Ted Nelson's Birthday Party at the Internet Archive

I wasn't aware of Ted Nelson before the Internet Archive announced his birthday party, but it seemed like a good occasion to learn about him. Turns out he's a very interesting guy. Ted was one of the pioneers of the computer industry, starting long before the internet. You can listen to a 1979 interview here. There are many more interviews with Ted online, but this one is hilarious, as a clueless interviewer tries to convince Ted that nobody would want a computer in the home.

The program was preceded by a reception that included drinks and substantial snacks. 

One of several platters, before the crowd demolished it

The drinks included (sugar-free) lime Kool-Ade, Ted's childhood favorite.

Ted speaking

It was a warm evening, so there were fans.

Both sides of fan 

After the program, there was birthday cake.

Cake with lit candles

Cross-section of cake slice

Ted blowing out his candles

Video of Ted blowing out his candles

 It was a fun evening, and I am looking forward to learning more about Ted.

If you're not familiar with the Internet Archive, check it out. They have a lot more than the archived internet, including a free lending library, and the Wayback Machine, which has archived content no longer available via a regular search engine.

Premium Gold Flax Treats

The Premium Gold people sent us an extremely generous sample of two of the products, Gluten Free Flour and Golden Omega Ground Flaxseed and we proceeded to enjoy the delicious treats you can create using their gluten free line of products. Tea Time will add more to this post, so check back if you're interested in gluten free pizza dough!

J.K. baked this amazing chocolate fudge cake from Premium Gold's recipe. The recipe includes directions for buttercream frosting, but Tea Time doesn't like the taste of uncooked confectioner's sugar, so J.K. used the blender frosting recipe from Judy Rosenberg's All-Butter Fresh Cream Sugar-Packed Baking Book, which has only three ingredients: chocolate, evaporated milk and sugar. We've made gluten-free recipes before with other brands of flour, but, while all were acceptable, this Premium Gold's product is outstanding. We could not tell this was a gluten-free cake.

 J.K. also tried substituting flax meal and water for the egg in her favorite muffin recipe. This worked,  but she didn't have the same luck with a pizzelle recipe. If you know anyone who is gluten-free or someone who is allergic to eggs, you'll find the Premium Gold Flax products live up to their name! 

Divine Delights at the 2016 Fancy Food Show

What's that noise? Oh, it's just Angela screaming with Divine Delights because we've found the source for our favorite petit fours. Yes! The ones they serve at Lovejoys and Diandas. Scrumptious melt in your mouth bites of cake and fondant. Who could resist? J.K. suggested standing and sampling our fill, stuffing our faces until we could never look at another petit four again. Angela was afraid that could never happen. So we just took one each and savored them as we walked away. These are always a Taste of Heaven.

What's cooking in Jerusalem? September luncheon

Cook the Book September (yup! it's nearly the holidaze!) was Jerusalem, co-authored by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi. Angela must have been living under a rock, because this was a cookbook she's never heard about before cook the book. Turns out the hype is for real. Check out this cook book if you want salads with few ingredients but big taste. Plus the amazing full-page pictures are a treat as well. If you're intrigued about what we ate for lunch, read on!

J.K., as usual, made dessert, a semolina, coconut and marmalade cake. This is very different from her usual cakes. No chocolate, to begin with, and not too sweet. No frosting, either. This is more a quickbread than a cake.

A lot of ingredients, though

First, combine the wet ingredients.

Oil, juice, zest, eggs and marmalade.

Mix until the marmalade dissolves. If you don't have a silicone paddle, use a whisk for this step.

Whisk the dry ingredients together.

Don't forget to prepare your pans. J.K. uses cake strips to keep the edges from baking before the middle, so she doesn't get a cracked dome in the middle of her cakes.

Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients, and pour evenly into the prepared pans. The recipe said to use two one-pound loaf pans, so she did, but one would have been enough.

The cakes didn't rise enough for two pans, but they were delicious and had a nice texture nonetheless.

After baking, the cakes get brushed with as much orange syrup as they can hold.

J.K.'s cake rounded out our veggie meal nicely! Angela made three salads from the cookbook (although there were a lot more recipes that inspired her, she used the tried and true cook the book method of sticking with the recipes that grabbed her attention during the first scan of the cookbook.) They were Baby Spinach Salad with Dates and Almonds, Burnt Eggplant salad and Roasted Sweet Potatoes with Fresh Figs.  We loved them all, and they were great to mix and match. They were supplemented by olives, hummus and pita and lots of pomegranate seeds. For our drinks we had a lovely light Sparkling white, provided by an absent friend which Angela gussied up with Brandied Cherries (also made by said friend, thanks G!)

Cook the Book Jerusalem Luncheon–the mystery jar contains soft cheese!

You can make this–simple, beautiful, delicious–here.

This recipe revamped the spinach salad for Angela.

Choose small eggplants to shorten the cooking time for this dish

Angela chose to serve up J.K.'s cake with the suggested orange blossom water flavored Greek yogurt (tip: make sure your "Greek" yogurt is not thickened with cornstarch–or something more ominous!!) roasted figs and more more more pomegranate seeds. It was a light and flavorful ending to the meal.

cake, yes please!

Have you found any favorite cookbooks through friends? Or do you page through them at the bookstore/library? Maybe you just search the internet (Angela found lots of recipes from Jerusalem online, but few blog posts/articles had the amazing photos and historical background provided in the cookbook–unless they were quoting it directly of course.)  J.K. has so many cookbooks (mostly dessert) that she needs to start a cook the book a week club just to make a dent!

Dessert, Pretty Please

Dessert, Pretty Please! The Pretty Please Bakeshop is in the Food Bermuda Triangle near my house over by Clement Street. I call it the FBT because it's such a seductive area with a resto or cafe (or ice cream, or desserts!) in every other storefront that you can get lost (and fat) there for hours. I braved the unknown and stopped in to this bakeshop to pick up a box of goodies for a friend's birthday. We were meeting at a bar and I thought these little bits of celebration would be perfect, plus give me an excuse to check out a new bakery a bit closer to home. (Schuberts always sucks me in).

I bought four kinds of twinkies and a carrot cupcake (for the birthday girl). Red Velvet, Spice cake, Banana Choco and plain Choco. They were all glazed, though the two twinks with Choco had a chocolate spread over the top as well. Our favorites were between the spice cake and chocolate banana. The carrot cupcake was moist with a nice frosting on top, not too sweet.

Pretty Please Bakeshop brings an imaginative eye to all their desserts!

Traditional chocolate Twinkie, filled on the inside!

Sundays are Happy Hour at the bakeshop from 4-5, which means you can BOGO your desserts. Who can resist that?! The Pretty Please Bakeshop has a lot more than twinks to offer because they are into seasonal personal pies, lots of cupcake flavors plus any Bay Area sports team event serves as inspiration. Not to mention macaroons, frosted cookies, pudding cups, cake parfaits and probably anything you can request! They also make intriguing, inspired and well-executed cakes here. I stole some pictures off their facebook page of ones I like the best. I am trying to think of a theme event that I could order a shaped cake for...if I get one, I'll for sure update this page!

 

 

 Yes, those are all CAKE! Pretty awesome cakes from Pretty Please Bakeshop. I remember my Mom made me some shaped Birthday cakes when I was a kid. I think there was a clown? Maybe a bunny? What shape would you get for a special cake?

*remember I stole the cake photos from the PPB facebook page! Check them out.

Cook The Book May–Dessert / Posted by J.K.

This is my second attempt at this cake (an extremely moist chocolate-beet cake,"page 54 of Nigel Slater's Tender). I have somehow misplaced my springform pan, which I didn't discover until the last minute, so I made the first one in a nine inch cake pan with an aluminum foil collar. It was delicious, but it didn't look like much. Angela offered me a box of three springform pans. The biggest one was too big and the smallest one was too small. The just-right size is heart-shaped, which isn't seasonal but seems appropriate for a cake that's tinted red by the beets.

The instructions weren't very clear, so the first cake was a learning experience and the second one was a lot easier to make. I started by preparing all my ingredients. First I chopped my frozen butter and measured the dry ingredients. Chopping the butter gives it more surface and enables it to melt faster.

The recipe calls for cooking raw beets, but I cheated and bought a can of beets. The one pound can gave me the half pound of beets I needed. I cut the little beets in half and pureed them with my immersion blender. I had one cup of beet mush.

I weighed my chocolate. Chopping isn't necessary. Two minutes in the microwave will melt any quantity of chocolate.

  

Then I separated my eggs. One yolk broke, but that isn't important, as they get stirred together before being added.

   

All the ingredients (except the hot coffee), ready to go!

I added the hot coffee to the melted chocolate.

And stirred in the butter, covering it completely.

When the butter was melted, I added the egg yolks.

 Then it was time to go to the mixer. I beat the eggs whites with the whisk, then slowly added the sugar and switched to the silicone paddle to stir in the chocolate mixture and then the dry ingredients. With this attachment, folding by hand is not necessary. Just make sure the ingredients to be folded are distributed evenly over the top of the egg whites. The pouring collar, however, is necessary to keep the dry ingredients inside the bowl.

If you overbeat your egg whites (you'll know because they'll look like little rocks), just add another white and beat until it's incorporated and you have a solid mass again.

Prepared pan, lined with parchment and a lot of Baker's Joy spray.

Filled pan.

The cake, right out of the oven.

 The top edgges are a little overdone, but the sides look fine. And Tea Time likes the crunchy parts! If I make this cake again, I'll take it out five minutes sooner, or cover the top edges with aluminum foil halfway through, like a pie.

The cooled cake, out of the pan.

The cake is now securely wrapped and residing in my freezer, waiting to be served during the potluck at the next Swap on June 9.

I also cheated by using instant coffee. This little gadget is a whistling teapot for the microwave. The red tongue keeps the water from splattering (no, it really doesn't explode) when you pour it over the coffee.