Election in Action

TAKE A TOUR: Regular readers may know that I've taken a temporary job with King County Elections helping out with Washington's Presidential Primary voting. It's a temp job, but full time during the gig.

One thing I've learned is that the public is welcome to come to the elections headquarters in Renton, WA, just down the hill from our house, and they can take a tour of the facility.

If making it there in person isn't in the cards for you, you can take a video tour instead.

My job is on the front lines of election headquarters. It's demanding and intense and it feels like tremendously important work, getting people of all ages, ethnicities, political parties and so on registered to vote, handing them their ballots and giving them instructions about how to vote. I've only been doing that for four days, but I feel like I could already write a book about all of the stories. There are jubilant voters and incensed voters and everything in between. And they all have their own stories. One thing in common with each is that it's democracy in action, and it's pretty cool having a front row seat.

Also, can I just say what TERRIBLE HORRIBLE time it is/was for me to get a front line customer service gig, including contact with people who have traveled all over the world VERY recently. If I don't get coronavirus, it will be a miracle. 

SEA UNICORN: This weekend, we had a cake to bake for Birthday Dreams, a non-profit that provides birthday parties to kids in homeless shelters. The birthday boy's wish was a narwhal cake.

Challenge accepted!

Annabelle and I looked for narwhal cakes online and found some great ideas. We baked four layers of chocolate brownie cake, and stacked them,slightly offset, with vanilla cream in between.

We had to crumb coat the cake, made some fondant, and circled the cake in a rice cereal treat ring.

Here's Annabelle's account of the project. ...

To create our narwhal cake for Birthday Dreams, we first had to bake our favorite chocolate cake recipe from the book ‘Hello, Cupcake!’ We made enough of this recipe to bake 4 layers of circular cake and one hemisphere for the top of the head. Once the layers were baked, we stacked them at a slight angle to create the illusion of a narwhal breaching the surface of the water, which was represented by a layer of rice krispies covered with whipped blue forsting. We covered the cakes with a buttercream crumb coat and laid blue-green fondant over the whole thing as the narwhal’s skin. The face was made of the same homemade marshmallow fondant material, just colored with different food coloring and rolled very thin. The horn is fondant wrapped around a skewer for stability, and curled into the iconic spiral shape. We made fins out of homemade modelling chocolate (melting candy and oil mixed together) and covered them in the same color as the body. The narwhal cake was our first ever try at making a cake like this, and I found it rather simple and fun! 

I think it's so darn cute!