Gifts

Sometimes, my husband will spring an unexpected bouquet of my favorite roses. In younger days, I didn't care for cut flowers - beauty cut down in its prime and all that. Now, I love them. I decided to give Noe a dozen of a different kind of "rose": A 12-pack of Ashanti Hot Wing Sauce. Wait, this is actually going somewhere. I have a pair of best pals, both of the male persuasion. Never been anything sticky there, never will be. They are Jon and Roger. Roger was visiting with his most excellent Mom and brother, we were in DCA, and we wanted a nice lunch that wouldn't break us. I suggested the bar above Ariel's Grotto. Lunch was good, and Noe, who is a finicky eater (oh yes you are) mentioned that he really liked the wing sauce.

One of the things I love about Disney is that if you really like something, they'll give you the recipe. I asked our server about it, and he disappeared into the back. He returned with the name of the sauce they used: Ashanti. I'd never heard of it. For the next few days, I kept my eyes peeled when shopping, but finally had to go to the Internet. I'm not a big wing person, but I like the sauce on fried chicken.

Last night, we worked in Pro Cake Decorating class with chocolate fondant, modeling chocolate and royal icing. I like the 4-3-2-1- marshmallow fondant recipe, and after it's aged a day you add cocoa powder (Dutched is best) and some chocolate liquor. I had none of the Godiva Toba Garrett suggested, so used some Bailey's chocolate mint that was laying around. That's it. From now on, no matter what, I'm feeding my fondant booze to make it happy, because it was wonderfully easy to work with last night. I was "hot" last night...I'm not a Wreckerator (anymore) by any means, but I'm no Jessika Ramos (btw, that's Pierre Jues, my chef instructor, on the previous page). Here's the result:


My MIL jokingly said, when she learned that I was making a chocolate fudge cake, that I was to put her name on it (meaning save it for her) - as part of my royal icing work, I did so, in script instead of lettering. This cake nailed me my first perfect score in the class, and my chef instructor is a renowned French pastry chef who is not an "easy grader".

I'm taking a different cake decorating class next semester, focusing more on sculpture, airbrush and more "stunt decorating". For my four foundation classes, I'm taking Japanese 2, Algebra, History of Asian Art and Web Design. When I taught Web Design classes, we used FrontPage. I think I need to catch up a bit.

I need to buy a 0 tip and 1 tip this week - my smallest round tip is a 3, which is a bit too big to do nice detail work. I really, really love the tiny detail work, much better than the buttercream scrolls around the border of the cake and all that. I'm going to make decorated sugar cubes and see if I can sell them to the local tearooms and gift shops. When I was a teenager in Hawaii, my friend Mariko Takemasa (now Ikagi) sent me some Christmas sugar cubes. I was enchanted. I never used them; I thought they were too pretty. Now, I can make them!

We can't swing a Disney cruise for a while, unfortunately, and there's a huge billboard above the GameStop that I see every day, mocking me. It will be docking in LA in January, and I would like to lay eyes on a DCL ship. I am considering going to San Pedro to see if we can take a few photos of it from land while it's docked there. The first day, I think, is Jan 23. I'll have to double-check.

Japanese class got canceled (this is why I check my email on my Blackberry every 2 1/2 minutes) so I'm going to catch up on homework and help out my parents.

I am not a big TV watcher, though I love The Big Bang Theory and a couple other shows, I saw two commercials that got my attention. The first was for Union Pacific, which I was surprised to see, and the second was the new Alka-Seltzer commercial - Speedy is back! I hope they keep him.

In closing:


Fab