a five things meme

[rushthatspeaks]

Have been sick, still am sick, and haven't had much to write about. A meme is a good way to realize what I may not have been talking to people about as much as I think I have.

So, five things, from trishkitten, and if you want me to give you five things, uh, I guess I can? Not very good at that end...

Trish wanted me to talk about:

amazing cakes. Which is interesting, because cake in itself isn't my primary dessert-making focus, it's just that a lot of the desserts I make tend to use it as a base because it can be sculptural and is otherwise modifiable. I do like cake, though. I like it so much better than pie. But not as well as mousse. I work very hard at making good cake, and have considered trying to become a professional baker, although I am still fighting with myself over the baker/more general patisserie/line cook question.

a vegan cake recipe from the 1940s, via the Homesick Texan, with my notes added: I can vouch for this. It was initially a wartime cake, but then so was carrot cake.

Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups of flour
1 cup of sugar
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (with my usual note to use the good stuff)
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
5 tablespoons canola oil
1 cup cold water (not iced)
1 cup diced Granny Smith or other good baking apples, peeled and cored (1 medium-sized apple)
optional: 1/2 cup chopped pecans or walnuts

Method:
1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
2. Combine dry ingredients in flour sifter and sift into an ungreased 8x8 square or a 9-inch round baking pan. You can also use a 9-inch cast-iron skillet. You really don't need to grease the pan, there's enough oil in the batter.
3. Poke three holes into the flour mixture. In the first hole, pour the vinegar. In the second hole, pour the vanilla. In the third hole, pour the oil. Enjoy the reminiscences of your fifth-grade science project.
4. Then pour one cup of water into the pan (don't wait for it to subside or anything) and mix very well.
5. Stir in the apples and nuts.
6. Place in the oven and bake for 45 minutes or less, until done.
7. Cut in squares and sprinkle top with powdered sugar. You really don't need to ice this. Most of the icings I can think of that would go well with it aren't vegan anyway.


my current default icon: is from Baccano!, the anime that kept me in anime fandom last year when I simply couldn't otherwise bring myself to care. There was just nothing I wanted to watch, and nothing I wanted to buy, and nothing that didn't make me feel like I'd outgrown such vast portions of anime-as-it-is-marketed that there was no point in trying to keep up with the new stuff. And then there was Baccano!, and it makes me smile every time I think about it, literally, I'm smiling now. And having that kept me paying attention enough to run into a couple of other shows, such as Spice and Wolf, which I would have been sad to miss. So partly the icon is a character I love from a show I like that makes me smile, and partly it's a reminder that even though the things I like can be few and far between and the landscape of particular portions of culture can look like a horrible wasteland of sameness and banality, it's worth continuing to poke around anyway. (My primary specification for a default LJ icon is: makes me happy to look at.)

And I think the other three get a second post.

Comments

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I would happily take five things from you were you to be so minded at some point.

Also, *hugs* and continued hoping for less sick soon.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

*hug*

Angels, Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter (which I have not seen), how you started playing Civ, a book you think has been overlooked, there is no fifth thing.

And *hug* again.

[sovay]

and if you want me to give you five things, uh, I guess I can? Not very good at that end...

Er, sure. I'm really bad at following up on memes—schreibergasse set me one last year that turned into a series of essays about favorite characters and I had to shut it down before it ate my brain.

Feel better. I'll send you the recipe for the eggnog cake when I get back this afternoon.

*hugs*

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

That's the first thing I've voluntarily eaten in fifteen years which contained the word 'eggnog'.

Just tell me five movies you think I should see?

[sovay]

That's the first thing I've voluntarily eaten in fifteen years which contained the word 'eggnog'.

And it sat all right?

Just tell me five movies you think I should see?

Hmm. Okay. If you've seen these already, tell me and I'll suggest some other things. In no particular order—

1. Orphée (1949). Jean Cocteau is really not as interested in retelling the story of Orpheus and Eurydike in postwar France—compare it with Orfeu Negro (1959), a more or less straight transposition of the original myth to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro—as he is in writing really awesome fanfic for it, which means that while there is a poet and his wife and maenads and katabasis, there is also Death's chauffeur, a literary magazine, a car radio tuned to dead air, and stage business right out of a bedroom farce, except not. Pieces of it are very funny, pieces of it are chilling. It doesn't stop where you think it should. It is set in present-day France and the underworld looks like some burned-out, bombed-out cellar of the occupation years; María Casares' La Princesse is one of the three characterizations of Death I like best.

2. Titus (1999). The intellectually brilliant thing about Julie Taymor's adaptation of Titus Andronicus is that it uses the nonexistent emperors of the Shakespearean original as a springboard to create an alternate history in which the Roman Empire continued up to the present day, quite naturally evolving 1930's Fascist architecture as it went. It shouldn't have worked at all on film, especially when she introduces the Goths as, well, goths, but somehow the layers of visual and cultural allusion meld and it does not matter that what we are watching bears almost no resemblance to any historical Rome, it rings on all the right frequencies. The rest of the brilliant things are that it's by Julie Taymor, so the armies of Rome are golems of Tiber mud and a mutilated girl becomes a blasted winter tree, there are apocalyptic visions of anachronistic cherubs, and she handles the horrifying denouement by cranking up the violence until it becomes a gleeful cartoon and then leaving the dust to settle on the audience in the aftermath. It's probably wrong that this was the first thing I saw Anthony Hopkins in.

2a. The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964). Despite a cast which contains Alec Guinness, James Mason, Sophia Loren, Omar Sharif, and Christopher Plummer, this is not a good movie; it contains about a third of a good movie concentrated near the beginning of its runtime and thereafter interspersed randomly among scenes of Stephen Boyd being unable to act his way out of a paper bag with a flashlight and instructions in triplicate. Very few remakes are better than their originals, but The Fall of the Roman Empire was deservedly trashed by Gladiator. Nonetheless, I consider it requisite viewing for anyone with even vague interests in the classical world—you won't learn very much about the late second century, but the funeral of Marcus Aurelius is a genuinely other-timely setpiece and Christopher Plummer is so much fun to watch.

[sovay]

3. Revengers Tragedy (2002). If you are going to watch Titus, you might as well see my other favorite revenge tragedy on film, which replaces the action from an allegorical Jacobean-Italian court to post-apocalyptic Liverpool. It mixes and matches modern dialogue with the Middleton and it works surprisingly well, as does the soundtrack by Chumbawamba. The slash value between Vindice and Lussurioso goes up to eleven in this version, and since they are played by Christopher Eccleston and Eddie Izzard, I am quite sure a lot of it has been written; and its Castiza is as complicit in the murder plot as her brothers. Derek Jacobi—in sunglasses and ponytail—is clearly having a great time as the Duke.

4. Un conte de Noël (2008). This is the only film I've ever seen, aside from Fanny and Alexander, which leaves you with the sensation of having been immersed in someone else's family—here only for the three or four days before and after Christmas, but there is history that goes back forty years and some of it is life-changing and some of it is debris and the film is not going to explain most of it to you, except insofar as any family that gets together retells the same stories and has the same fights and every so often solves a longstanding problem, although this is not the kind of film where the Christmas spirit pervades the narrative and tidies up all the loose ends. It's not anti-Christmas, mind you. It is just totally unpredictable, in the way that large, volatile gatherings of related people are. By the end of the movie, it's difficult to say whether you like or dislike any of these people, no matter what endearing or appalling or completely boring behavior they have displayed; you are too close to them. Oh, and there's a ghost wolf in the basement.

5. Hobson's Choice (1954). I'd prefer to say as little about this one as possible, since I took it home from the audiovisual shelves at the Arlington Library because it had a Criterion spine and was surprised and delighted by the results; it's one of David Lean's pre-epic films and it is at once acid-etched and oddly sweet. I showed it to Greer for reasons that will become obvious afterward, but it's gotten me to notice John Mills wherever he turns up now.

Will that do?

[eredien]

Five things?

[seishonagon.livejournal.com]

I'll take five things, if you've got the time.

[octopedingenue]

I would like very much now to have cake and also five things. If you have time to provide the latter, I can have my cake and eat it on this end.