Pigs in mud cake

This was my attempt at making a pigs in mud cake I've seen floating around the interwebs.  This is the original;

And this is my finished product;

So a quick and dirty how to.  I made two very moist chocolate cakes (vegan - a recipe to follow shortly) in a 21cm spring-form cake tin and left them overnight to cool in the fridge. I also made the pigs ahead of time.  When I say "I", I actually mean "we" because Kat is just better at modelling than me. It's not that I can't make cute little piggy bottoms with sweet little tails attached - it's more that it would take three hours and seven individual tantrums whereas Kat can do it in like ten minutes.  Bitch.

A hot tip I got from a website somewhere is to tint the icing not just with pink but with a tiny amount of ivory/flesh/apricot colour as this makes a much nicer pink pig skin colour instead of a lurid pink.  It works. You need four trotters, three piggy bottoms and  two piggy torsos - one with arms and one without.  For the trotters -just roll four balls slightly bigger than a pea and press a bamboo skewer across the middle to make the "cleat".  Pea-sized balls pricked with a skewer work for the snout.  The bottoms are just balls, again with a bamboo skewer pressed to make the "cleavage" of the bottom.  The tails are tiny sausages of icing curled around the bamboo skewer. Belly buttons and eyes are, again, just holes made with the bamboo skewer.  The arms on the pig reclining against the edge of the tub are one tube, about ten centimetres long, cut in half and with a snip in each end to form the "cleat".  Then they were left overnight to air dry.  I highly recommend either making spare parts or keeping some icing wrapped in cling wrap in the fridge in case you need more.  Placing the parts in the mud can be challenging and pink piggy parts smeared with mud just don't cut it.

The day after making the cakes and the pigs I took the cakes, cut them in half and layered them with vegan buttercream.  I checked the height of the Kit Kats and found that I only needed three of the four halves to make the cake high enough (you need about an inch between the top of the cake and the top of the Kit Kats). After stacking them with buttercream between the layers I coated the sides of the cake with more buttercream to make the Kit Kats stick.

A word on Kit Kats.  They're not cheap and for this size tin you need eleven.  I got them half price so it wasn't too $$$. I have seen other stuff used but I liked the hot tub look the Kit Kats give. So yeah.  21cm cake tin?  Eleven Kit Kats.

Insider tip?  Break them in half while they're in their packets - it makes them split easily without shattering.  Then start putting them around the edge of the cake so there are no gaps.  Finish it off with a pretty bow (I went with pink organza) which not only serves as decoration but keeps the Kit Kats in place while you pour in the "mud".

Okay it's mud time!  I went with a 2:1 chocolate to cream ratio. 200g chocolate and 100ml of cream makes a very firm ganache when it sets and it won't run or leak on you.  Heat the cream and chocolate together in the microwave, taking it out at frequent intervals to stir so it doesn't burn.  Pour into your hot tub and then smooth the top.

And the final part is to place your piggies.  I personally recommend using tweezers to place your trotters or you can make like Kat and go through a few replacements while muttering "shut up, shut up, shut up" and making a concerted effort to ignore the tweezers your bud is wordlessly holding out for you. Your call.

The pigs were a massive hit.  The man I made them for used to work in an office called "The Swamp" so it was the perfect theme. For a few hours they lived a condensed version of the celebrity lifestyle with all the trappings of fickle fame.  Famous, gossiped about, photographed...and then their adoring public turned on them and consumed them in a vicious flurry.  Unfortunately I had to leave the party early...this is what greeted me when I returned;

I'd say it tasted as good as it looked!

Kachow!

Any marriage breakdown is full of the "could have, should have, would haves" and I'm no exception.  There's a bunch of burning resentments that can drag you down if you let them.  Case in point - the ex taking the lawn mower to go mow the new girlfriend's lawn. ARE YOU FREAKIN' KIDDING ME?  Know how many times he mowed our family's lawn in the last five years?  ONCE.  You want to mow a lawn sunshine?  Come mow mine because you OWE me a BUNCH of lawn mowing and that be the tip of the BIGGEST iceberg since the Titanic.

You can see how quickly that sort of thinking snowballs, right?  I recently had something of an epiphany about this one.  I've got a limited amount of energy to spend in the wake of this separation.  I can pour it into anger and resentment over all of the things he failed to do or I can pour it into just getting on with doing those things myself and forging the life that makes me happy in his absence. Obviously I choose option B.

So first up was my little boy's bike.  My aunt gave it to him for his third birthday in the (vain) hope that it would prompt the ex into putting it together for him as a father-son bonding session.  Here's his bike right up until recently;

Sad, right?  So I assembled my not inconsiderable collection of tools and got busy.

Here's my issue with this sort of caper.  I've got the tools. I know how to wield them.  But oh my God instructions?  I have never been the "Insert Tab A into Slot B" type. It doesn't help that they insist on a one-size fits all instruction booklet to cover the nine different kinds of bike they make and you wind up with instructions like, "if your bike has a cam shaft differential prong you will need to rotate the locking pin 90 degrees before insertion. WARNING - If your bike has a fiscal foreign deficit prong and you rotate the locking pin 90 degrees instead of 60 before insertion your child's bike will explode the instant he sits on it taking his genitals with it and it will be ALL YOUR FAULT*."  And then there's the vague sketches that are meant to help you identify which model you have as opposed to just writing the model number on the fucking box in the first place and clearly marking the booklet with which instructions apply to which model.  I digress.

I gave up on page two straight after the identification of all the parts and decided to wing it.  20 minutes later we had a shiny metallic red bike and one very happy little Viking who insisted it was his "Lightning McQueen" bike, shouting "KACHOW!" while posing for photos with it.  Best.  Mother.  Ever.

* ACME Fuck You Co does not accept liability for any injuries that result as a direct result of your failure to pay the $200 assembly fee on your $60 bike you miserable cheapskate.  Best of luck.

Can I go now?

Some days I think I might be permanently broken. I think I have used up all of myself trying to help others, make things better and there's nothing left over for me. Nothing really prepares you for the moments when you put yourself out there, extend yourself beyond your comfort zones to a place where your heart and health are at risk and you are rebuked as though you came with evil intent.

I'm spent. I'm drowning. And no one is noticing. Kat tells me it is because I do such a good job of emulating someone who is coping. If only she could see the hurt, the anger, the gathering rage which for all it's substance still feels like a superficial film masking a rising tide of black nothing. I don't have the capacity to love the way I used to. I don't want to care about anyone or anything. I am morbidly obsessed with what it would be like to be empty and feel nothing.

I want to be swallowed by the earth, with nothing remaining but the occasional memory. Hey remember that girl with the red hair who smiled even when the tears ran down her face and said she was fine even when she wasn't? What happened to her? I don't know. I think she moved away.

Why does the thought of becoming a whisper seem so attractive? Because if I could fade like that I could give myself permission to take a bow and leave.

Family portrait

This weekend I took my babies to the park for a picnic with friends at Floriade.  My goal was to get one nice photo of the three of us together.  Five attempts.  Here's what we got;

Well if nothing else we managed to capture the personality of the subjects in this portrait.  *sigh*