Verbal Snippets & Snapshots

So, between the time I last posted on this blog and now, I’ve gone from the one-third mark to the one-half mark of my fifth semester at Hopkins! (Wow! Already?) The following video summarizes some of my thoughts on how time seems to fly when there’s a lot to do:

In other news, I spent quite a bit of time within the past 48 hours in baking-related situations! Over the past week, my friends Aparna and Jose have been “trash-talking” each other as to who’s a better baker and decided to settle the argument with a “bake-off” yesterday. However, because they didn’t give their friends enough notice so that there would be plenty of people to judge their creations, what happened was that Jose’s friend Tiffany and I ended up being the only non-competitors present at this bake-off–plus Tiffany and I ended up assisting Jose and Aparna in finishing their respective creations. It goes without saying that Tiffany and I ended up refusing to give a verdict upon tasting the two wonderful cakes, and so Aparna and Jose agreed on a tie–but not before vowing to have another bake-off in the near future!

By the way, in this “bake-off,” Aparna and Jose had agreed that their “secret ingredient” would be pumpkin, and that they would have a fall theme to whatever they bake. (Originally, they wanted a neutral third party to come up with those two things–but once again, because they gave their friends very short notice about this bake-off, they didn’t find someone to do that.) Aparna ended up baking a vanilla cake with pumpkin filling that was decorated to look like a pumpkin patch. Jose ended up baking a pumpkin roll cake that had a mascarpone cheese filling and English toffee topping. Who would’ve thought two very different approaches to baking a pumpkin cake would both turn out to be so delicious?

As for today, I spent part of the evening baking cookies from scratch for the first time ever! Before today, the only baking I’d done was (a) baking a Filipino rice cake called bibingka from scratch for the dinner party that Aparna and I co-hosted during Intersession ’08 and (b) baking cookies from pre-cut, ready-to-bake cookie dough a few times earlier this semester. I incorporated bits and pieces of various recipes from the Internet as well as a few tips from my friend Renato (another friend of mine who likes to bake) to come up with an oatmeal chocolate chip macadamia nut cookie recipe–and it worked out wonderfully!

With that said, I shall go off to continue doing my homework–as you might have noticed from the video, I have a lot of work left for this semester!

Photo Captions: (1) Aparna with her cake (2) Aparna’s cake (3) Jose’s cake (4) my cookies