 Ganache Crash |
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There is a strong possibility that if you are a breathing human living on planet earth that I owe you an e-mail. Let me just get that out of the way. It's not that I don't plan to write back, I am just behind and it will take me a while to catch up. Lord almighty. I went through a couple of weeks of being too tired and defeated after work to bother making dinner or doing anything but prostrating myself with my new sheets pulled over my head, and I think my body decided that it was deprived and has gone into a gluttonous overload. Last weekend I ate eggs baked into rosemary focaccia bread and the best grits that have ever crossed my lips. And bacon. Bacon! Then because that wasn't enough, I ate some spinach and ricotta ravioli, a bite of turtle soup, some crabcakes with crawfish macque choux, and strawberries soaked in Grand Marnier over homemade chocolate gelato with phyllo pastry and whipped cream. Then to top it all off, I ate a chocolate chip walnut cookie. It's really a miracle that I have lived to tell this tale, but it's hard to be in the city with some of the best restaurants in existence and not enjoy the bounty placed before you. That's no excuse for the pizza and Snickers ice cream cone extravaganza of yesterday, though. Perhaps I should consult Annegrrl about her master cleanse. So, let's talk about Vegas. I'm going to list the suggestions that I've gotten but not the people who made them in case they don't want to be outed as the Vegas-lovin' whores that they are. There's Cirque du Soleil, specifically O, which someone called the most spectacular thing she's ever seen in her life. Cirque du Soleil was definitely the most strongly and frequently recommended of all suggestions. Walking around in Paris and partaking of the buffet there and the coconut macaroons. Mamma Mia. Hoover Dam. The roller coaster at New York, New York, or the one on top of the Stratosphere. (Skip the volcano in front of the Mirage.) The Freemont Street Experience. Comedy at the Comedy Spot. The Luxor, which is not where we're staying, but it sounds nice. Do not expect to sleep. Do not try to walk around during the day. The calamari appetizer at Fusia, breakfast at Grand Lux in the Venetian, Caesar's Palace Forum shops & mint white chocolate gelato near the fountain, shopping at the Aladdin and Venetian. Mandalay Bay: Shark reef exhibit, House of Blues for dinner, rumjungle for drinks. Fireside Lounge. The incredibly retarded-but-super-fun "ride" at Caesar's called Race for Atlantis. The conservatory at Bellagio, and the Bellagio water show (dinner at the Eiffel tower restaurant in Paris will give you a nice view of the show, sadly, a large dent in your wallet as well. Barry Manilow. Red Rock Canyon to take in the view, watch crazy rock climbers, and look for wild burros. And comfortable shoes. We'd like to take a day trip out to one of the national parks but fear we might keel over and die from the heat. We will have to look into this further. Go read Tamar's entry about Vegas. I was reading about the Los Alamos informant who got the crap beaten out of him, and I started for some reason thinking about Tiger Eyes. (I despise the cover pictured in this link and love my old-school one.) That's where I first learned about Los Alamos. Who said that Judy Blume never taught anyone anything? (Let's not forget the life lesson that you shouldn't put aftershave on balls, indelibly imprinted on my brain upon reading Forever. Before my mom discovered it and took it away from me, of course.) In case you are a poor soul who's never read Tiger Eyes, it's about Davey Wexler, a teenager whose dad is killed in a convenience store robbery in Atlantic City and who moves with her mother and brother to New Mexico so they can live with her uncle and his wife and get back on their feet. Her uncle is kind of an asshole and works at Los Alamos. He and his wife are super strict and cautious, very different from her own parents, and Davey thinks that especially her uncle really needs to remove the pole from his butt. Davey has a hard time adjusting to her new life, misses her dad desperately and is still wholly traumatized by his death, misses her boyfriend, and pretty much hates everything and is living in a fog. She becomes friends with Jane, who's an alcoholic and kind of a weirdo, but whatever, Jane. She also goes out hiking in the canyon and meets Wolf. Wolf is pretty much the most important person ever. With Wolf, she ceases to be Davey and becomes Tiger. They hike and they talk but don't reveal too much about their lives and somehow he helps to bring her back out of herself, to help her deal with her dad's death. Because I don't want to spoil the book, that's all I'll say about the plot. Except that it's awesome. And I remember all of these little things I learned from it, like what the word "moot" means, and the expression of how a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, and what chamber music is, and sangria, and about how being in the desert for the first time can give you a nosebleed, that a cat who's weaned too early can get an oral fixation and like to drink out of the toilet, and how to translate cuando los lagartijos corren. These things (well, except for the last one) are in no way major parts of the book, but I remember them from it, remember learning about them from it. Certainly I read all of Judy Blume's books dozens of times, but this one is the best. I mean, can it even be argued otherwise? I think not. I loved this book so much. The RENT trailer is now online. I am not sure what potential audience they are trying to attract with this. Shelley was having trouble pulling it up on her computer without having it freeze, but she saw enough of it to conjecture, "Maybe Adam Pascal's hair is so ugly that it's breaking my Quicktime." Amen. My little brother finally cleared up who the chick is whom Adam is singing to and making out with when he has semi-normal hair in what must be flashback scenes -- April. As in, "Her name was April." "It's out again." "Sorry 'bout your friend." Apparently April is now her very own character because clearly they didn't have enough to deal with already. We're also pretty confused by the Seasons of Love scene, as in the standing, singing, and clapping in a line as they do in the play. What possible reason could they do that in the movie? Shelley asked, "What are they suddenly, the Von Trapps?" My brother thinks maybe they just do that for the trailer. Who the hell knows? It's all very overwhelming. Some of them just look exactly the same. Jonathan Larson's parents and sister are apparently on set every day and are being very supportive and giving lots of input, so I see that as nothing but a good thing as far as the direction the film can take. Still. The trailer left me feeling a little weird inside. Mostly it just made me feel like I needed to lie down. So I have survived the adventure of the cupcakes. I'd never made cupcakes before, and my inaugural baking extravaganza was with these espresso cupcakes with milk chocolate ganache filling and white chocolate frosting. I ignored those who gently warned me that this might be too ambitious for a cupcake novice and plunged ahead. Once I overcame the hurdle of actually finding espresso powder in this godforsaken city as well as cupcake papers that did not feature Spongebob Squarepants, Scooby Doo, Shrek, or Spiderman, I set forth on making them. (I actually solicited assistance from a total stranger in the grocery store who was in my aisle. "Excuse me, do you know where they might have cupcake papers that aren't for kids? I cannot give a grown man cupcakes in swathed in images of Dora the Explorer." She sympathized and pointed me to the aluminum foil section, which I walked by about ten times before I finally saw the damn plain wrappers. Thank you, strange lady!) I made the ganache in the morning before work, which seemed simple enough -- heat up some heavy whipping cream, melt in some milk chocolate, whisk until smooth, put in the fridge until cold, viola! Then that night I baked the cupcakes after sampling a large dose of the batter, which tasted like some kind of creamy frappuccino explosion of ecstasy in my mouth. I almost burned them but not quite, hallelujah. Then I made the frosting, losing my double boiler virginity when melting the white chocolate with the double boiler from Maryelizabeth's as seen on TV Original Chocolate Factory and luckily not scorching it. After the cupcakes had cooled, I reached inside the fridge, ready to fill the cupcakes with the ganache, but the ganache, while certainly cold, was really, really, liquidy. Like a very liquidy batter, and I knew that if I tried to fill a cupcake with it, the cupcake would hastily dissolve into goo. I paged Shelley. "Ganache emergency." She called me back straight away and told me that the ganache would have to be whipped since it was, in fact, made of whipping cream. I moaned, "The recipe doesn't say anything about whipping." She said nicely, "Sometimes the more complictated recipes assume too much about what you already know." I laughed deliriously and covered my face with a frosting-covered hand. "Whip," she ordered. "Whip vigorously." I made her clarify what that meant and she said, "USE THE MIXER UNTIL IT GETS FROTHY!" So I did. And frothy it became. I dumped it into a ziploc with the corner cut off, praising myself inwardly for my genius homemade pastry bag. This was interrupted when Shelley called me from a gay bar in New York City to announce that the video for "Since You've Been Gone" was on, and she sang me a few bars. This definitely put some spirit into my squirting. So much spirit that the sealed top of the bag burst open and ganache flew out of the top in a projectile manner toward my face. I overcame this snafu and cut little holes in the tops of two of the cupcakes and squirted in some ganache, set the top of the cut-out portion back on top of the cupcakes, and frosted them. I decided that I should probably not be filling and frosting the day ahead so I covered them all tightly and finished the next night before I headed to the birthday boy's house, on the way to which half of the frosting melted off the top of the cupcakes and slid onto the bottom of the pan, nestling them in a snowy white chocolate oozefest. I still have ganache on my kitchen ceiling and a possibly a little bit up my nose. Despite my spazosity, making these was really fun. 
I'm a little out of sorts today after sleeping for three hours last night, but the rock show and ringing in the birthday were worth any sleep deprivation, and I plan to make it up by enthusiastically leaping into my bed immediately upon finishing this here entry.
About this time in ...
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