A Blog!

The bewitching thing about our lad is that he can be interestingly unhappy in SO MANY WAYS.

Sure, here's my disorganized recipe from hell, cobbled together from various websites and experiments. I just realized that I pasted the caramel and pastry cream in the wrong order... It's easier if you make the pastry cream first and clean that pot for the caramel. I'm on mobile. Will fix.

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1 box white cake mix, using egg whites. Bake. Flip onto a wire rack.

2/3 box spice cake mix (save the rest to turn into batter later, or portion the batter and bake it on the side.) I add extra allspice. Bake in previous pan.

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Caramel Ganache (kinda):

1 cup granulated sugar

⅓ cup butter, salted or unsalted

White chocolate and hot milk ganache (pre-prepare or don't; pour hot milk over the chocolate and stir until thick but fluid consistency. Use the same method over dark chocolate to make a separate, thicker ganache for later).

Heat until fully melted and amber, without burning. People say don't stir the sugar; I don't think it matters much for a cake like this and I stir it to help it melt faster after it has started.

Add the butter pieces and stir until smooth. It's gonna look scary. Just keep going.

Add the white chocolate ganache until reaching desired consistency. This is done now. Transfer to a holding container and immediately wash your pot. Filling the pot with water and letting the leftover scuz simmer on low helps.

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Pastry Cream (it's just custard with butter, apparently) (ALSO NOTE: I never have a ton unless I make a thin tall cake, but this amount offers an appropriate texture. Maybe double this exclusively if you can make it look pretty. IMO, I'd turn this into a mousse to stabilize it, but I haven't. Spicetrekkers Walnut Espresso Blondie has a good custard->mousse setup.)

▢ 2 cups whole milk

▢ ¼ cup granulated sugar

▢ 1 large egg

▢ 2 large egg yolks

▢ ¼ cup cornstarch

▢ ⅓ cup granulated sugar

▢ 2 tablespoons unsalted butter

▢ 1 teaspoon vanilla extract (or vanilla bean, split open, to add to the milk during heating)

In a medium saucepan, combine milk and granulated sugar. Gentle simmer/steam. Do not boil.

Whisk together 1 large egg, 2 large egg yolks, ¼ cup cornstarch, and ⅓ cup granulated sugar in a mixing bowl until smooth and pale.

Slowly pour about half of the hot milk into the egg mixture in a steady stream, whisking constantly to temper the eggs and prevent curdling.

Immediately pour the tempered egg mixture back into the saucepan. Return to medium heat and whisk constantly until the mixture thickens and begins to bubble, about 2 to 3 minutes.

Remove from heat. Stir in 2 tablespoons unsalted butter and 1 teaspoon vanilla extract until fully melted and incorporated.

Transfer the pastry cream to a clean bowl. Press plastic wrap directly onto the surface to prevent a skin from forming. Refrigerate until completely chilled (can use freezer initially, if you want).

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Layer as per image. Layer as follows:

Spice cake → Caramel ganache → White cake → Plain pastry cream → Pastry cream with add-ins → Dark chocolate ganache with oreos if you want it that way → Crushed biscoff cookies

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It is very reminiscent of a typical Southern dump-cake, but if you organized it. It's fun. With work, it could be kind of classy?

alt form(s) under the cut, beware of potential spoilers

"The hat is customizable," he said, struggling with the velcro patch on the front. "If I need it, I have an ICE one too. I pick based off the business i walk into."

"Customizable is an important hat descriptor," I said. "what can I get you?"

"You wouldn't believe how offended people get these days," he said. "And I'm supposed to do something about it if you're offended? You chose to be offended!"

"We all have hundreds of thousands of decisions everyday," I said. I thickened my accent. "That's what my stepdad always said. But I can make one easier - we have a delicious Ethiopian roast available."

"Like if I told you you have a bull ring," he said, "because bulls have rings in their noses. Is that offensive?"

I laughed. "I've heard that before."

"It's a joke, but people get offended. Maybe you're offended."

I looked at him. I smiled. "You aren't trying to offend me though, right?"

Of course he was. I was being friendly and the friendlier I was, the faster he switched topics. He was saying anything inflammatory he could think of to see if I'd take the bait. After about 20 minutes of my redirecting and deescalating, he settled into a more normal interaction. He took up too much of my time showing me a product I'd feigned mild interest in to get him to stop talking about getting accused of inappropriate behavior at work. When we finally disengaged, he spent 10 minutes trying to catch my eye again. When he failed, he left.

There's this new breed of customer who insists on trying to incite political conversation through their clothing and, when that doesnt work, their snide little comments. If I owned my own business, maybe I would have given the guy the fight he wanted. But I work for a corporation and I love paying my bills so I deescalated.

Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.

The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).

The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.

But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.