Toddler Mutant Ninja Turtle

I'm dating myself, here. I grew up in the era of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. They were pretty cool, right? Patrolling the city's sewers, fighting foes with their awesome martial-artsy skills. It wasn't until I was in college that I really examined how strange the concept of the whole show was. I mean, just listen to the title. Say it out loud. Slowly. Word by word.

Teenage
Mutant
Ninja
Turtles.

What the ... ?

Can you imagine how that studio pitch meeting went?

"Hey Bob, I've got a great new idea for a kids' cartoon."

"Oh yeah? What's the premise?"

"Well, there are these turtles who live in the sewer in the big city. Never know what might actually be in sewers in the big city. Might be alligators. Why not turtles?"

"...Turtles?"

"Yeah! Mutant turtles!"

"Okay...."

"And they all learn martial arts from a wise old rat."

"A mutant rat?"

"Yeah, a wise, old, mutant rat. And they all have these really cool, educated, artsy names. Renaissance masters. Like Michaelangelo."

"All of them?"

"Um, well, maybe. We're working on that."

"Okay.... so, uh, what's the point?"

"Oh, yeah. They go around fighting evil. Basic super hero stuff. But they're not supposed to exist, right? Because they're mutant turtles. So they have to stay in the sewer and fight on the down low and eat pizza and learn from the rat."

Silence.

Awkward shuffle.

"Uh, did I mention that they're teenagers? Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles."

"By God, Mike, why didn't you just say so in the first place! It's brilliant! It's fan-freaking-tastic! We'll start story boards on Monday!"


Come on. Give me a break. It can't have been THAT easy, right? I mean, it sounds like something a college pothead came up with at 2 a.m. for his visual arts class. And yet look at it! It took the world by storm! Swept across the U.S. in a flurry of backpacks and lunch boxes and figurines and lousy live-action movies. I don't remember a whole lot of parents saying "boo" about it. But then again, I probably wasn't paying much attention.

Anyway, none of this has anything to do with cake. The reason it's on my mind is because I was asked to do a cutesy turtle cake for a second birthday party. When I told my friend about it, he asked if it was going to be a TMNT cake. I laughed and said no, and that the 2-year-old was WAY too young to even have ridden on the TMNT revival bandwagon. But as I was frosting the cake, my husband wandered by and said, "So cute! All he needs is a little bandanna mask and nun chucks!"

I snickered a little bit and said, "but he's way too young for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.* Just two. So wouldn't that be more like the Toddler Mutant Ninja Turtles?"

He just kind of looked at me and shrugged.

Regardless, I ended up with a cutesy turtle cake frosted in buttercream. I didn't want to waste a bunch of excess or carve the cake, so I baked the "shell" in my largest Pyrex* bowl, and the head and feet are made from trimmed cupcakes. I put him in the fridge, and when he came out I used a smooth paper towel, placed it against the cake, and rubbed it gently to give the buttercream a smoothed look--being careful that the heat of my hands didn't make it gooey (and looking at the picture, I really should have done his legs, too). This only works with "crusted" buttercream--and any texture from the paper towel will transfer over. This opens up a whole realm of possibilities (some paper towels have really cool quilted patterns--you can put them on wedding cakes!), but for the "smooth" look, you need something like Viva*. I've had people talk about dipping spatulas in water while you're frosting, too, but you just gotta do what works for you. With something with so many nooks and crannies like this little turtle dude, spatula work was too fine for me.

I free-handed the shell pattern, which you can probably tell, but I thought he looked pretty cute.

Maybe the toddler will grow up, love the third revival of TMNT, and in six years I'll be asked to make a bust of Leonardo. The mutant turtle--not the painter. You never know, right?

*None of these people/businesses/corporations sponsor me or anything. Promise. They're just what I've found that works best. Well, except TMNT. I don't really use them for anything. Just comic relief. But the other stuff--now they're handy. Come to think of it, shouldn't they be sponsoring me??

Dear Ikea

Dear Ikea--

I know that you're a company that strives to keep things inexpensive, and thus some things are cut from your daily operation--like having pre-assembled furniture or people to help you move 100-lb boxes onto your flat cart that is never truly controllable because it has those stupid gliding wheels, so you spend half the time hauling against it with all your weight so that you don't crash into the poor, little old lady wandering through the picking area with her cane.

I understand that you've built a reputation of quality, inexpensive furniture designed on principles of minimalism and customization. I get it.

And having always lived in various places where there was never an Ikea, I looked upon your store like a home-design mecca, overwhelming in its glory and stymieing plethora of items.

But here's the deal. You have a lot of choices. I mean, a ton. If you were to create some sort of computer algorithm, I bet a person walking through Ikea with the intent to purchase a boat-load of stuff would face the possibility of a million decisions or more with colors, doors, configurations, items, additions, whatever. So we did our research, my husband and I. We figured out what we wanted to buy, and bookmarked some stuff we wanted to see on the floor so that we could decide. It turns out that a lot of the stuff we wanted was in your "Besta" line. And we have compact cars, so no way was that going to work to haul all the stuff we wanted to buy all the way back home. Here we were, so dedicated and excited to deck our house out with Ikea goods that we woke up at the crack of dawn, drove 2.5 hours into New Jersey (I mean, Jersey! Do you have any idea what the drivers and the highways are like in Jersey? It's terrifying!), rented a UHaul cargo van, and showed up an hour after you opened.

We had a list. We had a plan. This was going to be easy.

So Ikea, imagine our chagrin, if you will, when every single item on our list that was not related to a closet was "temporarily over-sold." The desk. The shelves. The entertainment center. The cabinets. So we looked at other things we thought we could use as Plan B. Oversold. Oversold. Oversold.

And, now that we're feeling so under-slept because we woke up so early to get that UHaul and make it to your store at opening time, imagine how we felt when we couldn't find anyone to ask about this mysterious plague of overselling. After three laps of the sofa/wall unit/ kitchen departments, we finally found someone--who told us that she has no idea about this "oversold" thing, and that we should go back to wall units. Which we did. And when we still couldn't find anyone, we stalked some other poor Ikea employee to the office section and asked him for help. He was actually quite nice, and called the people in the wall unit section and told them that we were coming. So we went back to the wall unit section for the third time.

Guess what? Your Besta line had quality issues, so you couldn't sell it. In any color. And it's been this way for at least a week. And guess what? Your web site still said that you had all these things in stock, which is why we drove for 2.5 hours at the crack of dawn to get to JERSEY to buy this stuff. We stood in the store  and checked the website again, and it still  said everything was in stock! Is it too much to ask, Ikea, that maybe you could have put a note on your website letting people know? And I know she meant well, but the lady that told us to call the wall unit department before we came "next time" was really unhelpful. You're just lucky that my husband can recognize the signs of impending uncontrollable rage and steered me away before I could do something I would later very much regret. I mean, is it too much to ask to offer to ship this stuff? Or make some sort of accommodation? I know you're a busy kind of place, but surely you can spare some effort for us.

It's okay, Ikea. We came up with a different plan. We could get over the fact that nothing that we had checked on your website or had planned on purchasing was going to work. In fact, maybe what we came up with as Plan C was even better than Plan A, now that we think about it. Score for you!

But I have to say that you lose points on efficiency. We would have paid you to pick our stuff for us. We were exhausted. Our blood sugar was low. We didn't want to play "Frogger" with the carts. But you couldn't do that. Nope. Can't pick orders for people unless you're going to deliver it... even if they're willing to pay the "local" delivery price...and even if another employee of yours (who happened to be in the wall unit department) said that picking was one fee, and delivery was another--we could pay for one or both.

And you lose major points for customer flow. Can you explain to me why, when there are 12 closed checkouts, and a wait time of more than 15 minutes at each open register, that you don't open more checkouts? And what is up with those cramped check-out lanes, anyway? You do realize that people are coming through with gliding flat carts that they can't control, stacked high with hundreds of pounds of disassembled minimalist Swedish decor, with old ladies with canes wandering through at random intervals, right? Why make it more challenging for people by putting over-sized pallets of stuff in the way, so that the customer feels like they're negotiating a game of Pac Man just to be able to pay you for the chance to go home and try to assemble this furniture with instructions that have no words?

Oh, but I did enjoy the free lunch. Thanks for that. After the four wardrobes, and the mirror, and the entertainment center, and the bed frame, and the canvas painting, and the nightstands, and the office chair, and the dishes that we bought, that ten bucks of meatballs was appreciated.

I'm sorry, Ikea. I'm being snarky. And bitter. Really bitter. I really do appreciate the free lunch. In fact, over lunch, my husband and I repeated over and over again how lucky we were that we were able to be able to get all this furniture in the first place. And that our plates of meatballs were more food that a lot of people would see in a week. For a while, reapeating this mantra of blessings helped us to be much more Zen about our experience while we were visiting you. But you see, then our second gliding cart in a row was broken. And we couldn't get through that damn check out line without banging into people. And we had to pick one load, check out, load the van, and go back in and pick another load, check out, load, and be gone. But some of your stuff is "full service," and we really couldn't figure out the logic behind which is which. So after our second time loading, we accidentally drove away without realizing that we had forgotten a chest of drawers that you had to pick for us as a "full service item," and which we paid for. In fact, we didn't realize it for 170 miles. And then you put us on hold for 15 minutes when we called to see if we could refund it, before you transferred us to a new department where we were on hold for another 15 minutes, and then your employee--who was really trying to be nice, I'm sure--says something like, "whoa! Why is this so expensive?" And really, that's simply not what you want to say to someone who has just spent 6 hours in your store, trying against all odds to buy enough stuff to fill a cargo van.

And when we looked online to see if we could just ship the stupid chest of drawers to us, the shipping cost more than the drawers! More than it would be for us to drive another 5 hours round trip, with tolls and gas. Really, Ikea? You're going to charge us $300 dollars to ship a chest of drawers that we're buying--that we really already bought--because all the other stuff we wanted to buy was oversold and you couldn't help us out with any alternatives?

Look. I'm sorry. You don't deserve this. Really, you don't. I shouldn't even be writing this, but it's really late and my better judgement is gone. You're busy. You serve a lot of people. And I had just made a resolution to be more grateful about things like this in my life. I mean, when you really think about it, this whole scenario is quite a first-world problem, isn't it? I mean, really. I'm writing a diatribe to a furniture store, for Pete's sake. Life could be much worse. This letter just makes me sound like a bitter, entitled, self-righteous person--and I guess that right now, I'm okay with that. Sarcasm aside (and I do mean that seriously), thank you for providing me so many opportunities to count my blessings. It's really only my own fault that I wasn't able to more successfully overcome my frustration and just be grateful. You're still home-design mecca. I just won't have the energy to visit you for a while.

But seriously, Ikea? Seriously? Throw a girl a bone, here. Or at least some free shipping.

Sincerely,
Bested by Besta

"Worst" is Relative

Our little white dog practices his stealth camouflage
skills in a pile of white packing paper.

So here's the truth. I haven't yet figured out what I want this blog to really be. I like to write--a lot--but I also like to bake. It was supposed to be a place to showcase my baked goods for potential customers. But every once in a while, I just want to write something and know that someone out there is reading it--even if it was only an accident. So I suppose I'll settle for 90-10 or 80-20.... 90 percent baking, 10 percent random musings (or there about).

If you've read my earlier posts, you know that we've just moved. We're no strangers to moving. We've been shuffling our stuff all over this vast expanse of a nation, and even globally once or twice. But the thing is, most of the time the move is work-related, so my husband's company chips in for some of the relocation. Usually we're (I'm) a little bitter and disillusioned with the process when it happens, so I don't really touch much of anything before movers come. That means that we've been moved at least twice and I haven't culled anything out. Well, that's not strictly true. I got rid of some stuff when we moved to Alaska. Kind of a lot really, but just the easy stuff. My husband hadn't really sorted through much, either.

This time it was our choice to move, so no movers--just us. It took us so incredibly long to pack, mostly because 50 percent of the time was spent unpacking stuff that we hadn't even looked at in years in order to either get rid of it or re-pack it.

Through Craigslist and donations, we got rid of a small UHaul's worth of stuff. That is a lot of stuff  to get rid of. I felt pretty good about it and about us. We were making progress. It felt cathartic. I have a friend who works on a farm, and she recruited some of her friends to help us move. We stayed up until midnight the night before the move to make sure everything was as organized as it could be. We were good. It was going to be hard, but should flow well. And we got rid of a whole truck's worth of junk. And UHaul swore that our 26-foot truck would move a 3-4 bedroom house, and we only had 1.5 bedrooms and an office. We were golden!

Oh, my. How far the righteous can fall.

We got up early to move things from our storage unit to the freight elevator and the loading dock, and were immediately stymied by locked doors and passenger elevators that weren't working. And then the freight elevator wouldn't work, but by happy coincidence we caught the weekend maintenance man as he was walking in. By then we had gotten nearly nothing out of the storage unit, but it was time to back the truck up and meet the crew that was going to help us--who all showed up right on time.

One thing maybe I haven't mentioned is that the apartment we were moving out of was in an old, renovated cotton mill that was originally built in 1870. At the time, it was the longest continuous manufacturing/mill building in the world, which means it's about 3-4 blocks long. We lived on the far end of it, as far as you can get from the loading dock. Delivery men have told me that they called our unit the "apartment at the end of the hallway from The Shining." Everything we moved, we had to shuttle two blocks, inside, down a hallway to the elevator, from the elevator to the dock, and from the dock to the truck. And we had a fridge and a stove and a washer and dryer, and furniture, and an upright piano... anyway, this post is getting really long, so I'll try to wrap it up.

The apartment wouldn't let us reserve the dock for more than 3 hours. 3 hours is not near enough when you're traipsing your stuff two blocks down a hallway. UHaul lied. No way in heck that truck was going to take all our stuff in one go. The freight elevator broke down. The fridge turned into the fridge from hell, because it wouldn't fit through any of the doors without severe jimmying, bending, pushing, huffing, puffing, rolling, cursing, and high blood pressure. We got kicked out of the loading dock--while all of our stuff was still scattered around it. It was one of the hottest and most humid days of the summer. We made trip #1 to the house, and while backing into the driveway I put a nice set of deep, muddy ruts in my new neighbor's still-growing lawn. We unloaded most of the truck and then we released the farm helpers, and our friends stayed on to help us. We went back to the loading dock. We couldn't get the elevator. We finally got the elevator. We packed up the truck with round 2. We got all the easy stuff off the truck. We couldn't get the piano in the house. We left it in the garage. We got the fridge into the house... barely. We couldn't fit the fridge in the kitchen. At all. The kitchen that was built for this fridge. We couldn't maneuver it around the island. We messed with it for about 2 hours. I have begun to hate that fridge. We ran to Lowes 15 minutes before closing and picked up a cheapo garage fridge/freezer that I'll use for baking.

We finally said goodbye to our loyal, loyal friends at about 11 pm--who had shown up promptly at 8 am and live an hour away--and who wouldn't take payment. We were tired, and cranky, and for about the fourth time that day I felt like breaking down in tears. Except for the tears part, Sean felt the same. The whole thing had taken about 3 times longer than we thought, we weren't even able to get everything in the house with help, and we couldn't even feel like we'd accomplished anything, because now it was time for all the unpacking. We decided that we'd run to the store to get a very, very, very late dinner, and treat ourselves to a soda and a chocolate-dipped ice cream cone at McDonald's.

McDonald's was out of chocolate for the chocolate-dipped cones. And they were out of diet soda. That was the moment that I think Sean wanted to burst into tears. "This whole day should just be called The Day of Disappointment," he said (with quite a bit of passion, I might add).

I had to agree. The next day I woke up tired and achy and cranky and just generally no fun to be around, and I told my mom that the move day had been my worst day in recent memory. But at some point I had a major change of heart. I don't know what triggered it, but it's amazing how my outlook changed.

We are lucky enough to be moving into a new house. Poor us. We are lucky enough that when our massive fridge didn't fit in the kitchen, we could go buy another one, just because we didn't want our food to spoil-- which also means that we had food and more to spare. We have jobs. We live in a free country. As a woman, I enjoy equal rights with men. I have education. I have freedom of religion. I have the right to vote. I don't have to worry about being killed like that poor woman in Afghanistan who was filmed as she was executed for alleged adultery. I don't live somewhere with a horrible regime like Syria. I can go to the grocery store, with its aisles and aisles of food and fresh produce and get whatever I want. I don't wake up each morning and wonder how in the world I'm simply going to survive. On my worst day, 98% of the world would still envy me. "Worst" is very, very relative.

It's amazing how trivial your problems become when you stop to count your blessings.

A Zoo of a Baby Shower

 I'm pulling stuff out of ancient history here, people. Because of the move, I don't think I'll have anything brand-spankin' new to post very soon, so--in order to try and stick to my promise to try and post every week or two--I pulled these photos off my computer from nearly two years ago.

A little-known fact about women (at least little-known by those who aren't women--namely men and small children) is that sometimes we just don't like baby showers. We don't! We don't know anybody else there. We're starving and all there is to eat is itty-bitty quiches and cucumber sandwiches. We really don't want to play the game where someone melts a bunch of candy bars onto diapers and we all have to guess what kind of candy bar now looks like it squirted straight from a baby's bottom. (Snickers, anyone?) But we go because we feel a sense of duty to the mom-to-be. Or because when it's our turn, we want people to show up, too.

Oh, don't get me wrong. Some women enjoy baby showers. Sometimes even I enjoy baby showers. I like the ones where I know all the people and we eat chips and salsa and drink beer (except for the mom to be) and eat cake and tease each other mercilessly. I even enjoy the mini quiche and cucumber sandwich soirees, but not always. And let it be known that I have nothing against itty-bitty quiches and cucumber sandwiches. I happen to like both of them--just not when I'm so hungry that I'm this close to putting a few dashes of hot sauce on my arm and chewing it off--but I have to be polite and reserved and only eat two mini quiches instead of two dozen. Don't pretend like it hasn't happened to you. We both know it has.

So when the mom of a friend asked if I would make cupcakes themed to "Baby Animal" for her daughter-in-law's baby shower... well, I said yes. I had to, right?

These cupcakes were based off of and inspired by the hit cupcake cookbook, What's Up, Cupcake? I made a few changes, but it's generally the same. Using breakfast cereal, mini M&Ms, pull-n-peel Twizzlers, some chocolate melties, and food coloring, I created this little baby shower zoo.

Then I went to the shower, set up the cakes, and examined 6 different diapers full of melted chocolate poo--and won. Oh--and they had guacamole, so it wasn't so bad, after all!

Four-letter words

I'm moving, folks. Again. This is why, despite my new-found blogging dedication, I haven't posted anything for about 4 weeks. I should work on another cake mix tweak or something.

I've moved a lot. I should be used to it. This one is a relatively simple, local move. But I still hate it. While I look forward to settling down in our new place--I'm in love with it--I really, really hate the process of getting there. My mother-in-law always says that "move" is a four-letter word, and she's right. It doesn't have the hard, staccato consonants and harsh syllables of traditional cuss words, but in my mind, it's the worst of them.

In random updates, I got feedback from the bride that she loved her cake, and that she got compliments during the reception that it was the tastiest wedding cake some of the guests had ever had. She also ended up with a whole sheet cake left over (I forgot how tiny the waitstaff tends to cut slices), and she brought in the leftovers to work THREE WEEKS after her wedding, and still got compliments. When I heard that she brought it in three weeks later, my first thought was, "Dear Lord, I hope no one dies." My second thought was, "Still getting compliments? Either someone is lying through their teeth, or there is a large percentage of people in this world who have been deprived of good cake." Turns out she had actually frozen it for a while. But still.

And speaking of good cake deprivation, I bought a slice of red velvet cake from a schmancy bakery on a whim on the Fourth of July. I was going to make my own "Red Velvet and Blue Suede" cake, but with the packing and the moving and all, I lost my gumption. So I thought, "Huh. This is supposed to be good...I'll just pick up a slice."

Man. What a disappointment. It wasn't bad, it just wasn't great. It was overly-schmancified. Sometimes, good old-fashioned comfort food flavors just need to be left alone. Ah, well. I've learned my lesson. And let's get this straight: I'm not the Goddess of Cakes, here. Not even close. Some store-bought or bakery-bought cakes are wicked tasty. I can think of a particular chocolate fudge one right this minute... but sadly, a lot of them aren't. I'm just on a life-long journey to discover what things I need to make on my own, apparently.

Up soon: a 3D turtle cake for a 2-year old's birthday party!