Make & Bake

PROXY CAKE: On Monday, our main focus was completing a birthday cake for Rick's birthday - kind of. 

Rick lives in Vegas now, so he wouldn't be tasting, or even seeing in person, the cake we were making for him. However, as regular readers know, we like to donate cakes to kids in local homeless shelters via one of our favorite charities, Birthday Dreams. So, we went on their website and chose the cake request we thought Rick would like best if he were still a little boy.

When I saw a youngster wanted a superhero cake, I knew that was the one we had to do for Rick. he was all about super hero action figures when he was young.

We decided to incorporate elements of the Big Three into the cake. We covered the cake board in red fondant and carved a spider web into it as a nod to Spider-Man.

The cake's bottom layer was vanilla cake covered in buttercream tinted silver and decked out Batman style. The top 'cake' layer was actually a giant Krispies treat covered in homemade marshmallow fondant. 

For both layers, the e belts are from fondant we made, the capes are sculpted from modeling chocolate we made, as are the cake toppers. The logos are cut from from a sugar sheets.

We also put the cake recipient's name on the cake board, but left it off for confidentiality reasons prior to this photo.

With every cake we donate, I make up a little cake tutorial, so whoever is serving it knows what's what ingredient wise, as well as what's hiding inside structurally.

This cake was a fun one. We hope both boys (Rick and the young recipient) liked it!

JARRING: Tuesday night we *finally* got around to jarring the honey we extracted from a couple of our hive's frames last week. The bowl below shows how much our 'haul' was (9 ounce bear jar for scale).

We are lucky that there's a jar wholesaler down in the Sodo district of Seattle, which is conveniently located for us. We went there a couple days back and scored some honeycomb shaped jars at a reasonable price.

We scooped the honey out of the bowl and let it stream into the jars.

 It wasn't the quickest process, but it was relaxing in a way.

 It's kind of mesmerizing watching the honey slowly run into the vessels.

We were very careful while filling the jars, not wanting to waste a single, precious drop of the special stuff!

TEST KITCHEN: The fourth Saturday of most every month, we help serve dinner at a shelter for homeless young adults and teens. This month the service will be close to Halloween, so we pitched a sorta spooky menu including "Halloweenies" (mummy wrapped hot dogs) and screaming beans (spicy baked beans).

Tuesday night, we gave a couple of recipes a test run.

We were mostly happy with them. You have to love the Instant Pot pressure cooker. You can go from dry beans to this (below) in about two hours. Remarkable!

SOMETHING TO CHEW ON: The headline was one you don't see every day. The tease notification from Space.com read, "Meat Grown in Space for the First Time Ever."

I had to click on that.

On October 7, Aleph Farms, an Israeli food company, announced that its experiment aboard the International Space Station resulted in the first-ever lab-grown meat in space. 

Here's a Roscosmos photo of the cosmonaut with the space meat.

The company grows lab "cultivated beef steaks," which is an entire piece edible meat from just a couple of cells. On the ISS a 3D bioprinter was used.  In the contraption, "animal cells, are mixed with growth factors and the material 'bioink,' and 'printed' into a layered structure," per Space,com's article.  

No mention of whether the meat was eaten and how it tastes. The article's subhead did note, however, that the cultivated meat is "slaughter-free." That's something to think about.