Nifty, Nifty, Tiffy's Fifty!

 

I took yesterday (and today) off of work, but I didn't get to sleep in, because I had to drive to the Kohler Water Spa, which is two hours away. Tiffy was waiting there for me, and we got to use all the fun pools in the spa, like the grotto with a waterfall, the hot tub on the top floor under the skylights, and the hot tub and cold plunge pool you are supposed to use in conjunction with the steam and dry saunas in a detailed manner (five minutes in this one, three minutes in this other one, etc.), but we just kind of went in the right order for as long as we felt like it. And let me tell you, we didn't feel like spending more than about ten seconds in the cold plunge pool! Then we had lunch in our terry robes, and I had chocolate tea - so good! After lunch we had our treatments; I had the Lavender Rain treatment, which is a pretty good description of what it was, and Tiffy had something with a light show and even more water. Hers was longer than mine, so I went to the top floor and prayed the rosary up there, under the skylights and beside a lot of very happy-looking plants. I do have to say that the music at spas kind of annoys me. Sometimes they play actual Asian or Native American music, and that's fine, but then they will play that New Age piano music or Fibonacci Sequence chimes, and that's just boring. Not awful, just kind of tedious.

Then we went to our college friend's mother's house, and a fourth friend joined us for dinner. We wanted to go to a wacky supper club in Kiel, with Liberace's old piano and a bunch of doilies everywhere, but it had gone out of business, so we went to one in Chilton instead. Then we went back to the house, and they had gotten Tiffy a cake and put those relighting candles on it. The cake had thick and very brightly colored frosting, and the candles fizzled and sunk into it, so it was kind of a chore to dig them out. Here is a picture of part of the cake so you can get an idea.

Sorry that it's sideways - when I turned it, Blogspot refused to acknowledge its existence, so I had to post the original image. Anyway, we ate way too much of this neon cake that would probably glow under blacklight, and we stayed up late talking to our college friend, her brother, and her mother, and playing with her dog Pluto. Pluto is some kind of terrier mix, and he has so much energy. He also recently celebrated his first birthday, and our friend did give him some frosting, but not cake, since it's chocolate. Then he was on a sugar high and was really energetic. Tiffy and I probably burned off some of that cake playing with him.

This morning Tiffy and I drove back to Madison, and I gave her Present #2: a chocolate puzzle.

We each tried a piece, so it can't be put together again in its entirety. I got the milk chocolate version, thinking Tiffy didn't like dark chocolate, but she says she likes all real chocolate, just not white chocolate. (In case you are wondering what Present #1 was, it was a compilation I made of our travel adventures together. I gave it to her yesterday, on her actual birthday.)

After that, we had shrimp curry at the Globe, then we hung out at the Union Terrace and, yes, got ice cream. Not long after we got back to her sister's apartment, her parents arrived. Tiffy is actually staying in a guest suite at the apartment building, which is very cute. We checked it out before she had to go get ready for her birthday dinner with her parents at Samba. Happy birthday, Tiffy! Don't think of it as "over the hill" - think of it as having a better view!

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Flowers for Pa Hat's Birthday

Happy birthday to Pa Hat! For his birthday, I am going to post some photos of lovely flowers that were blooming in the neighborhood around my office a couple of weeks ago. I took these photos during my noontime rosary walks.

 This next photo is of a crabapple tree at the Arboretum:

This little flower was in my office! A coworker gave me a Christmas cactus last year when I told her my big one at home had mysteriously died, and it has these pretty white flowers. The one at home had hot pink blossoms that were often featured on this very blog.

This same coworker, who is pretty much universally acknowledged as the most thoughtful human being ever, got this cake to celebrate the big boss at work having been there for a year. It says: "It's been a year, drop the Southern accent." Most of us hadn't even realized the anniversary had crept up on us! The cake was delicious, a chocolate mousse one, and we had ice cream too. Yum! All provided by this thoughtful coworker.

Finally, getting back to flowers, I usually find fake flowers depressing, but these flowers in the adoration chapel are so silly and cheerful that I actually kind of like them. They don't even pretend to be real flowers.

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Rich's Epic 60th Birthday Party

This was a most excellent weekend, although Friday night I was mostly making a really big cake that looked like a rocket ship. Plus one of the cakes kind of fell apart when I took it out of the pan. I do have photos and will post them, maybe tomorrow. As it turned out, we only ate half the cake, so I could have gotten away with baking one cake, but leftovers are not a bad thing… except maybe during Lent.

Saturday was Richard Bonomo’s epic 60^th birthday party. The theme was the Space Race, and Kathbert had borrowed lots of cool photos from the Space Place, while Travalon had made a giant banner that says: “Welcome to Cape Canaveral.” He had even gotten some old Life magazines from an antique store, so we made color copies of the coolest photos and hung those up too. We were planning to start the party at noon with lunch from David’s Jamaican, but by one, when the steel drum guy (Bahama Bob) showed up, not many people had arrived yet, so we hadn’t dug into the food. Bahama Bob set up in Rich’s sunny solarium, with a sign that said: “Beach” pointing due south, a beach umbrella, and a fake parrot on a swing. People sat in the family room to listen, but I danced on the floor of the solarium, and soon people had joined me, or had gone up into the loft to dance up there. Yes, it was a two-level party! Tiffy even got us all to make a giant conga line, with Rich leading us through the living room, dining room, and kitchen. There is now a video of said conga line on MyFace, so I will try to figure out if I can link to it or copy it or something to post on this blog. Bahama Bob had a long list of songs he plays, and everyone had a request. Everyone had a good time, even Bahama Bob, who emailed me today to say our party was the most fun one he has ever played at. Then we did dive into the food, and after everyone had eaten, we called the Mothership so she could tell us funny stories about Rich’s childhood at roughly the times key events had happened during the Space Race. Then we sang her Happy Birthday because it was her actual birthday; Rich’s was actually the day before. When we brought in the rocket cake, we counted down and lit all the candles at the bottom of the cake to be the flame behind the rocket – that was Kathbert’s idea. Rich got a number of presents, including a Prince Valiant book from Travalon (since he is the only one we know who reads that comic strip), and a group gift of “space pants” (Gore-Tex pants) and a star in Aquarius named after him. At that point most of the people left, but some of us hung out drinking wine and/or tea, and then a second wave of people came in the late afternoon. Travalon and I left around eight, and then I had to run in place for seven miles to burn off all those calories. (I had already gone three miles from dancing to Bahama Bob.) But I did it – I burned off 777 extra calories!

Yesterday was a wonderful Valentine’s Day. Travalon, Tiffy, and I went to brunch at Cento off of State Street, then we went to a chocolate shop called the Red Elephant, and they gave us red carnations and free chocolates with our purchase of fancy chocolates. It was snowing big fluffy flakes, and the ground looked like it was covered with sugar. Travalon and I went to the Garden Expo, since I had gotten free tickets for helping set up a booth there, and he was delighted to discover it wasn’t just plants, but there were lots of free samples of food, and lots of books. We even saw Prairie Man there, as well as a number of other people I know. Then Travalon and I had a romantic dinner at Inka Heritage, and then we stopped by Rich’s place and chatted with him and Antoshka for a few minutes before stopping at the Nau-Ti-Gal for White Russians. They had a Love Stinks party there on Thursday, and the bartender was showing us photos from it – he even played the guitar with the band AND baked and decorated the cupcakes! A truly multitalented man! There are a lot of calories in a White Russian, so with our delicious dinner and all that chocolate, I had to burn off over 600 calories. I did it, though. Here’s hoping today I don’t have to run in place for ten miles to stay under my calorie count!

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Another Pictorial Post

Here is a very random selection of photos for your viewing pleasure. First is the BonomOlympics cake, which isn't much to look at, but everyone raved about the way it tasted.

Next is the inside of Gesu in Milwaukee.

Why is my closet staring at me like that?

I love this sign inside of the Village Green Tavern.

What flavor are these chips? I'm just not sure…

This is a very funny-looking baby carrot.

What a great name for a bar!

This little patch of snow looks kind of like a turtle. It was still around on the 11th of April, up at Holy Hill.

This photo sums up my tropical wedding shower.

This is the pretty little tin my chocolate friend came in.

And, according to the plants, it's both Christmas and Easter at Richard Bonomo's house!

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Baking a Cake for the Boss

My coworker Handy Woman is an incredible baker, and she usually makes the treats for office birthdays, but she was intrigued by my description of black magic cake. “You’ll have to make that for the next birthday,” she said, so we looked at the calendar and determined that the next office birthday was our boss’s. It didn’t sound like a bad idea two months ago, but as the day grew closer, I started to get kind of freaked out about baking a cake for my own boss. Now I make black magic cakes all the time, in all sorts of weird permutations (like pennies, pigs, and Russian Orthodox churches), but always for close friends. They don’t mind if my pig is too cute to eat, my portrait of Abe Lincoln is way too cartoonish, and my Cyrillic alphabet contains suspect letters like theta. They are especially forgiving of my terrible frosting jobs… but what would my coworkers think? What would my BOSS think??

Richard Bonomo reminded me that it’s almost impossible to screw up a black magic cake, since it’s a very simple recipe. Still, mine often have structural integrity problems that my friends happily overlook, as long as the cake tastes good. This cake came out in fairly good shape, but then I made the frosting, stirring it by hand… and the butter didn’t get blended in well enough so there were white chunks showing in the chocolate frosting. Ugh! It was such an ugly cake! I brought it to work yesterday anyway, and just before lunch we all gathered around it, and I sang “Happy Birthday” in Basque to my boss. He is a very easygoing guy, and he didn’t seem worked up about the ugly cake. I was afraid Handy Woman would be underwhelmed, but she just seemed happy I made it from scratch and not a mix. Everyone seemed to enjoy the cake, so maybe my fears were unfounded. Maybe people really don’t care about how amateurish a cake looks, as long as it tastes wonderful… and black magic cake always does. Unless you don’t like coffee – I’ve been told by coffee haters that they can taste it and it ruins the flavor for them. Fortunately, all my coworkers are coffee fiends so we all love black magic cake.

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Pi Cake

I cannot take credit for this, but it's so clever that I had to post it.  Thanks to Agent Toque McToque for passing it along.

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Bat Cake

I realize many of the people who read this blog saw this cake in person, but I love posting photos of cakes to my blog. In this case, Richard Bonomo baked four 13x9” sheet cakes of a type called “black magic,” but two of them were half the thickness of the other two. The obvious solution was to stack the two short cakes, and then I was going to make a butterfly, using the stacked cakes for the body and the other two cakes for the wings. I cut off the edges of the stacked cakes to make antennae, but the creature looked more like a bat, which is easier to frost anyway since it just takes chocolate frosting to make a brown bat. A few gumdrops stood in for eyes, mouth, and fangs. When people asked me why a bat cake, I just said because I’m an old bat.

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Famous Hat's Guide to Research Terms

If you spend too much time around doctors (too much = any at all), then you may have encountered some of their bewildering vocabulary. The problem is just compounded when they do research. For example, here are some common research terms, which I have defined for your convenience:

Adverse event: having a bad day
Double-blind study: both the subjects and the researchers have their eyes removed; see also Rex, Oedipus
Grand Rounds: filet mignon
Knockout mouse: a fabulously attractive rodent
M&M Conference: discussion of colorful little candies that had REALLY bad days
Placebo: fake tobacco made of plastic

I have compiled the above terms in a brief synopsis so that you can see how they are used by those in the know:

In a recent triple-blind study, three blind mice could not tell which mouse was the knockout mouse, so each one assumed it was and strutted about accordingly. They had to attend a conference, but how would they find their way? Easy – follow their noses! The aroma of the Grand Rounds led them to the right room. The next conference was the M&M one, where they discussed a small green candy that had smoked some placebo and experienced an adverse event.

And here is a jungle cake done by my former coworker, who is a doctor but a good one. Sorry for the poor quality of the photo; I had to "steal" it from a website that wanted me to order prints using the printscreen function and Paint.

Jungle Cake

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Book Cake

Since I now have a reputation as someone who likes to show off cakes (my own and others), Hardingfele sent me these pictures of the cake at a going-away party for her coworker. And since I don't have much time to blog, I'm just posting these pictures. Enjoy! I won't be able to blog tomorrow either, since I will be busy biking from bar to bar with a bunch of people for Tiffy's college roommate's annual biking and drinking extravaganza. If you are reading this at work on Friday, you can envy me biking around and drinking gin fizzes while you are sitting at your computer. HA HA!

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A Memorable Memorial Day Weekend

Did you have a good Memorial Day weekend? Mine was wonderful! On Friday Anna Banana II and I went down to the lake to hear a Cajun band play, and a group of folk dancers were doing the two-step and the waltz to their music. It was a gorgeous evening. Then Rich and I went to the new Star Trek movie at midnight, and I knew it would throw my schedule off a little, but I didn't expect to sleep until dinnertime on Saturday! All I got accomplished that day was making the fondant for a frog cake for Cecil Markovitch using the recipe my coworker gave me for marshmallow fondant. My results were not nearly as professional-looking as hers, but Cecil seemed pleased anyhow. If you look closely, you should see not only two frogs (and a third being eaten by a snake) and two lily pads with flowers, but also a pineapple, a crab, and a penny sitting on a lily pad. The penny is in honor of Richard Bonomo and the penny birthday cake I made him earlier this year. The pineapple is a joke, because Cecil Markovitch HATES pineapples! (One of the B-Boys actually gave him a REAL pineapple!) Then I had some leftover brown fondant, so I made the little crab in honor of my OTHER choir director, who was hosting the birthday party, and also one of the B-Boys, the newlywed one, because their birthdays are at the end of next month, a day apart. (So they're Cancer the Crab, see.) Anyway, it seemed like something relevant to add to Frogs' Night Out, and what else was I going to do with some leftover brown fondant? These photos were all taken on Kathbert's cell phone.

Figure 1: Frog's Night Out (top view)



Figure 2: Frogs' Night Out (view of snake eating frog)
This theme was suggested by my OTHER choir director,
who saw a snake swallowing a frog on a TV show.


Figure 3: Frogs' Night Out (another view of snake eating frog)

Sunday after Mass a bunch of us went to brunch to celebrate the birthday of my Archirritant's ex-husband, then I went home and baked a Black Magic cake to put my fondant creations on. Cecil Markovitch's birthday party was on my OTHER choir director's pier; in attendance were Rich, Kathbert, Antoshka, both B-Boys (but not Mo-Girl, who was having a Girls' Night In), A-Fooze and El Fiance, Anna Banana II, and of course the host, the guest of honor, and me. We ordered pizza, and Cecil brought spinach salad, Anna Banana II brought hummus and veggies, the B-Boy who just returned from his Hawaiian honeymoon brought some kind of Hawaiian treats made of macadamia nuts and sesame seeds, and A-Fooze made Hungarian crepes that she calls "polichenta." (I have no idea how to spell that.) She made some filled with apricots and others filled with lingonberry jam in honor of the host. (Like me, she is from temperate climes but feels tropical at heart, loving bright colors and warm weather and Latin music.) Frogs' Night Out was a big hit, but most people didn't care for the fondant, which tastes like Peeps. Cecil did eat the little fondant pineapple and declared it was the best pineapple he had ever eaten. The rest of us demolished the real pineapple the B-Boy had given him for a joke.

Then yesterday I met T at her sister's lake house. T's niece's alter ego, the Evil Cherry Mouse, calls her Tiffy, so I said I was going to call her that on my blog from now on, and she said that was fine. We played games in the yard with her nieces and their friends, then her brother-in-law took us for a ride in the speedboat; Tiffy's nieces and their friend Little Mighty went tubing while the youngest girls sat watching them and Tiffy and I sat up front. Then we all colored cardboard fashion dolls and gave them names like Topaz Tanzanite, Paris France, Delaney Downhillski, Chloe Madskillz, and Kilarney Kilbride. (Tiffy's older niece was almost named Kilarney because her parents went to Ireland when they were expecting her.) After dinner Evil Cherry Mouse's alter ego, Tiffy's mild-mannered niece, and her friend Little Mighty wanted to go canoeing but they had to have an "adult" in the canoe with them so I agreed to go. I felt like Cleopatra in her barge as they paddled me along! We saw lots of carp, baby ducklings, a heron, and a tree with roots that looked like a skull. Then it started to rain so Tiffy's older niece hollered for us to come back in for do-it-yourself sundaes. Mmm!

This morning when my alarm went off, I could barely get up. In fact, I fell asleep briefly and dreamed I lived at Our Lady of Perpetual Sobriety and that they were having Mass at 6:30 am to accommodate some girls who wanted to attend a movie at 5:15 pm, when they usually have daily Mass. The celebrant was a priest we used to have who returned to Nigeria years ago. Then I woke up and wondered what that was about!

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Render Unto Caesar

Not a real Lenten reflection today, just a continuation of my discussion of coins. When we were children, my brother saw money as something to spend on candy and toys. I, on the other hand, was always fascinated by it for its own aesthetical qualities. I collected dollar bills by their serial numbers and coins that struck my fancy. Below are some "coins" that pose an intresting question: if in the Gospel Jesus said to render coins unto Caesar because they bore his likeness, who would get these coins?


Proteus is pretty straightforward. The next one - the space shuttle? Then a coin collecting club, shamrocks, musical instruments, and angels. Perhaps this is heavenly currency? More likely the silly coin they send along with appeals for money from a Catholic charity...

Below are some actual coins (and some other fake ones) that have no value beyond their face value but I found interesting because of defects and damage they have acquired along the way.

From top left: quarter with smooshed rim, quarter that looks thousands of years old (dated 1940), old and new buffalo nickels, rainbow nickel, rainbow dime, glittery dime, glittery penny, blackened dime and some blackened pennies, folded dime, penny that says "39," penny with so much damage that "Liberty" now looks like "Liberyy," penny smooshed by train, fake Delaware quarter, thing that looks like a quarter with no printing on it, dime that is green on back, token from who knows where (probably a game arcade). Below are the backs of the same coins:

And here is yet another cute cake done by my coworker, the one for her older daughter's birthday this past weekend, as well as some heart cookies she made. (She also decorated the pots.) If being a doctor doesn't pan out, she could definitely get a job in cake decorating!

Side View

Front View

Heart Cookies

And finally, a patch to fight global climate change! Hardingfele put it on her blog and asked me to put it on mine. Since I believe very strongly in fighting global climate change, I was happy to do so. If you have a blog of your own, please feel free to do so as well.

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Super Cute Cakes

A coworker and I were talking about cakes, and she said she was making one for her daughter's birthday that sounded like the Black Magic recipe I always make for Rich's cake. We looked them both up online, and sure enough, it was the same! She has never made this recipe before and wanted to make sure you don't really taste the coffee. I assured her that it just tastes like the richest chocolate cake ever. She said she was going to make a fondant, and my officemate (who used to be a pastry chef) said that it's a real pain to make, and our coworker said she uses marshmallows in her fondant so it's not only easier to make, but tastier too. Here are pictures she gave me of a birthday cake she made for her other daughter and a cake she made for someone's baptism that looks like Noah's Ark.

Sam's Birthday Cake

Noah's Ark

(cupcake in very back decorated by her 3-year-old daughter)

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Luau

Must be the second Friday the Thirteenth in a row because I am posting twice in one day! But I just found some cool photos while trying to find pictures of Mr. Why the Camera-Shy for Richard Bonomo, and so I just had to post some of them.

Here are some shots of the pig cake T and I made for Rich's Luau-themed birthday party. Since we couldn't bury an actual pig in the backyard in the middle of February around here, we had to settle for chicken with pineapple and poi for dinner and then a pig cake for dessert. (This cake is the same type as the penny cake I made for Rich's birthday last month, a recipe called Black Magic which is chocolate with just a touch of coffee. SO good!!) The piggie was so cute that Rich had trouble cutting it, but it was delicious.

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The Ineffable Palm Tree

I have been very bad about blogging lately, so to make up for my negligence I am writing a very long post on Rich's computer Aquinas tonight. I'll start with the title: one night at the OTHER choir practice, I spotted a golden calf in the coat closet and said, "A graven image? I always knew you Lutherans were heathens!" The choir director pulled the golden calf out of the closet and read the lyrics to the upcoming musical it was for, something the youth group is putting on. Last week I noticed several inflatable palm trees in the coat closet, presumably for the same musical, and when I showed them to the choir director and said, "I want one of these for Christmas next year," he said, "An ineffable palm tree?"

This weekend T came up for Rich's birthday party, and we were searching for some chocolate we had previously purchased but I commented that it might be a "quixotic" quest. Since I assumed this word comes from Don Quixote, which is pronounced kee-hoe-tee, I said the quest would be kee-hoe-tic. T said, "What?" She insisted the word was pronounced kwiks-ah-tik, so we agreed to look it up in the dictionary. However, this search also proved to be quixotic, however you pronounce that word, because I own a French dictionary, a German dictionary, a Portuguese dictionary, a Spanish-to-Basque dictionary, and a Swahili dictionary, but no English dictionary. T said, "You don't own an English dictionary???" and I said, "That's not strictly true. I do have an Anglo-Saxon dictionary." Eventually we looked up "quixotic" in the German dictionary, which said it was pronounced "kwiks-ah-tik," but when we looked up the German word it was translated as, it said the English translation was "Airy-fairy." Now I have spoken English for a score and fifteen years, and never have I heard the term "airy-fairy," so I felt the pronunciation guide was also suspect. However, today we looked "quixotic" up in Rich's enormous Oxford dictionary of every English word ever spoken, and it did say it was pronounced "kwiks-ah-tik." So there you go. Rich was as surprised as I was.

T came up with the theme for Rich's birthday this year, which was "Presidents' Day," since he shares a birthday with Abraham Lincoln. We decorated in red, white, and blue streamers (and oddly almost every shop in town was out of white), tied a flag balloon to his chair, and made him wear a flag-patterned hat. I dreamed that I made him a birthday cake that looked like a penny, so I did make one! See the results below.

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