Hamlette's Soliloquy

I went to ED's house last night. Yes, house--she no longer lives in a trailer, she is now renting an actual house, complete with basement! I'm quite envious. Although it's a rather odd house--the two bedrooms upstairs are painted cotton-candy colors: one is pink, the other is blue. The basement is fairly nice, and ED has decorated half of it all in trippy retro 70's stuff, like love beads and blinky lights and fuzzy posters of The Fonze.

The main floor is pretty nice, but quirky. There is a metal crank attached to one wall in the living room. It doesn't do anything, no matter how much you turn it in either direction. ED thinks maybe there used to be a tv antenna on the roof and you could turn it different ways with the crank--but there's no antenna there now, although there is one on the garage. But this crank doesn't seem to affect that one at all. Also, there's an outside exit in the bathroom. A regular door! We decided it's either an escape hatch so if you're having a really boring party you can just run away, or else its so the farmers could come in and get cleaned up without dirtying up the whole house.

And we had a few adventures while I was there. Of course, we watched a couple movies (A Life Less Ordinary and Alex & Emma), but we also had an interesting cake-baking experience. ED had decided, before I arrived, that she wanted to make a chocolate cake. So she mixed one up, but didn't want to do it in a normal flat cake pan because that would be too boring. She wanted to make a bundt cake. But her bundt pan was kind of smaller than normal, although she didn't realize that until she filled the whole thing to the top and had batter left over. She thought it would be fine (she doesn't bake cakes as often as I do, she's more of a pie person) and stuck it in the oven anyway. Then I arrived, and she took me on a tour of the house. When we got back to the kitchen, I smelled something kinda smoky, and asked if it was from the wood-burning furnace in the basement. ED didn't think it was, and then we both looked at the oven. I said, "You mentioned something about a cake..." and she yanked open the oven door. Batter everywhere! All down the sides of the bundt pan, dropping in glops from the racks, all over the coils...she yanked out the pan and I said, "ED, how full did you fill that pan?" She said, "to the top." I said, "ED, cake rises. You only fill the pan about half full!" She said, "Oh. But with pies you fill the whole thing..." Heehee, the top was kind of done, but inside was all gooey batter yet because it was supposed to bake for another 30 minutes or so yet. So we laughed a lot about it, and then spooned a bunch of the batter into a little round glass dish thing and stuck it in the microwave for a few minutes, until we had this sort of mutant cake mound. It was quite edible for the first ten minutes or so, but then turned extremely hard. So she decided maybe she would stick to pies for a while, since she's extremely good at those ;-)