Tuesday to dos

CAKE DAY: First thing this morning, we were firing up the oven. It was time to bake a cake, a Birthday Dreams donation. 

The birthday girl wanted a chocolate cake with vanilla icing, so we whipped up our favorite rich chocolate cake recipe. We cooked four 6-inch rounds, with the aim being a columnar cake.

We snuck a few mini chocolate chips in between the layers. 

After that, it was time to stack. There are four little posts under a mid-point cake board to help support the weight of the top two layers. 

We were told the party was for a 17-year-old who loves the color black. There's one problem with that request. Cakes with icing tinted black taste terrible, and turn party goers' mouths black. So, we came up with a work around. We decided to stud the sides of the cake with (mostly) black candies.

There's really no way to do that without winding up with a whole bunch of those little black rounds all over the place, but oh well. 

Once the sides were done, we topped the cake with 17 dollops of homemade marshmallow icing, one for every candle she'll need on the cake. We also found some nifty tall, thin black candles. 

We hope she likes it!

LUNCHEON: Today was the last in a series of Lunch with Staff for Connections (middle and high school) student members from The Museum of Flight. 

Today's guests were Robin Webster, development and membership, Bill French, human resources, Clark Miller, facilities, and Michael Graham, education.

Once again, the kids (and I) learned a whole lot about who and what it takes to run The Museum of Flight. And, once again, we were just one of two groups of people who linked in on the Zoom event. A shame more people didn't join, but we were happy to have the opportunity.

IN THE OTHER WASHINGTON: I've been meaning to make mention of the fact that during the White House's remodeling to accommodate the new administration, a super cool artifact
has been added to the Oval Office. Officially known as Lunar Sample 76015,143, it's a moon rock.

                                                       Photo credit: NASA

According to a NASA press release, the artifact is on loan "In symbolic recognition of earlier generations’ ambitions and accomplishments, and support for America’s current Moon to Mars exploration approach, a Moon rock now sits in the Oval Office of the White House." 

According to an inscription on the artifact's housing, "The Apollo 17 astronaut Ronald Evans and moonwalkers Harrison Schmitt and Eugene Cernan, the last humans to set foot on the Moon, chipped this sample from a large boulder at the base of the North Massif in the Taurus-Littrow Valley, 3 km (almost 2 miles) from the Lunar Module. This 332 gram piece of the Moon (less than a pound), which was collected in 1972, is a 3.9-billion-year-old sample formed during the last large impact event on the nearside of the Moon, the Imbrium Impact Basin, which is 1,145 km or 711.5 miles in diameter."

If things go as planned (and that is a pretty big 'if' at this point), NASA plans to return to the moon in 2024 (with the help of some commercial partners). That mission, Artemis, can be tracked here: https://www.nasa.gov/specials/artemis/