Assorted Ravings of the Slightly-Weird

Cinnamon And Spice And Everything Nice

It's been one of the crappiest weekends ever but I can say for sure that I did something most of you have never done and will never do in your lives.

And all you gutter brains can stop thinking whatever it is you're thinking.

On Friday night I had to make a carrot cake for my mom, who was attending a kindergarten reunion. (Side note: How cool is that? I can't even remember people from kindergarten!) Carrot cake is one of my specialties, probably because the recipe I use is so easy I can do everything by hand. Which means a big deal to me since I am such a lazy ass and hate cleaning up.

Anyway as I was gathering up the ingredients for the cake at 2230, I realised that there was no ground cinnamon in the house. Since the party wasn't till Saturday at noon, I figured it would be no biggie to just go to sleep, wake up early on Saturday and get everything done then. But no... my kancheong mom insisted that I do it there and then, so we embarked on a fairly frantic search for cinnamon.

Of course, I sat there and refused to go out to buy cinnamon (I mean, come on, who goes out at 2230 to buy cinnamon) so my mom dragged my dad out with her to the 24-hr minimart while I got the rest of the stuff ready. Finally she came back after 20 minutes, without the cinnamon and suggested that we substitute the cinnamon with kueh lapis spice. After a couple of minutes hotly debating the usage of spices, we decided to grind up cinnamon sticks instead, which she had in abundance.

Here's a tip: Those big blenders that claim to do everything? They can't grind cinnamon. Instead they just churn the cinnamon sticks around the plastic container, making a hell of a racket. So we had to bring out the mortar and pestle and pound the damn things into submission.

After all that work, the cake was finally done sometime past midnight. And then I had to wake up early on Saturday morning to frost the damn thing with cream cheese. I hate waking up early on Saturdays...

So, for those ladies that were in attendance, I hope they realised that they were eating a cake made by hand, with hand-shredded carrots, hand-chopped walnuts, hand-ground cinnamon and frosted with hand-made cream cheese frosting.

Oh and FYI, hand-grinding 1 1/2 teaspoons of cinnamon takes roughly about half an hour.

Posted by scrabbyfoo at April 19, 2005 12:50 AM