Moral superiority in the pink.

To the guileless eye, that might look like me hard at work mixing up a delicious birthday cake for M, but it is, in fact, me concocting an antidote for hubristic blunders. At least I am aware that I'll need nothing less than a ton of sugar for that. You see, I feel as though I am something of a semi-vegan cake baking master. I have an impeccable record for creating the most amazing semi-vegan birthday cakes ever. The past two years I have amazed M with my delectable 3-layer birthday cakes, though I suppose I should give a teensy bit of credit to the Grit, for having published their superlative semi-vegan cake recipes in the beloved-by-me Grit Cookbook. This year, however, my moral superiority got the best of me. I decided that semi-vegan just wasn't going to cut it. I wanted total vegan. Total vegan, it turns out, means no cream cheese or butter--the two offending ingredients in the Grit's frosting recipe. So I did a few minutes' worth of research and came up with an all new, all vegan birthday cake recipe--one that called for such replacements for cream cheese and butter as agar and arrowroot. Uh, okay. That *seems* like it might be... delicious?



Turns out that while agar is capable of transforming cocoa powder and a select other vegan ingredients into a really interesting gelatinous texture, it is not palatable at all. Especially once it is pureed into a spreadable, frosting-like consistency (I spared you photos of this mess). It doesn't come anywhere CLOSE to successfully imitating frosting. And, so, despite my initial consideration of perhaps moving one step closer to transitioning from vegetarianism to veganism, before I knew what was happening, I had replaced the crap vegan cake with this:



Mmmm... glorious, glorious 3-layer Dark Chocolate (vegan) Cake with Cream Cheese (semi-vegan) Frosting. Cream! Cheese! Butter! Get in my cake! And so, in the end, M had another happy semi-vegan birthday, and I will continue for the time being to be content with being a vegetarian, who, on occasion, consumes animal by-products.



Now, about my continued fascination and attraction to pink... I continue to maintain that it has nothing to do with any holidays that might begin with a "V" and end with "-alintine's Day". I'd rather like to believe, instead, that it has to do with being inspired by--



--the best movie ever.

And, speaking of sugary pink things, did you think I'd make you suffer through another one of my pontifications without including at least a little bit of knitting?



It seems that my happy, sugary-sweet sock has acquired a new, not-so-happy demeanor in the form of a huge, red, angry gash--



--wait, make that TWO angry gashes! Even my "happy on the needles" socks refuse to be cooperatively happy! Despite the pooling, though, I still really love these socks. And, look, I have successfully maneuvered the short-row heel! Now that's what I call sweet success! (or, just a really, REALLY bad pun).

Have a great Sunday, all!