chocolate cake and vanilla manga Sunday, Feb 24 2008

I made a chocolate chocolate chip double layer cake with dark chocolate frosting recently. It was alright. No individual part of it was especially sweet since it was mostly dark chocolate, but combined the whole damn thing was just over the top. A lot of people like that though. I say that it’s a lot easier to have a cake that you cover in frosting turn out well aesthetically since you can kind of use the frosting like plaster. Of course if your frosting actually has the consistency of plaster then you’ve got a problem. I guess I prefer cakes to pies somewhat, but it’s more that I think it’s easier to make a cake properly than a pie. I’m not a huge fan of either though. I like candy actually, but I never make any myself. You’re better off eating fruit instead of candy and all that. Lately I just don’t eat much of either really.

It occurs to me that even though I often have some problem or another when making a cake, I have in fact never failed at it. I can’t say that for any other type of dish whether it’s desert or appetizer or main course. Does that mean that I’m good at making cakes or just that I’ve never tried making an especially difficult one? I did make that chiffon cake recently and that was quite a bit more involved than this chocolate cake but rather than being more difficult it just had a lot more steps. I’ve never tried to do anything extravagant with cakes, like doing special designs, shapes, or decorations. On the other hand I don’t see any real point in doing so. As long as it tastes good and doesn’t look like a pile of shit (I don’t remember what it was recently that I made that looked like liquefied feces but even though it tasted good that really spoiled it) then it’s fine.

So as you might have guessed by the title I had something to say about a manga series. However I have so little to say about it I felt that I might as well mention the cake first. Hmm yeah I’ve got something else to do so let’s bang this fucker out.

20th Century boys by Urasawa Naoki, a 22 volume seinen (apparently) manga series that sucks. It tries to trick you into think it’s good, like Death Note, by being extremely complex and convoluted. But as things wind down you suddenly realize that it’s awful. I don’t even fucking care if I spoil this series for you. The author cops out every step of the way. Various integral characters always get into some kind of trouble which should be fatal but they end out popping up later at just the right time. Most of the characters spend the series on the run in some form or another, however they don’t really hide out and it’s like they’re not being searched for. It’s just fucking ridiculous. Up until about the 17th volume of the series which I read a matter of years ago, I thought this was a great series. Whether my tastes changed or the course of the story changed in that time I can’t tell you. But I can tell you that reading the last 5 volumes of the work at this point, a little over a year after the series finished its serialization and had been released in its entirety in a collected form, I just thought it was terrible. In the first place even though Urasawa’s art style is fairly unique, it’s not that great. The stories are complex, and the characters are very human, but things just don’t quite add up. The only other work of his that I’ve seen in its entirety is “Monster” which is a much better series but it is also similar in that the story takes place over a fairly vast span of time compared to most manga series and involves a massive conspiracy. I thought that Monster was the better work but you can draw your own conclusions. Maybe I wouldn’t like it at this point either. A series that is similar to 20th century boys in that childhood events and relationships somehow result in strange conspiracies as adults is “Old Boy” although that work is more perverse and less pop-culture (20cb has a lot of stuff of references to 70s rock music in it).

Well in the end 20th century boys does not end and is continued in the series 21st century boys which I have not read. I don’t know whether I will or not. I honestly regret “finishing” this series so I wouldn’t recommend it to people in general. Although I can imagine people who like epic convoluted complex stories enjoying this work. But it’s just bullshit from start to finish. Absolutely.

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Even fake food is better than fast food Wednesday, Feb 20 2008

Continuing my reflections on food, as promised I went out and bought a prepared pizza crust and cheese since I had a lot of toppings left over from the other day when I attempted to make my own pizza. The results were exponentially better than my horrid crust which is what I expected. What I was surprised by was how much better it ended out than the likes of what’s served at so called “pizza delivery” chain restaurants. I refuse to name names but I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. There’s a lot I could say about chain restaurants and fast food but three topics is a bit much.

Back to the prepared crust, I happened to buy a “fresh” variety that I’m assuming was partially pre-baked before being sealed in plastic. You can get different crusts in different states of prepare that have been preserved in varying ways, but I imagine that they’re all pretty comparable. Since it wasn’t raw dough the baking time (to say nothing of the overall preparation time) was less than what I made the other day, really you just need to let it go long enough to get the cheese to your desired state or 10 minutes, whatever is longer. I had to bake my pizza the other day for almost twice that amount of time. All in all, with the time it took to heat up the oven that I spent arranging the pizza it was 20 minutes. Most delivery chain pizzas take at least that long to arrive. I thought that the price for the crust was not great, but if you combine everything it’s not more than the regular price of delivery pizza unless you use premium ingredients. And of course if you use premium ingredients and don’t fuck it up then it tastes exponentially better than delivery pizza and might justify the price.

I must say though that for me pizza is a well below ideal food. Why? Because if you make it so that it tastes good it’s very high in calories, however it’s not especially filling so if you eat enough to feel satisfied you’ve also eaten enough to make yourself FAT. You don’t want to be FAT do you? Well to be fair you could say the same thing about any high fat low volume food, like cutlets and steaks. Although you tend to eat those more along with other things whereas when you get a pizza don’t you just get the pizza? Are you trying to tell me that you really eat a salad before you eat your pizza? Come on? You know you’re just eating other junk along with the pizza unless you’re just stuffing your face on pizza alone.

I may or may not try making my own pizza dough again some other time. Although I doubt that I’ll try kneading it by hand again if I do. By the way I topped my pizza with a cheese blend, and cured meats. I probably would have had to put pure lard on (the crust called for you to oil it so perhaps I did at that) to get a higher fat content.

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