Eggless Chocolate Cake with Raspberry Butter Cream Frosting Yum!

My friend, Kellie, celebrated her birthday last Saturday and the poor woman is allergic to eggs.

I found this recipe for eggless chocolate cake on allrecipes.com. It's nummy.

Ingridents:
• 560 g sifted all-purpose flour
• 600 g white sugar
• 85 g unsweetened cocoa powder
• 235 ml vegetable oil
• 710 ml water
• 15 g baking soda
• 3 g salt
• 45 ml vanilla extract

DIRECTIONS
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C), grease and flour a 9x13 inch pan.
2. In a large bowl, sift together flour, cocoa powder, soda and salt. Add sugar and mix together.
3. Add oil, water and vanilla and mix thoroughly.
4. Pour into a 9x13 inch pan. Bake at 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) for 1 hour or until toothpick inserted in centre comes out clean.

Thank you Allrecipes.com!

Then I did another search for raspberry frosting and found this recipe on a blog called Cupcake Frenzy. Sadly this blog hasn't been updated since November 2006, but there's loads of good stuff up there.

Raspberry Buttercream Frosting

150g butter, softened
2-3 cups icing sugar
frozen raspberries, quantity depends on how much of a raspberry taste/colour you're after
1/3 cup milk

1. Cream the butter. Add the icing sugar and raspberries and beat well. If you find you need more liquid in the frosting, add milk gradually.
2. Frost away!

Now this frosting recipe is not exact (it even says so on the blog). I suggest that you cream the butter and sugar well first and then add the strawberries. I'm not certain that the milk is wholly necessary.

So, I frosted the cake and added fresh raspberries to the top, circled the raspberries with white frosting as I thought it would look cute, put candles on the top and realised much to my horror that the colours were very Arsenal FC. I may support Arsenal but my Kellie is a Chelsea supporter. She did make a joking comment about the colours of the cake but absolutely loved it. In fact, everybody loved it. There wasn't a crumb left by the end of the night.

Here's a pic of the cake pre candles:


Here's the cake on fire:

If you have a friend whose allergic to eggs, make certain they get a birthday cake when their day rolls around.

How Twitter Ruined My Blog

It's Twitter's fault.

Yep.

Nothing to do with me being super busy or too exhausted from thinking and reading and writing for a living to actually write about my life.

No it's all Twitter's fault for my lack of blogs. Why? Well...

Every time I have a thought or two that could possibly be a blog I tweet about it in 140 characters. It's like micro-blogging. Then my desire to tell the whole story, although the whole story with my embellishment might actually make you laugh or chuckle a bit more than my tweet, is diminished. And, I go on with my life and have more thoughts which become more tweets and the cycle continues.

Remember, I'm always thinking. Sometimes even my tweets can't keep up with my brain, but I digress.

This doesn't mean that I don't have some damn good ideas for blogs or stories for "My Luck with Cars and Boys". I have at least 3 half finished pieces that are definitely blog worthy at the very least. However when I sit down (like now) after a day of thinking and reading and writing for work to blog, I find myself zapped of the energy to complete them. Twitter, on the other hand, takes little to no energy.

And now, I also blame my new toy. You may remember that I mentioned in my post about my MacBook how I just needed one more toy to make my technological life perfect. Well, I now have that toy. Here is a pic of a dishevelled, make-up free me (after a day of thinking and reading and writing for work) with my new toy.


Yes, that's an iPhone. And it has TweetDeck on it. So, now my twittering has become even easier. You'd think I'd use it to blog and maybe I will. I'll probably even start to AudioBoo regularly...eventually. So who knows. Maybe I'll revert to my habits of regularly blogging...maybe.

Until then if you're not on Twitter, you can look to the right of this page to see what I've just tweeted.

And now I'm back to thinking and reading and writing for work before I head to bed.

Oh Grow Up!!!

Good Lord, people! How old are you???

First Adebayor, you made goal number 3 in a game against your former team and yes Man City went on to win, but tell me did you need to run 90 yards and end with an arrogant display of you postulating on your knees, arms in the air to flaunt your goal in front of the supporters of the club you played for last season? Also, did you really need to kick Van Persie in the face? I watched that game and that kick looked like it could have been avoided, but you went for it anyway. Really, how old are you?? I hope at the very least that the rumour I have been hearing that the FA may penalise you with a 5 game ban is true.

Next on my list of childish displays is of course Serena Williams. Yes, sweetie, that was a horribly bad call but if you had just gone on to play, you'd probably have won. But no. You thought it would be prudent to curse out the line judge and threaten to ram a tennis ball down her throat. And so as a penalty you lost the match and you got a fine. You deserved both.

And finally our little fit of disrespectful defiance comes from you, Kanye West. Taylor Swift wins the MTV award for Best Female Video and you see fit to jump on stage, pull the microphone out of her hand and spout out your opinion that you think Beyonce should have won. Since when did the MTV awards become the Kanye West awards?? You want your own award show, go for it. But quit spoiling other people's moments of glory. What really makes me ill is that you didn't get a fine or any sort of consequence except negative media backlash. You got off easy.

To the younger generation, it's you and other celebrities they see as heroes. It sickens me to think about the message your behaviour sent out to the real youth in society. I know that you three aren't the only ones who have done thrown such indulgent childish tantrums. However, it seems to be happening more and more among your ilk. Since when did behaving in such a juvenile manner become socially acceptable? I blame the culture of instant gratification for this glorified infantile conduct but I am by no means citing that opinion as an excuse. You’re all adults now. Grow up and act appropriately!

On the flip side we have people like Beyonce. You, my dear, recognised what Kanye West had taken from Taylor Swift and thus when you received your award, you gracefully gave the microphone to Taylor so that she could have the moment she had been denied. That was real class. Thank you. I wish there were more celebrities like you.

Okay, rant over. Have a nice day (or eve depending on where you are).