All Eyes on Me

In honor of the visit of aurora_knightthis weekend, I decided to make a little present for her.


It's a cake in emulation of a much better made one I found on the Internet, meant to emulate the the look of Mjolnir stuck in the mud in the movie Thor, waiting  for someone worthy of it to pluck it from the ground. It's a two-layer eight inch round devil's food cake iced with Hersey chocolate frosting. The best part was getting to gouge the top up with a spatula so I could make it look like mud to lay the hammer in. I got the toy Mjolnir from Target for twelve dollars. It is nicely modeled for a cheap toy, made of a bouncy Nerf foam. Jane gets to take that home with her after we eat the cake. It tastes pretty decent, but I know my cake baking skills could use some work. Unfortunately the problem with practicing is that then I'll have a ton of cake lying around that I won't be able to stop eating.

Had one of the nicest weekends I've had in quite some time. Saturday I went to Newport, RI to meet aurora_knight and have a great time walking around through the city. That was a great trip. I'd never been there before, but I knew it was a pretty town by the sea where lots of Gilded Age millionaires built their summer homes. We went on a tour of two of the grandest, The Breakers and The Elms. The Breakers in particular was opulent, seventy rooms all styled like high French aristocratic chateaux, designed by the famous Vanderbilt family. The ceilings were all crenelated with carvings of animals, mythology, angels, and fruit, and covered over with painted murals. The gilt covering the moldings and the furniture was made of actual gold. The billiard room was walled entirely in marble. There was a fountain under the staircase. It had ballrooms and sitting rooms and dining halls and a breakfast room and dozens of bedrooms. It was grand and gorgeous but honestly rather overdone. It was rather too much for my tastes, and honestly did not seem liveable by modern standards. I was trying to imagine rolling out of bed, padding down that giant staircase in my pajamas and walking across my cavernous hall to eat my breakfast in my opulent breakfast suite. It made me kind of uncomfortable, honestly. Maybe it works better if you're expected to be fully dressed in elegant clothes and have servants waiting on you and making everything happen, but Jane said that even for the age it was considered over-the-top. I like the say I could expand into any amount of space you gave me-- throwing parties and hosting dinners and running larps and having rooms for sewing and gaming and maybe even a performance space --but I found the Breakers to be just too much even for me. My favorite part of it was the butler's pantry, a place like a kitchen except without fixtures like a stove or anything, which was elegant in the simplicity of its very fine dark wood cabinets and endless counter space. By contrast, the other house, The Elms, of the coal family the Berwinds was very fine and grand but more tasteful and liveable. I'm sure I could move in there just fine. :-)

Overall it was a lovely trip, walking around and chatting with Jane, who is always lovely company. I'm so glad she invited me. Thanks, dear! Here is a nice picture of Jane in one of the Newport shops we browsed. Her hair looks very pretty.

This has been a nice week for seeing people I have been missing. The early part of it saw lovely friends crearespero and aurora_knight coming to Waltham to visit, which involved playing on playgrounds and nice dinners and a trip to go swimming and a lovely long walk. I've missed both of them terribly, so this visit was really lovely. Jane could only stay for one night, but Frances only just leaves today. She is going to spend a little extra time with katiescarlett29 before the whole gang of us goes up to her place this weekend. On Friday I will get to see nennivian  when she joins Jared, Bernie, and I to drive up to Long Island together. Steph is finally back from Argentina and has invited us all to visit her and see a Shakespeare in the Park performance of Measure for Measure. And that means that not only will I be reunited with Steph, who I have been missing painfully since she shipped off for Argentina, I will get to see Plesser and thefarowl as well! So a good chunk of all the people whom I haven't been able to spend time with in a while will all be in one place. I'm really grateful to Steph for inviting us, because it will be so wonderful for us all to get together again.

Jared gets in today! I'm so excited. I will be picking him up from the airport around five-thirty, and then we will go out for a dinner at a nice Italian place in the (surprisingly close nearby) North End, followed by coming to BSCF. We should probably be there around eight o'clock and staying for the rest of the evening, for those of you who would like to see the boy while he's in town. 

In housemate news, we now have a Jane at Elsinore! She got in around the middle of the day yesterday, and with her arrival, the place is now complete. I hope she is settling in comfortably, and enjoys living there with us. I'm glad to have her, and I'm also glad that things will finally be able to settle. It's looking like Elsinore's going to be a pretty fun place to be now. 

Which brings me to the thought of how, especially lately, Elsinore has been a favorite hangout spot. This pleases me, because I love entertaining. One of the best things, in my opinion, about living at Elsinore is that there is the kitchen and living room space necessary to have people over to do things like hang out, have gaming gatherings, and my very favorite form of socialization, the dinner party.

Cooking has become a major hobby of mine as well as something I've gotten kind of good at, so it gives me a lot of job to be able to share it with the special people in my life. I very much have internalized the notion that food is love. By going to the time and effort to cook something delicious to serve to people I care about, I am showing the love I have for my guests and my desire to make them happy. I also love food as a social lubricant. Some of the best and most comfortable conversations I've had with large groups of people have happened over a dinner table sharing a tasty meal. It's so easy to connect with each other that way-- I suspect that it is because of this that so much of human ritual, ceremony, and celebration incorporates people eating together as a major aspect.  

It also enormously helps my development as a cook. As much as I enjoy cooking for its own sake, like pretty much everyone I find it much more worthwhile to cook for a large group. It feels like a greater return on the effort. And I like the challenges it offers me as a menu planner. What meal can I design that will appeal to everyone's tastes, and satisfy the requirements of the vegetarians, the carnivores, the kosher people, all on the same plate? I like serving lots of different things to my guests, so it keeps me looking for new dishes to try in order to keep the menu interesting. And then I get external feedback. Are things cooked to your liking? Do the flavors of a given dish go well together? Do you find the various dishes I picked for the meal to be complementary? What did I do well, and what should I change for next time? I want to improve as a cook, so I am really interested in varied sources of feedback, and I certainly love talking about cookery and food, so the discussion is interesting as well as useful to me. And of course there's the validation factor-- I love getting compliments on what I serve! So basically having people over is a perfect combination of my favorite things, good food, good friends, and compliments. No wonder I love throwing parties!