CakeLove

Is rich in many ways. Let’s see.

They are popping up all over the place and expanding into cafes. From exposure on the Food Network and word-of-mouth, this business is raking in the bucks. Given that the story behind the founder is a gem, and the motto/idea is simple: “Cakes from scratch,” it’s no wonder that this take on desserts appeals to people.
But these tasty treats come at a hefty price tag. $3 for a cupcake and $6 for a cheesecake smaller than the palm of my hand is a bit ridiculous. The price would not have been so bad if the product was equally worth it. In my honest opinion, it is not, and I have buyer’s remorse as a result. And diarrhea.

Which leads me to my next reason why CakeLove is rich…
Its flavors, ingredients, etc. are rich. Rich and heavy. Perhaps more than one item leads to intense intestinal distress. So for people with average digestive systems, do not indulge on more than one serving. Consider yourself warned.

Trying to satiate my sweet tooth and treat myself to something celebratory in the completion of a publication led to my wandering to CakeLove. In the future, I know better than to venture there again. I could have gotten better cupcakes from a box mix. The icing wasn’t bad, but my cream cheese icing I made recently was better and I am giving Cinnabon a run for their money. As for the cheesecake, it was not as dense as a typical cheesecake and had a thicker graham cracker crust. But its extremely small size and lack of orgasmic reactions in my taste buds made me think of better uses for my six bucks.

Frankly, Safeway the grocery store has better desserts. For about the same amount of money I spent at CakeLove, I could have gotten one of my favorite desserts:
It has a croissant-type layered, flaky pie crust with large sugar granules on the bottom, with a custard body, and fresh fruit on top (kiwis, strawberries, mandarin oranges, etc.) with a light gelatin glaze. It serves 8-10 people and is fabulous.

In short, CakeLove? No thank you. I have better uses for my money.

PowerPoint Presentations

The PowerPoint templates that come with MS Office are crap. For many years, my company has been using these crappy PowerPoint templates that are quite hideous. Frustrated when working on a presentation for a conference, I located a graphic design company that had a crapload of decent templates for an annual subscription. I convinced my company to invest in this and then went through all 5,482 templates in my down time at work to download the relevant ones.

Out of all 5,482 templates, there are quite a few that I could not imagine ANYONE using for an actual presentation. But there are two that really stuck out.

The first one is this:

WTF?! Strawberry trees??? I believe the designer was tripping on acid when creating this one.


The second one is this:

Also related to strawberries. Strange. And highly suggestive/sexualized. Probably would yield the most interesting PowerPoint presentation ever.

Spiffy new toy

MKD and I got new cell phones last weekend with the renewal of our 2-year contract. This marks the fourth cell phone we have gotten through Verizon and is by far one of the best too. It’s the Alias from Samsung.

To make regular calls, open like normal:
ooooohh...

To use full keyboard for text, email, etc., open from side:
aaaahhh...

Having a full keyboard is really convenient and I find that our texts have drastically changed. Texting takes half the time and you can have actual words and sentences instead of abbreviated caveman speak. For example, here is a text I recently sent to MKD:

“My dearest MKD,
I am leaving work now and hope there is not too much traffic. When I get home, we shall make dinner together. How does the Chicken Portobello Wraps with Balsamic Aioli sound?”

With our older phones, the same message above would have been this:

“On way. Chix wrap din?”

Sadly, I think the top message took less time to compose and send than the bottom one.

Childhood Goodness and EXTREME dorkiness

For those of you less fortunate, you did not grow up playing Contra on Nintendo like I did. Well, I personally did not have a Nintendo as my parents refused to ever get me a video game system in fears of ‘hurting’ the tv. But I did have a best friend/neighbor that had a Nintendo in the basement of his house in which we could play games such as Contra until our thumbs were raw. So really, you were not fortunate if you did not own a Nintendo or did not know someone who let you play with theirs (cough, MKD).

Recently, Contra 4 was released for the Nintendo DS as a 20th Anniversary type of thing (god, I feel old). Not only is it as awesome as I remember from my childhood, but fracking harder since the cheat most people know (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, select, start) does not work! So I have to beat it the old fashioned way, with tremendous skill and lightning-fast reflexes.

After playing for a few days, level 4 kept kicking my ass until I figured out how to beat it. After that was smooth sailing. As of last night, I beat the game on “Easy” using about 30 lives out of the 50. I was rewarded with just the credits, no ending, since you have to beat the game on “Normal” or “Hard” to see an actual ending. Not to mention, when beating the game on a harder mode, you also unlock older versions of Contra from my childhood days! But beating the game on “Easy” did unlock a challenge mode with 40 tasks of various objectives. This is now my new challenge and I choose to accept it.

Unlike the video games today, I don’t get all nauseated and gross playing this one. [yay!]