...and sometimes monsters from another dimension try to crawl out of your sponge cake.

Here's a lesson no one needs to learn: sometimes life fails at being awesome. And it's bad when it's happening to you, but watching someone else go through it is no picnic either. When stupid things happen, often the only real solution is time. Wait. Eventually life will feel less worse. Although that doesn't mean it's not still a little bitch.

In the meantime, there's not much you can do to help someone who's dealing with their shit. But if they call you from bart and need a not-stupid person to hang out with, you can invite them over to take it out on the sponge cake you're making for a trifle.

There may be casualties.

Actually, I'm going to take full credit for the sponge cake disaster, and offer some more advice: don't overbeat your eggs. If they get bigger and bigger and bigger and then get smaller, it's too late.

Monsters from another dimension will warp your poor, innocent sponge cake, trying to get into this world by way of your kitchen. There is nothing you can do. You will have to buy store-made cake for your trifle.


On the other hand, the sponge cake will be so desperately hilarious that life will seem a little less ridiculous.

And the trifle will have enough fresh fruit and Grand Marnier that no one will notice the absence of homemade sponge cake, and will start eating it before you can take a nice photograph.

And then your friend, who is a very talented, intelligent, beautiful lady, will give you a lovely blog award, and while you won't understand exactly what that is and have to call her during her work hours to figure it out, it's still quite lovely and much appreciated.

To recap:

=

And apparently this One Lovely Blog Award requires me to tell you seven things about me that you may not know and, ideally, aren't entirely uninteresting. And then I'm supposed to pass it to the next lovely blogger, who will look like an asshole if they don't do the same.

One. I was a very picky eater when I was a kid, which was mostly about texture, but I also really hated peanut butter. Once I took a nap with gum in my mouth, and it got in my hair, and my daycare teacher had to use peanut butter to remove it, and my hair smelled like peanut butter, and it was the worst thing ever. Way worse than gummy hair. I grew out of my pickiness, and now I think peanut butter is a-okay, although I don't have the same attachment to it that others do.

Two. The only thing I still refuse to eat is kimchi, which it cabbage that has been left out, rotted, and then is stuffed into small jars with large amounts of spicy. I witnessed an explosive kimchi incident as a young girl and it left deep scars.

Three. My mom always made my birthday cakes and I was never jealous of other kids and their fancy store-bought ones.

Four. The most amazing thing I've ever eaten is an olallieberry (or a loganberry or a boysenberry - some sort of blackberry relative. I can't find the menu.) from Alice Water's Chez Panisse.

Five. My grandpa used to count the peanuts in the little packets they give you on airplanes. I believe the average was 21.5 per packet. Now I count peanuts. Delta's average on my last trip was 16.5. Peanut packets these days, they just aren't the same value as they used to be.

Six. I really enjoy reading cookbooks from the 1950s. The recipes are so funny! My favorite is "Frozen Salad." I don't have it in front of me, but as I recall, it has the cook combine crushed pineapple, cream cheese, marshmallow mix, and whipping cream, freezing the mixture, and then spreading mayonnaise over everything. White and frigid, just like a good fifties housewife.

Seven. I used to live in a house with a lot of potheads (UCSC like what!) which was fantastic, because whenever I messed up a cooking project (like bread that didn't rise enough and was dense and almost soggy on the inside) I could just leave it out on the counter and it would disappear overnight. And the next morning everyone would be raving about the delicious thing they ate when they got the munchies at 3am.

There! Seven things! And the next sucker is Robyn, who is an amazing cook, baker, writer, tweeter, friend, and all-around bad-ass lady, and who needs to update her blog more because I like to read it.