So my birthday is coming up, which means I have cake on my mind. I love baking but I don’t like ultra-sweet stuff, which means most traditional layer cake recipes are pretty meh for me.

However, there is one flourless chocolate cake recipe that I absolutely love. I found it years ago on the Whole Foods website and haven’t had much need to tweak it. Anyway, here it is:

Ingredients

• 12 Oz bittersweet chocolate chips
• 1 cup and 3 tbs butter
• 1 1/4 cup sugar
• 6 eggs
• 1 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1 tbs milk
• 1 tbs honey
• 1/4 tsp vanilla extract

Putting it together

1. Preheat oven to 375
2. Spray a 9-inch springform pan with cooking spray, line bottom with parchment paper and spray that too
3. Melt 8 oz of chocolate and 1 cup butter in a saucepan over medium low heat. Stir until they are completely blended. Pour into large mixing bowl.
4. Mix in sugar, then eggs (one at a time). Sift in cocoa powder, stir until blended.
5. Pour batter into baking pan and bake 35-40 minutes. Remove, let cool 10 minutes.
6. While the cake cools, make the glaze: melt remaining chocolate and 2 tbs butter in saucepan. Stir in milk, honey, and vanilla extract.
7. Pour the glaze over the cake, spreading with a spatula.
8. Put the cake in the fridge to chill 30-60 mins, or just dig in. It tastes good cold or hot.

This cake is awesomely dense and chocolaty. It’s also really easy to make gluten free - just use gluten free vanilla extract. I highly recommend it to chocolate lovers and people who find store bought cake boring or too sweet. 

acciojkrowling asked: How about you wait two days and actually read The Casual Vacancy before deciding your opinion?

The Underemployed Academic: Your speed is impressive you tumblr like a younger woman.

As a symbol JK Rowling can be more than a woman, she can be incorruptible, a hero.

As a person though, she can be corrupted by her own success. 

The Harry Potter series took a massive downturn after her popularity peaked. , her comments leave a strong impression that she has no love for fantasy novels, nor her own previous writing, erroneously eschewing all fantasy novels as sexless child books.

The quoted prose reek of the false intellectualism of someone trying too hard.

I am dating this smart ass. <3

In all seriousness, though, never let hero worship get in your way of being objective. When we make successful artists untouchable, we give them the right to do whatever the hell they want, and this is usually not a good thing. Think of the Starwars Prequels! The past few Sookie Stackhouse novels! M Night Shyamalan!!!

Challenge artists, especially the successful ones. Push back. Otherwise their egos will eclipse their talent.

Scaring myself silly reading scary stories right now, when I really ought to be working on one of the billion other things I have to do. There’s something I keep noticing.

I’m not really one to criticize writers for being unoriginal. True, I am less likely to read a piece of work if I find it predictable (see, dull) but I get it. Writers learn to write through imitation. Everything is derivative because everything had been written before. Etcetera.

HOWEVER.

There is no excuse for being too formulaic. When I read a ghost story and the big twist ending is that the ghost someone saw just happens to resemble someone who died horrible/committed suicide/vanished mysteriously in that very house, I am not impressed. I am not scared. I am literally falling asleep.

Seriously people. This trope has been used so. Many. Times. It is a cliche, and cliches are for lazy people.

Thank you. That is all.

So yesterday was my year and a half anniversary with my boyfriend. Since our actual anniversary was cut short by a rare Boston power outage (seriously, we hadn’t even cleared dinner off the table) we decided to go all out.

We came down to his parent’s boat. We ate on the back deck at just about sunset, which is always pretty. We’re right on the Mystic river and have a pretty good view. There’s a blinking green light some way down the water that always makes me think of The Great Gatsby. 

The wine was a nice, acidic kick-in-the-teeth red. Mike’s first remark upon trying it was to say that it would be excellent in a sauce, but it grew on us. It was cheap at only eleven dollars and I’m definitely holding onto the bottle.

For the meal, we had duck breast dusted in sage, rosemary and thyme, pan seared and then covered in a blueberry sauce; oven roasted parsnip, carrot and onion cooked under duck thighs; and sliced cucumber lightly dusted in salt.

After dinner, while sitting out under the stars, we tried to have coffee and pastries but something in the coffee making process went horribly and terribly wrong and mostly I had a mug full of coffee grinds. It was still a good night, though.

Today I tried making a milkshake for the first time. I have to say, it was surprisingly good. I usually have to fork over something like six dollars for a frappe at the local ice cream stand. This cost a fraction of that.

Here’s how I did it:

• 1 cup chocolate ice cream
• 1/4 cup milk (I used 1% and it was fine)
• About a teaspoon of chocolate syrup. More than that was too much.
• 1 tablespoon of sugarless smooth peanut butter

I mixed these in the blender at a low speed. It came out thick and creamy - pretty much exactly the way they are at the ice cream stand. I added peanut butter as a variation on ordinary chocolate and it worked really well, but you can omit the peanut butter for an ordinary chocolate shake.

I’m considering trying out a hard chocolate frappe. I have some whipped cream flavored vodka in the freezer that I need to find a use for (I know, I know, I bought it out of morbid curiosity) and this might be the perfect way to get rid of it. Or it might be a way to create an ungodly mess. We’ll see.