who is not defined by her love for Bob. She winds up running Mainframe’s military and does so without becoming a cast-iron Amazon or taking away from the male characters. I had no idea how great a character she was when I watched the show as a kid. But Hexadecimal is still my favorite.

So. The end of season 3. I wish that Enzo had blown Megabyte’s brains out. We’ve already seen that Enzo’s capable of killing and the show’s willing to get that dark. He may even be struggling with PTSD. Then he finally, finally, gets into a situation where shooting somebody in the face is the right thing to do, and he won’t do it. I know it’s supposed to be part of his character arc that he’s turning away from the violent person he’s become, but I don’t buy it. Megabyte is the sort of supervillain who will always come back. (Guess what? He does in season 4.) So for Enzo’s supposed moral victory, he puts all of Mainframe in danger. Possibly the entire Net.

Despite that gripe, the end of the season was oddly satisfying. It’s as deus ex machina as a deus ex machina ending can possibly get, yet I don’t mind. It’s fitting with their world. The characters are at the mercy of a User they don’t understand and who ultimately saves them all through dumb luck. There’s something philosophical about that.

So if you’re looking for cheesy CG, great characters, and surprisingly grown-up storytelling, give it a try.

Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear

It’s traditional high fantasy, reimagined in Central Asia.12109372

Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear follows the story of two characters through what looks to be a sweeping saga about the collapse of an empire. The first is Re Temur, a young man who’s distant in the line of succession to the Great Khagan and never expects to hold much power. But the death of the great Khagan and the resulting civil war thrust him into the limelight. The second main character is Samarkar, disgraced ex-princess of Rasa. To save herself from getting executed by her brother, she goes into training as a wizard. When she is ordered by the head of the wizards to investigate a Rasan city that’s been destroyed by the civil war, Sarmarkar’s and Temur’s lives intersect.

What I liked best about the story was the setting. Bear introduces us to a world that’s deep and rich, and even goes so far as to explain how people’s clothes are tied on. (Isn’t that something you always wonder about fantasy princesses?) But even given that, she lays on the Fantasy Counterpart Culture a bit thick. So far to the east, further east than where any of the characters live, there’s this empire called Song – I see what you did there, that’s totally China but named after a different dynasty. Far to the west, there’s a city called Kyav where the people are as pale as mushrooms and grow beets. Could that possibly be Kiev?

I’m not sure why Bear decided to split the difference – why she didn’t give the societies in her book their familiar modern names or come up with entirely new societies. Are the changed names an excuse to add fantasy creatures to the story? Maybe Bear plans to change the course of history, and Temur is totally not going to turn out to be Kublai Khan?

One thing she did with her really-guys-this-isn’t-Asia is she reimagined Islam as form of goddess worship. Women don’t catch a break, though. In this world, they’re forced to stay in seclusion because they’re incarnations of the One True Goddess. This is very interesting and I can’t wait to see where she goes with it.

At first I thought Temur was a blithering idiot, but I developed a grudging respect for him over the course of the book. This mirrored Samarkar’s own feelings about him, so it might have been intentional. (But how long is it going to take him to figure out his horse is magical?) Samarkar was far and away the more interesting co-main character. I loved her complex feelings about taking the wizard’s path and the interplay between the wizarding community and the seat of the government. In fact, I would have been happy to read a book set entirely in Tsarepheth that was all about the political intrigues of the wizards. But this is like me complaining that I wanted ravioli when somebody serves me chicken.

In my opinion, the plot was the weakest part of the book. I prefer first books of trilogies to stand on their own as books. Range of Ghosts is a grand tour of places and people we’ll need to know for the rest of the trilogy, which is great as a beginning, but not as a book. And by the end of the book, I kid you not, we have a wizard, a fighter, an ex-cleric and a monk traveling around together. It is a testament to Bear’s writing skill that she makes this look good, but I am waiting to see when she will pull the plot out of Dungeons and Dragons territory.

The Golem and the Jinni

15819028I don’t know about this one. There was a lot that I liked, but there was also a lot that I didn’t like.

The Golem and the Jinni takes place in New York city from the summer of 1899 to summer 1900. As immigrants from all over the world stream through Ellis Island, a couple of supernatural beings drift into the city and there they form a bond. That’s all you really need to know. Sure, there’s some business about an evil wizard, but he doesn’t take up that much of the plot. The book is a series of portraits of people, human and non, who are getting used to life in a strange new country. It would have worked better as a set of loosely connected short stories, which makes me wonder if Wecker’s editor forced her to make it into a novel.

The characters are delightful and I have a lot of respect for someone who can wrangle an omniscient narrator as well as Helene Wecker does, but the book sags in the middle. It relies on a lot of coincidences. (The way the golem and the jinni meet each other is glaring. New York City is how big and they just happen to bump into each other the one night the golem goes out walking?) The book is nearly five hundred pages long, but it doesn’t give the feeling of sweeping epicness that would justify its weight.

This may sound strange, but I found the body count oddly satisfying. People die in this book and they stay dead. No Disney resurrections here. Yet whenever a character dies, there’s a reason it happened and it means something to the other characters. Wecker does a great job of making the book dark, but not too dark.

The blurb on the cover said this was Wecker’s first novel and I don’t believe it for a moment. She has too much of a command of the English language for this to be her first attempt. There’s a lot more manuscripts sitting in Wecker’s desk drawer, and I’m looking forward to seeing them.

The Imitation Game

Benedict Cumberbatch is going to play Alan Turing in a movie. I’m not sure how to feel about this. He’s an excellent actor but he looks really weird as Turing.

The real Alan Turing:

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Um … nailed the hairdo?

Image courtesy of the Flicks and Bits blog.

Image courtesy of the Flicks and Bits blog.