HePPY NeW YEuAr!

Just before New Year’s Eve, as I was trying to plan our dinner with friends (grown-ups, so I felt I had to respect their special needs in terms of the absence of blood and gore when it comes to their food … SIGH!), I learned that the U.N. have declared 2019 the International Year of the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements. (It’s true!)

I thought this should be the cake theme.

(2019 is also UNESCO’s International Year of Indigenous Languages which would have been cool as a theme, too, but that would have required some research, and I didn’t have enough time. Grrr.)

And then I realised that a periodic-table-of-chemical-elements cake would be a lot of work.

I don’t like a lot of work.

(Nah, that’s not entirely true. At least not when it comes to baking. But I was preparing a rather big fancy dinner which was going to keep me busy in the kitchen for a whole day anyway.)

So I decided to incorporate the theme in a different way.

Step 1: an orange quark cake. (Quark! Get it!? Hee!)

Step 2: Periodic table bunting.

I had to cheat a bit because the letters used in the periodic table were not accommodating (which I find quite rude, to be frank!)

So … HePPY NeW YEuAr, everybody!
May the periodic table of chemical elements be with you.

Chocolate Souffle Cheesecake for Friday the 13th (and against burnt Brussels sprouts)

Today, I had five reasons to bake a cake:

Reasons 1 – 3: Chocolate. Souffle. Cheesecake.

Reason 4: It’s Friday the 13th! Yay!

Reason 5: Yesterday, I managed to burn Brussels sprouts. I was seriously distracted for a moment or two, and only noticed what had happened when it was already a bit of a catastrophe… The smell is HIDEOUS. Capital HID, capital EEE-OUS.

And it’s two more things: pervasive and tenacious. Every corner of our home still smells of it. And there’s only so much you can do with opening the windows wide. So I had to bake a cake in order for a new smell to cover the burnt Brussels sprouts.*

This is where I got the recipe from: Sweet & Savory by Shinee – I read it the other day and was instantly intrigued, even though I deeply disapprove of the “holiday” mentioned in the text… But then, I have my own occasions for which I bake cakes! To each her own, I say.

Anyway. Intrigued. Yes, I was. Three ingedients? Sounds interesting. Three ingredients, all of which my man loves? Sounds fascinating. (Although he will be disappointed by the lack of butter… ;)

There was a typo in Shinee’s instructions though. When she wrote, “Dust some powdered sugar, if desired” she forgot to add “in the shape of a skull”!

Yes, my cake collapsed and cracked a little… If The Man likes the taste and texture, I will have to have another go some time and try and do better…

In other news, don’t you just love my pretty new cake stand!? We’ve spared no expense, as John Hammond would say: that’s € 1 truly well spent!

* By the way, this has not worked. Rather than cover it, the new smell ganged up with the old one and together they turned into a mutant monster smell out to destroy humankind…