Chocolate cake and revamped websites

Busy week and weekend, punctuated by failing technology. Our air conditioning was broken for almost two weeks during an especially hot spell in Toronto. Our phone and DSL went dead for a day. Bell said it was a network problem, but I know the squirrels were behind it somehow.



Ruth and I revamped her website. I had created her site with static HTML years ago, but I moved it into Wordpress to make it easier for Ruth to maintain it herself.

I also started revamping Inkygirl. It's too cluttered right now, but I'll be gradually tweaking the template and graphics.



Building a website is a lot like baking a cake in some ways. You need to start with good ingredients. For my two website revamps I started with Chris Pearson's Thesis Wordpress theme. I've used Chris's templates before and have found them to be much more solid and well supported than other templates I've tried.

I had toyed with the idea of learning CSS and creating a site from scratch but I'm realizing that I simply don't have the time. Besides, tweaking is much more fun and I do learn some CSS this way.



The cake I baked was from a recipe in Green & Black's Chocolate Recipes Unwrapped. The book was a gift from some British friends; it's the sort of cookbook that's fun to read on its own, with sumptuous and mouthwatering photographs.



I used Green & Black chocolate bars in the recipe: dark chocolate and ginger for the buttercream filling, and dark chocolate for the drizzled icing on top. The recipe also called for an apricot-lemon sauce to be poured over both cake halves after they've cooled, before sandwiching them together with chocolate.



I also used a special gourmet vanilla that my friend Luisa brought me from Mexico. The stuff smelled heavenly, much richer and smoother than the regular vanilla I bought from the grocery store.



The cake was mainly for Ray and Jeff; Ray came over on the weekend to help Jeff with prep for renovations we're having done this week. Both enjoyed the cake, and I sent some leftovers home with Ray.



There's something comforting about baking. I don't do it often because I have little willpower when leftovers are sitting around the house, but I find it's a wonderful way to relax, to slow down and enjoy the sensuality of the process: the fragrance of melting chocolate, for instance, and the silky softness of flour mixing with cocoa and sugar and different-textured grains sliding against one another.

Plus baking still seems like magic to me. I feel like a little kid sometimes, peering in through the oven window and seeing (lo and behold) pans of liquid gunk rising and swelling into chocolaty curves, smooth and inviting.

Mmmm....

And don't even get me STARTED about buttercream icing.

Anyway, I hope you all had a good weekend. I'm looking forward to seeing Tulpan at the Toronto Film Festival with Craig tonight!




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