Today was T. E. Lawrence's 120th birthday! Since my sister is moving out on the 19th, we moved Build-A-Cake Day to today, and we built a cake. And it wasn't a lie.



The cake was great. It was so delicious and moist.

But, seriously, I'm disproportionately proud of how the cake came out.



Now I just need to make myself a weighted companion cube... heh, I'm so dorky. ^.^

Guys guys guess what guys? I can make cake in a coffee mug! No really, it's true!

( I can prove it, too! See, I have a recipe and everything :3 )

These cakes are very easy and quick to make and they are fun and make very little mess. Basically, you should just make one for yourself. Right now. When I experimented with making a cake using lemon and cinnamon, the result was AMAZING. It tasted like a crepe, sort of, but that's probably because we always put lemon juice and cinnamon on our crepes. >.>

But, yeah, it tastes amazing and it is a lot of fun. I hope everyone gets a chance to make one. Props to hannahstuff for posting the recipe in the first place.

Recently, my laptop got a new battery *woot woot* which upped its battery life from about 20 minutes to about 4 and a half hours. Still, my computer seems to have gotten a wee bit overzealous with its estimated battery life time:



241 hours? Heck yes! Of course, it fixed the estimate a minute or so later, but all the same!

In other news, nothing else is new. August 16th marks T. E. Lawrence's 120th birthday! I think I'm going to, for this year, move Build-a-Cake day from the 19th to the 16th, because my big sister moves out on the 19th, and I don't want her to miss Build-a-Cake day.

Also, I have a new song to love for now. "All Good Things Come To An End" by Nelly Furtado. She is very good at doing a lot of different sorts of music. I mean, she basically does solely pop, but she does different sorts of pop. It is a fantastic song, at any rate.

Here is the interior of the cake. I hope that I didn't hype it up too much, because it looks sorta the same as it did before:







Not much to speak of today. Yesterday, a friend and I tried to get though the preface of our history summer reading, and LORD, was that academic purple prose if ever I saw it. See, I can appreciate purple prose sometimes, in literature, when it makes it fun. But when it's academic, and they just replace words with bigger words to sound smarter, and tie their sentences up in unnecessary knots, it can be annoying. It wasn't all bad. I guess some of it was just a bit hard to choke down. Still, the points were all valid, and I suppose I prefer this sort of writing to babyish, silly academic stuff.

I truly need to make myself a "The Cake Is A Lie" icon...

Recently, I found out from weizhijun how to make a cake with rainbow-colored insides. o.o As in, the baked part is in splashed rainbow colors. Anyway, I made a cake like that yesterday, and it turned out really well! It was easy, too. The hardest part was probably getting the egg whites. (The cake mix required three.) I didn't know what to do with the yolks, so I dumped them in a glass, which made me realize something: If you wanted to be a jerk of exponential proportions, then you could fill a glass up with egg yolks, and tell someone it was orange juice. Ewwwwwwww. Still, it might convince them. See?



Anyway, while I would've liked to make the inside of the cake rainbow colored, I only had a very little amount of red food coloring, some green, and some blue. So, I divided the cake mix into four bowls and ended up with these colors (also, I added nerds, which is what the little bumps in the mix are... they look a bit weird):



Then, I dolloped it into the baking pans like so:


( more below the cut... )

In other news, I got two shots today and they really stung. Also, I promise to not post any more pictures of food for a while. Unless, you know, I really have to. :P

Here's a photo from some cupcakes I made a while ago. The design might be hard to make out, but as it is, they are Cupcakes of the Proletariat! Commie cupcakes! Adorned with hammer and sickles! Okay so maybe that's not the best idea of something to make, but I found someone else who made Communist cake, and it seemed like it would be amusing. As it turns out, cupcakes are very hard to ice designs onto with just a knife. Still, these cupcakes are very true to communism: they were made in vast quantity, but very low quality! (They still tasted good, though.)



Enlarge for a better look at the designs. Very little is new since I last updated. I went down to a lake with one of my friends and we took some pictures with her manual camera. Manual cameras are really a lot of fun. I would love to get one, but I feel like the money I would save in the initial price of buying it would be lost in the amount I'd spend on film. So, someday when I'm rich (read as: never) I'd love to get one of those digital cameras which looks like a manual camera.

Also, I made a rather bizarre comic strip, as well as some character pictures. Nothing else is new. That's all.

So, today Shauna turned 18! Woooo~ The card which her friends got her had a bunch of scratch tickets in it. She won two dollars.

I found out yesterday that today was her birthday, so I said I'd make her a cake. She asked for carrot cake. So, after school, Britt came over, and we bought two boxes of cinnamon cake mix (we couldn't find the carrot cake mix), and one box of carrot cake mix (because we bought it later, when we found it), and a can of confetti icing, which is called "Funfetti," which is completely lame and not fun at all. But anyway, it tastes good, so.

We spent pretty much all of yesterday afternoon making them. We went baked them in those little cupcake paper things, and then iced them, first with too much icing, then with not enough, and then it evened out. When we were done we tasted them, and they were THE BEST. CUPCAKES. EVER.

We made about 40, which fit into three shoe boxes and a little aluminum tin. Today when we got into school, there was still maybe fifteen minutes to class, so Britt, nee-chan, Shauna, and some other people all went up to Mr. Vigneux's (which is a freakin' odd spelling for a name pronounced "veen-yoh") room (because that's the class that Britt and nee-chan have with Shauna) and left the boxes by his desk, with a note not to eat them until B period.

Perhaps the best part, though, was that my B period class is science, and Britt interns with my science teacher, so she asked him if I would get in a lot of trouble if I was a minute or two late for class, because it was the celebration of one of my friend's 18th birthday, and he said it was okay, so I ended up plopping down on Mr. Vigneux's floor and eating a cupcake. w00t! When I got to science, the teacher wasn't even there yet, so I left him a cupcake on his desk.

Aaaand, jujitsu was great today. Aly got her yellow belt! Go Aly! Britt might join, too. Also, in geometry, I did a proof from start to finish by myself. YAY! Proofs are fun </nerd> ...but it's true.