This month has left me with many a reason to make cakes, making it a good month. I started out with a birthday at the OOO Office. I always enjoy doing cakes for them because they just give me a theme and let me run with this. The first was a cake for a gentleman named Tim who worked on the Corpse Craft game. This was a great one because I had just recently started into painting with royal icing. I think the end result turned out well. The flavors were red velvet and vanilla bean buttercream.

Next up I stepped up to the plate to make Cephalopod another squid-type cake. Last year I went the 2-D route, so this year I was determined to make it 3-d. I started with a standard 10″ cake (flavors were vanilla lime with keylime curd) then built on top of that. The squid was made of poundcake and the ship piece made of marzipan. Other than that it was buttercream and fondant.

This cake helped me transistion into my next cake for a coworker George, who moved to Greece a week ago. I was assigned the task of making a going away cake for him. Again it was a standard 10″ cake. The flavors were carrot cake with vanilla cream cheese filling and a Swiss buttercream frosting. I used what I had learn from making the squid to make and texture a sheep. I don’t know Greek, so it was interesting trying to figure out how to write “Happy Shepherding” on the cake. I apparently got shepherd right. That’s better than nothing.

Next up with a 20 Year Anniversary cake for our general manager. I was given a invitation to design it after. I wish I’d done more on it; but I also think that if I had, then it may have ended up too busy. This was the first time I had used stencils on a cake and it was a great learning experience. The flavors were white cake with lemon curd and fresh berries.

Though I do not have a picture, the final cake of this month went to a good friend, Danny. Who’s birthday was this week. We celebrated with some wonder Afghan cuisine, tiramisu, cthulhu Munchkin, Blazblue, and Zombies. I’m still a bit bitter that I’ve still yet to win a game of Munchkin ever since I learned it at Connecticon a million years ago.  Anyway, cheers Danny!

This week we are off to Connecticon! See you there!

Awhile ago this article caught my geeky-culinary eye. It combined 3 of my favorite things: video games, play-doh, and pastry. After contemplating the idea for a few months, I finally found an appropriate subject matter to emulate. I’ve talked about it before; but if you haven’t checked it out yet, then you should really head over to Whirled. There is a brilliant game over there called Dictionary Attack that I decided to use as my subject matter.

I have got to tell you, these cookies took forever to make. Wow. They’re massively tedious. I’m sorry MDB, I’d planned on making a few different types; but they will have to be saved for a later date.  Here’s a picture of the cookies and the game they’re based on.

Chilling with the Lich King whilst he hangs with his many Val’kyr hos .

Patching things up with Baron Rivendare. He apologized for the many, many times his minions made me fail my 45 minute Baron run.

Hanging out with Mayor Quimby.

Surveying the land with some pretty tight wheels.

Showing the folks at Light’s Hope Chapel what’s-what. Wait? We got our butt’s kicked? But didn’t they see the massive army of ghouls and abominations?! What about Highlord Mograine? Oh right, father issues. Oh well.

Fine, well then I’m going to go have a little talk with Van Cleef. Hey Edward! Have you seen corpse explosion?!

Reasons the beta is awesome.

These are a few of my favorite things.

I’m sure than most everyone already knows the events of the past week; but now I’ve taken some time to digest everything and breath…and blog.
Last week began with my parents finding their way out from Ohio. I drug them everywhere interesting I could think of and made them eat at a lot of places they generally wouldn’t have. Sorry dad. Somewhere in the mist of that I turned 25 and spent a good portion of that day at the beach. I enjoy low-key birthdays. Two days later I was awoken to the cats playing “run-over-jes’-face” and got up to find that Ian had PRESUMABLY gone to work early. Thinking not much of it, I gave him a call to make sure he INTENDED to go in early. After ensuring everything was fine, Dad and I headed to Lowe’s for some home improvement items. I got home and went to my computer to get directions to our next destination only to find a message from Ian letting my know there was a late birthday present game on my computer. I opened it and started playing, thinking I was playing a build of a project he’s been working on with friends. The little 8bit avatar of me should have made me suspicious. The alarmingly specific events in the game should have made me suspicious. When the final boss bugged and Ian had to remake the build and put it back on through the network I finally admitted that I wasn’t just playing a random game. Before I knew it 8bit Ian had a question for me and I turned to find flesh Ian walking toward me. I’m sure everyone knows what happened next and I said yes.

I’m not really a fan art type of gal, let alone super good at photoshop; but I conjured this up on my couple of days off. Go play Whirled, then play Brawler in Whirled. It’s an amazing game done by an amazing guy.

Puzzle Pirates has some cool things happening this holiday season and created new ways to show off your awesome pirateness. Check it out!

Saturday came another D&D game. I fought a crocodile and stomped on someone’s hand. Fun was had. Have some pictures.

Many gamers will boast that they are true gamers because they’ve played all three Halos and Mario. While I would tend to agree with standard-jock-stereotype that the Halo legacy seems to be the gamer marker these days, I would also mentally *pffft* at him, because disagreeing in real life and calling myself a true gamer would grant me a hearty laugh and a butt kicking. The more I look around at our shelves though, the more I believe I’m right. Many benchmark games have released in this past week leaving me to riffle through all my old games and sigh. I still have all my old games for the simple fact that I tend toward nostalgia frequently and would randomly like to be able to play Sonic or Rampage without scanning Ebay. Why do I need a GBA when I have a DS Lite? Why do I need a GameCube, a PS1, or an Xbox when I have all their respective upgrades? And not only do I have them; but they’re all plugged into the TV. Simple, they’re neat and give me a sense of time and progression. Decades of systems sit before me, decades of games, decades of saved games and memory cards. It’s the same reason your parents have kept every little thing you’ve done since age 0.
Earlier, though, I found myself going through my screen shots folder for World of Warcraft and was startled by my sighs. Has the game really been out that long that I can look at an image and go “Oh I remember when Slackers took Deviant Delight, turned themselves into pirates and raided Freewind Post. Good times, good time.”? Or “Oh wow, I remember the first time we tried to do Deadmines and couldn’t because it was too hard.” The best thing about going back through all the screenshots was seeing my armor progression. I lack a lot of images from my low levels; but the shots I found should suffice.

Not my most ellegant post ever; but check this out and you’ll make the same face.

I apologize about my lack of updates. I’ve been enjoying some time with my mom here in San Francisco, then took a mini vacation back to Ohio to see the rest of the family.
Of course, I had a great time and it was bittersweet to return to the other side of the continent.
Aside from the $91.00 parking fee at SFO, I was also greeted with a spiffy legendary copy of Halo 3. No, I don’t really play the game all that well; but it came with a very awesome Master Chief Helmet, previously thought to be cat-sized. While we have large cats, this helmet is no where near their size.
I was also greeted with My Sims for the Wii and I couldn’t be more excited. I had the opportunity to play this while still in the works over at EA and I can only say that it’s more fun than I had hoped. I love games like Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon and My Sims just gave me the ability to play the same way as the others, only with building blocks. Being a massive fan of Legos as well, this game is just my cup of tea. Oh, and did I mention that it’s adorable? Well it really, really is.
More news later, for now here are a few pictures. One of the non-cat-sized helmet and the others taken while flying.