National Chocolate Cake Day and an Ironic Argument

Celebrate, people! It's one of the best days of the year. It's National Chocolate Cake Day! What could be better? Valentine's Day? I say not--because on V-day you have to wait for someone else to give you the chocolate, and there are issues and implications and heaviness and sometimes pouting or martyrdom connected to the chocolate giving/receiving.

Not so on National Chocolate Cake Day. Let's all just get along, and share the cake. Is it best with a glass of milk? Or will a scoop of ice cream on the side do? Sigh. I love it. And the frosting must be equal to the cake, I say. Frosting snobs, UNITE! Only the best for MY chocolate cake.

Kind of reminds me of when my oldest was a wee babe in arms and I had a package of Pampers from a baby shower with me on a vacation and my aunt (who still had a babe in arms, that's just how it is in families of Mormons, get over it) teased me about the expensive name brand diapers, "Oh! Pampers, huh? Because nothing is too good for my baby's bottom." Me? I answered. The world's biggest cheapskate? I'd buy diapers at yard sales if I could.

Anyhow, that maxim DOES apply to chocolate cake. Only the RIGHT frosting will do.

Does frosting have nutrients? If you use real butter, there's vitamin E. If you use milk, there's a dash of calcium. Man, it's almost health food.

No iron, though. Not even in the powdered sugar.

Which brings me to a different point about iron, I mean, IRONY. I keep being told that a lot of people don't get what irony is, and I've heard many complaints directed at that angsty Canadian singer (forgot her name right now) who sang "Isn't it Ironic" about rain on her wedding day, the complaint being that she misdiagnosed irony, thereby leading astray a generation of literary illiterates. I don't know. I never listened that closely to the song. I think I was in Japan when it was popular, or giving birth or something that kept me from enjoying the tunes on the radio.

My husband, who will be footing the bill for date night's dessert tonight (dare you venture a guess?), and I have been in a bit of an argument about irony this week. More of a debate, really.

So. We both were asked to speak in church on Sunday, and somehow he worked in the topic of pets, that we have been given the ability to choose for ourselves, and all consequences aren't immediate and God could make us obey if he wanted to, but he allows some consequences to come later, which makes us His children, not his pets, and so on and so forth.

It was quite interesting. I could even listen to his ideas, since my talk was already over and I could breathe and uncross my eyes, and stuff.

Anyway, the closing song was "Know This That Every Soul is Free," which includes this verse:

Freedom and reason make us men;
Take these away, what are we then?
Mere animals and just as well
The beasts may think of heaven or hell.

When that line about animals came up, we looked at each other in surprise. Hey, that's just what he was saying in his talk!

Later he said, "Wasn't that ironic?" and I said, no. Not ironic. Coincidental. And he said, Nuh-uh, ironic. And I said, Nuh-uh, coincidental.

Or was it?

I'm not sure.

Later, I noticed another aspect to the meeting. My dear friend the veterinarian, who had never been to our church before, had come to listen, and she has a super soft heart toward all creatures canine. In the process heard my husband's tangential points about shock collars, and why it's nice that God doesn't zap us when we make bad choices like a shock collar. Yeah, all the shocking discussion about shock collars. In front of our cute little vet. That seemed ironic to me.

Or was it?

I think it's going to take TWO pieces of chocolate cake to sort it out.

Got this from a site called "Chocolate Cake Party" -- Excellent!

http://www.chocolatecakeparty.net/chocolate-cake/

Cheese is the New Chocolate (and leaving behind being a pantser)

After days and days of holiday gluttony, I have finally stopped snacking on mixed nuts long enough to put my fingers on the keys and finish up the remainder of the outline of my NaNo novel. For the first time in years of writing novels I was a "pantser" this fall as I wrote, just creating outline-enough to get the daily word count down. I GREATLY prefer a road map for where I'm going next. It could *feasibly* be finished by the end of January. A first draft, that is.

Ooh! And on my morning run today I even figured out who the bad guy is going to be (amazing that I could write 185 pages and not quite know who the villain was, haha), AND how and where to write in the scene to introduce him and all his cronies.

It's a Christmas miracle.

For weeks I've had to put my mind to the details of this holiday mania, which is wonderful, but it's nice to start to possess my own brain again. That's kind of how I think of writing, of what a gift it is to me--a place and way I can be just myself, my own thoughts, my own creativity, myself. Without it, I don't know where I'd find that. At a gift-giving time of year, it's one I'm so very grateful for.

Speaking of gifts, I have a child born on Christmas, my oldest, so it's even MORE mania than just the Christmas mania and cooking. We also get to celebrate another birthday on that day. For years I loved it because I'd ask what his favorite meal was so I could fix it on Christmas, and we got macaroni and cheese or refried beans on tortillas. (Way easier than a turkey!) His gift to me this year was his favorite meal, a frozen lasagne. Does Christmas dinner get much easier than that? The other kids were kind of confused when they heard him make his request and I shouted "Yes!" and threw both arms in the air in victory.

His cake was a homemade chocolate cake. Have I mentioned a thousand times how great the recipe is on the can of Hershey's Cocoa? It's the BEST. (Just remember to sift the flour!) But you HAVE to make it with the frosting recipe on the can. It's amazing. It's so amazing that when I ate half a slice, I got an enormous sugar headache--that's what I get for "going off sugar" for eight months. Can I express how troubling that is? I cannot. I am the girl who used to polish off one of those super-syrupy orange sodas at the doctor's office during a gestational diabetes test and say, "Can I get another one of those?" while women all around me were wincing in pain at the tongue-numbing sweetness of it.

I guess I'd better go back to eating muenster cheese as my sugar substitute. I haven't had a grilled muenster cheese sandwich for three days. I might be going through a different kind of withdrawal. I might be getting a "cheese headache."

The Maker of the Treats!

The other night I took my PYRAMID of RICE KRISPIES TReATS to the Scout Court of Honor, and one of the boys said, "Wow, Sister Griffith. Are you the Maker of the Treats?"

Why, yes. Yes, I am. In fact, I'd really like a t-shirt that says this.

I'm still plugging away at my edits. Just a couple dozen pages to go! I can almost smell the cake I'm going to make for myself when I'm done. Mmm. Chocolate. The recipe from the side of the Hershey's Cocoa can, with the frosting recipe from it, too. (That delicious frosting has officially turned me into a Frosting Snob. I can never again appreciate a canned frosting.)

The Cake of My Editing Accomplishment Dreams

Of course, naturally I'll only be eating ONE BITE of this delicious cake, since I'm not eating sugar anymore. Well, not very much sugar, anyhow.

When I was 19 I worked in the Pepperidge Farm Cookie Factory for a summer. Perhaps I've mentioned this before. Well, the point of it was to earn money to spend on a trip to Europe with my roommates. I spent a lot of my time there looking like Lucille Ball in the candy factory, and probably cost the company more money than I made for them. It was a bit of a disaster. However, my sweet Dad put a poster on my wall: "As you work, think 'Eur-ope, Eur-ope, Eur-ope, Yurrr-up!'" It really helped.

Then the trip was the incentive for the cookie work. Now, the cake is the incentive for the writing work.

I work well with incentives.