Try saying that ten times fast!
So...I've been on quite the baking binge this week. Tomorrow is my co-worker Wendi's birthday, but I'm working at my other job tomorrow. So I decided to bake something and bring it to work with me today. I've never made cheesecake before, which was kind of bothering me. So I decided to give it a shot. I looked through a bunch of yummy looking recipes, but didn't find anything that I really wanted to make. So I did a little brainstorming and came up with these. They were really yummy. The mascarpone insured that they weren't too sweet and the chocolate crust was complimented nicely by the raspberry sauce on top.
This recipe makes about 24 little cakes.
Crust
6-8 oz chocolate graham crackers, crushed
1/2 cup (1 stick) chilled unsalted butter, cubed
mini chocolate chips
Filling
16 oz cream cheese
8 oz mascarpone
3 eggs
3 tbsp flour
3/4 cup sugar (I think I used slightly less)
splash of vanilla
Raspberry Sauce
10 oz frozen raspberries
2 tbsp water
2 tbsp sugar
Here goes...
Heat oven to 350
Prepare muffin tins by adding those silly little paper cups. I kinda hate these things, but it makes getting the cakes out in one piece much easier.
Mix crushed grahams with butter. Do it with your hands the way you would mix pastry dough. Once it's all clumpy and mixed up, press mixture into the bottoms of the prepared muffin tins. Just the bottom, not the sides! Bake these for about five minutes and set aside to cool.
In an electric mixer (or by hand, if you prefer) mix cream cheese, mascarpone, flour, sugar and vanilla until smooth. Add eggs one at a time, beating after each addition.
Sprinkle the mini chocolate chips into the cooled muffin tins. Not too many! Just enough that you have a thin layer. Spoon the filling on top. You should have enough to fill each tin just about to the top.
Bake for 15-20 minutes. I recommend checking them every five minutes or so. They're ready to come out of the oven when the centers are still a bit jiggly. Place them (still in the tins) in the fridge to cool for at least an hour.
Meanwhile you can make your raspberry sauce.
Combine raspberries, water and sugar in a small saucepan and simmer until the mixture becomes slightly jelly-like. Remember to stir it every minute or so. Cool this in the fridge as well.
Once your cakes are cooled you can take them out of the tins and (carefully) peel the paper cups off. Put a spoonful of your raspberry sauce on top and they are ready to eat!
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Mmm, Carrot Cake Muffins!
I passed a construction site on my way home a few minutes ago, and as I watched sparks fall from a few stories above I couldn't help but think of Kira Argounova.
"Jagged walls of red brick, new and raw, checkered by a net of fresh, white cement, rose to a gray sky darkening slowly in an early twilight. High against the clouds, workers knelt on the walls and iron hammers knocked, ringing sonorously over the street, and engines roared hoarsely, and steam whistled somewhere in a tangled forest of planks, beams, scaffoldings splattered with lime. She stood watching, her eyes wide, her lips smiling."
Anyway, I didn't start this post to discuss Ayn Rand. The real point is to share a recipe for Carrot Cake Muffins. I had a urge to cook last night, but there was nothing in the fridge to bake with aside from some carrots, applesauce and yogurt. I borrowed some flour from my roommate and found some walnuts in the cabinet, and with a bit of thinking came up with the following recipe.
Carrot Cake Muffins
Makes 12-ish
1 1/2 cups flour
1 (slightly heaping) tsp baking soda
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1 heaping tsp cinnamon
1 heaping tsp allspice
1/2 tsp ground ginger
2 grated carrots
1 cup unsweetened applesauce
1/2 cup yogurt
1/2 cup walnuts (I think I used something closer to 2/3 cup, but I'm not sure.)
Preheat oven to 350 (I found that 400 worked better on my gas oven)
Mix applesauce, yogurt and carrots.
Mix flour, sugar, salt, spices and baking soda, and add slowly to applesauce mix.
Stir in walnuts, and rasins, if you happen to have some.
Spoon into greased muffin tins and bake for 15-20 minutes.
That's it! These were super good, and my roommates and I ate them all, still fresh and warm from the oven with chai spiced whipped cream on top.
"Jagged walls of red brick, new and raw, checkered by a net of fresh, white cement, rose to a gray sky darkening slowly in an early twilight. High against the clouds, workers knelt on the walls and iron hammers knocked, ringing sonorously over the street, and engines roared hoarsely, and steam whistled somewhere in a tangled forest of planks, beams, scaffoldings splattered with lime. She stood watching, her eyes wide, her lips smiling."
Anyway, I didn't start this post to discuss Ayn Rand. The real point is to share a recipe for Carrot Cake Muffins. I had a urge to cook last night, but there was nothing in the fridge to bake with aside from some carrots, applesauce and yogurt. I borrowed some flour from my roommate and found some walnuts in the cabinet, and with a bit of thinking came up with the following recipe.
Carrot Cake Muffins
Makes 12-ish
1 1/2 cups flour
1 (slightly heaping) tsp baking soda
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1 heaping tsp cinnamon
1 heaping tsp allspice
1/2 tsp ground ginger
2 grated carrots
1 cup unsweetened applesauce
1/2 cup yogurt
1/2 cup walnuts (I think I used something closer to 2/3 cup, but I'm not sure.)
Preheat oven to 350 (I found that 400 worked better on my gas oven)
Mix applesauce, yogurt and carrots.
Mix flour, sugar, salt, spices and baking soda, and add slowly to applesauce mix.
Stir in walnuts, and rasins, if you happen to have some.
Spoon into greased muffin tins and bake for 15-20 minutes.
That's it! These were super good, and my roommates and I ate them all, still fresh and warm from the oven with chai spiced whipped cream on top.
Friday, October 17, 2008
The Other Hallucinogen
I just found this in one of my old notebooks. I think I wrote it in March ('08). Anyhow, its what I wrote during my last acid trip.
The color yellow. I don't really have a follow up to that sentence. Just yellow. Its such a forgiving color. When the sun shines and hits the yellow just right...its like hearing bells, or feeling a smile: a warm glow spreading everywhere. Yellow is such a happy color. It's like a reward. A reward for living. Every time I noticed something pretty today the sun came out and made the yellow a bit brighter for me. Although it did get carried away with itself sometimes. But, oh well! It's the sun, right? I guess it's allowed.
I felt so bad about walking on the poor earth earlier. I could feel it springing back and breathing under my feet. I walked on so much ground today. Is it all resigned to it's job, or does it aspire to be more than the dirt under our feet? It does feel good to dig your toes into the grass. Especially when the grass is that pretty yellow-green color that the sun gives it sometimes.
Today was only for the cuckoo birds. I had to scare the others away. I wasn't very good at it. I mostly just yelled at them in my head.
I hope that everything is okay...
I don't remember why I stopped writing at that point, and I have no clue what that last sentence means. I wasn't seeing things at the time that I wrote this, but I was nowhere near sober. I had spent the day walking around Miami talking to the sun. Yep, talking to it. It was my personal friend that day. I remember that I was scolding (probably out loud) it for getting carried away with itself. But I kept talkin to it because it was doing beautiful things to all the yellow objects around me.
I've noticed that when I do LSD I develop a fixation with the color yellow. Every time I trip I become completely obsessed with it. Example (mom, you may remember this!): my mother's kitchen used to be a beautiful sunflower yellow. Sometime in the last few years she painted it a brickish shade of red. I was tripping at her house one day (I believe I was still living there) and happened to walk into the kitchen. Looking around I realized that although I knew the walls were red, I could see the yellow paint underneath. I sat on the floor and stared at the yellow/red walls until my mother came in and rightly asked me what the hell I was doing. "Well mom," I answered, "it's always Christmas in your kitchen." It made sense to me, since my altered mind thinks of the color yellow as a gift or "reward for living" as I put it in the above passage. She just shook her head and walked off. Point is, even the memory of yellow is enough to enthrall me when I'm tripping.
As for the cuckoo birds...I don't know. The next page in my notebook says "What does a cuckoo bird look like?" The page facing that claims that "It has big eyes! And it loves to put its toes in the grass." The sketch that goes along with it is of a man with a bird's head, sporting a blue mohawk. Make of that what you will.
The color yellow. I don't really have a follow up to that sentence. Just yellow. Its such a forgiving color. When the sun shines and hits the yellow just right...its like hearing bells, or feeling a smile: a warm glow spreading everywhere. Yellow is such a happy color. It's like a reward. A reward for living. Every time I noticed something pretty today the sun came out and made the yellow a bit brighter for me. Although it did get carried away with itself sometimes. But, oh well! It's the sun, right? I guess it's allowed.
I felt so bad about walking on the poor earth earlier. I could feel it springing back and breathing under my feet. I walked on so much ground today. Is it all resigned to it's job, or does it aspire to be more than the dirt under our feet? It does feel good to dig your toes into the grass. Especially when the grass is that pretty yellow-green color that the sun gives it sometimes.
Today was only for the cuckoo birds. I had to scare the others away. I wasn't very good at it. I mostly just yelled at them in my head.
I hope that everything is okay...
I don't remember why I stopped writing at that point, and I have no clue what that last sentence means. I wasn't seeing things at the time that I wrote this, but I was nowhere near sober. I had spent the day walking around Miami talking to the sun. Yep, talking to it. It was my personal friend that day. I remember that I was scolding (probably out loud) it for getting carried away with itself. But I kept talkin to it because it was doing beautiful things to all the yellow objects around me.
I've noticed that when I do LSD I develop a fixation with the color yellow. Every time I trip I become completely obsessed with it. Example (mom, you may remember this!): my mother's kitchen used to be a beautiful sunflower yellow. Sometime in the last few years she painted it a brickish shade of red. I was tripping at her house one day (I believe I was still living there) and happened to walk into the kitchen. Looking around I realized that although I knew the walls were red, I could see the yellow paint underneath. I sat on the floor and stared at the yellow/red walls until my mother came in and rightly asked me what the hell I was doing. "Well mom," I answered, "it's always Christmas in your kitchen." It made sense to me, since my altered mind thinks of the color yellow as a gift or "reward for living" as I put it in the above passage. She just shook her head and walked off. Point is, even the memory of yellow is enough to enthrall me when I'm tripping.
As for the cuckoo birds...I don't know. The next page in my notebook says "What does a cuckoo bird look like?" The page facing that claims that "It has big eyes! And it loves to put its toes in the grass." The sketch that goes along with it is of a man with a bird's head, sporting a blue mohawk. Make of that what you will.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Forget scrambled eggs! THIS is your brain on drugs.
Anyone who has seen the movie Children of Men will recognize this scene: We're walking down a shadowy path. Many people move around us as we walk towards the bright spotlights up ahead. I can see people and trees trapped behind the chainlink fence to my right. Under the lights a few people are rudly directing the members of the crowd one way or the other. I suddenly realize that if we get sent to the right we will be entering what is essentially a death camp. We got to the crossing, and were sorted to the right. "I'm going to die," I thought. I knew it was true. There was no way to make it out of here alive. My mind caved in. "I'm going to die." The path we were on got darker and darker. The farther we went the more terrified I became. When it became so dark that I could no longer see the rest of my body the fear seemed to swallow me. In the moment before I broke down completely something occured to me. I could, I realized, accept that I was going to die. I could accept that there was no way out, and I could resolve to do it gracefully. Kicking and screaming never helped anyone, I reasoned. This thought made so much sense that I calmed down. Why spend the last minutes of my life terrified beyond reason? If I could not enjoy them then I could at least live them fearlessly. And if there was actually some sort of afterlife I would be able to be proud of the way I died.
That ten minutes on the path was the most pivotal part of my shroom trip. I realized the next day how much I had managed to learn. I realized that if I had not accepted that I was going to die my trip would have turned very bad. I truely thought that I was going to die. It never crossed my mind that I would not. That I was able to find the strength to accept this fact was amazing to me. I now know that I have the potential to react this way when I finally am dying.
It was also very interesting to me that I could control the outcome of my trip as much as I did. Some part of me knew that I needed to calm myself before things got ugly. The trip itself had started really well, with no indications that I would later be facing death.
Yesterday afternoon my roomate Jen, her dog Frida and I ventured into San Fransisco for the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in Golden Gate Park. At the park we met up with a friend of Jen's (who's name I cannot remember), and many friends of this friend. After introducing ourselves we kicked off our shoes and sat down on the large threadbare blanket that had been spread on the ground. Almost immediately people began to produce bowls and pipes, and we broke up into many "getting to know each other" conversations.
The words "shroom chocolates" were all I managed to pick out of the conversation going on next to me. I had been talking to a few of the blanket people about my art, but suddenly the concept of shroom laced chocolate had my full attention. Jen's friend had pulled out a round, foil wrapped object that was presumably the chocolate in question. Seeing that I was interested she told me that one of the guys on the other end of the blanket was selling them. It was too good an opportunity to pass up.
For a long time now I've been meaning to try mushrooms. My experiences with LSD have been wonderful, but there is something to be said for the fact that shrooms are natural, while acid is synthetic. I wanted to see if that made a difference. So I bought some chocolate. I ate half of it to start with, feeling very glad that I had declined to smoke any pot when a bowl was passed in my direction. I didn't want to mix the two drugs just yet. I don't really remember what happened for a while right after I ate the chocolate. I just know that when I finally looked up I realized that I had been drawing on my hands for some time. I got up to watch the band that was playing and the effects seemed to hit me at that moment. The sun was beginning to set and the strips of pink clouds weren't behaving quite right. They seemed to be staying still, but at the same time gave the impression that they were itching to scurry off across the sky. As I was watching them I absentmindedly raised myself up on my tip toes. I gasped and looked around, and then stumbled. For a moment it had felt as if I was flying. But I was still on the ground. I shook my head, trying to reconcile being in the air on on the ground at the same time. The sensation was unsettling, but interesting enough that I did it over and over in order to have that feeling of grounded flight.
At this point I hadn't had any strong visual hallucinations, and I never ended up having any. What happened was more than a visual hallucination. It was a total sensory hallucination. It was as if I had created another reality for myself to exist in, where my senses acted differently. Listening to the music gave me the feeling of being in water, or being filled with it. Sound was translated into a tactile sensation. The sounds of the large crowd and of the music combined made me feel very full, as if every last bit of space in my body had been filled with some sort of jelly-like substance. As the sounds waned, so did the feeling. Some visual stimulus also translated into tactile hallucination. A person in the crowd was playing with a green laser, and every time I saw the light skitter past I felt someone grab my head and shake it, jarring my brain.
I felt at this point that I could safely experiment with a little pot, so I packed a bowl and took a few hits. It was almost dark and the band was playing a beautiful song, so I got up and danced. Jen, the nameless friend and I danced barefoot in the grass until the last song. And then we kept dancing to the music in our heads.
During the walk out of the park I slipped from my audio/tactile reality into the CoM reality. When I finally made it into a new reality I found that there was new music in my head. And I danced to it.
That ten minutes on the path was the most pivotal part of my shroom trip. I realized the next day how much I had managed to learn. I realized that if I had not accepted that I was going to die my trip would have turned very bad. I truely thought that I was going to die. It never crossed my mind that I would not. That I was able to find the strength to accept this fact was amazing to me. I now know that I have the potential to react this way when I finally am dying.
It was also very interesting to me that I could control the outcome of my trip as much as I did. Some part of me knew that I needed to calm myself before things got ugly. The trip itself had started really well, with no indications that I would later be facing death.
Yesterday afternoon my roomate Jen, her dog Frida and I ventured into San Fransisco for the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in Golden Gate Park. At the park we met up with a friend of Jen's (who's name I cannot remember), and many friends of this friend. After introducing ourselves we kicked off our shoes and sat down on the large threadbare blanket that had been spread on the ground. Almost immediately people began to produce bowls and pipes, and we broke up into many "getting to know each other" conversations.
The words "shroom chocolates" were all I managed to pick out of the conversation going on next to me. I had been talking to a few of the blanket people about my art, but suddenly the concept of shroom laced chocolate had my full attention. Jen's friend had pulled out a round, foil wrapped object that was presumably the chocolate in question. Seeing that I was interested she told me that one of the guys on the other end of the blanket was selling them. It was too good an opportunity to pass up.
For a long time now I've been meaning to try mushrooms. My experiences with LSD have been wonderful, but there is something to be said for the fact that shrooms are natural, while acid is synthetic. I wanted to see if that made a difference. So I bought some chocolate. I ate half of it to start with, feeling very glad that I had declined to smoke any pot when a bowl was passed in my direction. I didn't want to mix the two drugs just yet. I don't really remember what happened for a while right after I ate the chocolate. I just know that when I finally looked up I realized that I had been drawing on my hands for some time. I got up to watch the band that was playing and the effects seemed to hit me at that moment. The sun was beginning to set and the strips of pink clouds weren't behaving quite right. They seemed to be staying still, but at the same time gave the impression that they were itching to scurry off across the sky. As I was watching them I absentmindedly raised myself up on my tip toes. I gasped and looked around, and then stumbled. For a moment it had felt as if I was flying. But I was still on the ground. I shook my head, trying to reconcile being in the air on on the ground at the same time. The sensation was unsettling, but interesting enough that I did it over and over in order to have that feeling of grounded flight.
At this point I hadn't had any strong visual hallucinations, and I never ended up having any. What happened was more than a visual hallucination. It was a total sensory hallucination. It was as if I had created another reality for myself to exist in, where my senses acted differently. Listening to the music gave me the feeling of being in water, or being filled with it. Sound was translated into a tactile sensation. The sounds of the large crowd and of the music combined made me feel very full, as if every last bit of space in my body had been filled with some sort of jelly-like substance. As the sounds waned, so did the feeling. Some visual stimulus also translated into tactile hallucination. A person in the crowd was playing with a green laser, and every time I saw the light skitter past I felt someone grab my head and shake it, jarring my brain.
I felt at this point that I could safely experiment with a little pot, so I packed a bowl and took a few hits. It was almost dark and the band was playing a beautiful song, so I got up and danced. Jen, the nameless friend and I danced barefoot in the grass until the last song. And then we kept dancing to the music in our heads.
During the walk out of the park I slipped from my audio/tactile reality into the CoM reality. When I finally made it into a new reality I found that there was new music in my head. And I danced to it.
Sunday, October 5, 2008
Happy Birthday To Me!
My father doesn't know it yet, but he got me this tattoo for my birthday. Thanks dad!
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