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the strangest season
Apr. 2nd, 2020 09:04 pmIt's my first season as RBA (Regional Brevet Administrator), theoretically running brevets.
Well, that's obviously not happened. Someday, I'll ride with other randonneurs outside of Zwift. Hopefully.
But at least Zwift somehow got the secret handshake to talk to my somewhat-ancient CycleOps exercise bike; I didn't pony up for the smart one but I did get the one with real power, so I can race people virtually. Still so few women that, amusingly, in the race I did yesterday, I was 4/7 (4/11 for most of it but I guess the last 4 didn't finish) in group D. If I'd ridden in group C I would have been 2/2, no one at all raced B, and I would have *won* group A as 1/2. Long-term paying for both Peleton and Zwift and often going for months using neither is probably not actually the right plan but for now it's fun.
However, this is mostly a baking, not a biking, quarantine post: for once I made myself birthday cake, since buying a treat wasn't happening, and I have all this time that I'm not commuting.
It's mostly faithful to the recipe in my retro-reprint Betty Crocker, but I made a few tweaks and thus feel free to rename it, as the original one is a little "ooh we added some spice and made it ~exotic~ (even though it has less spice than the applesauce spice cake a page before that is not given a vaguely ethnic name". Except I haven't thought of one yet. (If you want to google the original and other variants, it was listed as "Araby spice cake", and this repost of it is accurate to my cookbook.)
( Unnamed chocolate spice cake with mocha buttercream filling and White Mountain frosting )
I contemplated various flavorings for the frosting, but I love the classic plain White Mountain. Could try doing the mocha thing like the filling with it too, or go for contrast with orange blossom water or something, but I'm also just as happy I didn't, since we only just finished eating the rosewater-and-pistachio vegan aquafaba meringues I made recently.
Oh, right, recipe for those, too:
( Vegan pistachio rosewater meringues )
Evidently you can do cooked frostings with aquafaba, too, but that's an experiment for another day...
Pictures later when I figure out where I'm posting them now that my Flickr is out of space, including the one of a half-eaten meringue that everyone on Facebook thought looked like I was eating a minature dinosaur skull, evidently...
Well, that's obviously not happened. Someday, I'll ride with other randonneurs outside of Zwift. Hopefully.
But at least Zwift somehow got the secret handshake to talk to my somewhat-ancient CycleOps exercise bike; I didn't pony up for the smart one but I did get the one with real power, so I can race people virtually. Still so few women that, amusingly, in the race I did yesterday, I was 4/7 (4/11 for most of it but I guess the last 4 didn't finish) in group D. If I'd ridden in group C I would have been 2/2, no one at all raced B, and I would have *won* group A as 1/2. Long-term paying for both Peleton and Zwift and often going for months using neither is probably not actually the right plan but for now it's fun.
However, this is mostly a baking, not a biking, quarantine post: for once I made myself birthday cake, since buying a treat wasn't happening, and I have all this time that I'm not commuting.
It's mostly faithful to the recipe in my retro-reprint Betty Crocker, but I made a few tweaks and thus feel free to rename it, as the original one is a little "ooh we added some spice and made it ~exotic~ (even though it has less spice than the applesauce spice cake a page before that is not given a vaguely ethnic name". Except I haven't thought of one yet. (If you want to google the original and other variants, it was listed as "Araby spice cake", and this repost of it is accurate to my cookbook.)
( Unnamed chocolate spice cake with mocha buttercream filling and White Mountain frosting )
I contemplated various flavorings for the frosting, but I love the classic plain White Mountain. Could try doing the mocha thing like the filling with it too, or go for contrast with orange blossom water or something, but I'm also just as happy I didn't, since we only just finished eating the rosewater-and-pistachio vegan aquafaba meringues I made recently.
Oh, right, recipe for those, too:
( Vegan pistachio rosewater meringues )
Evidently you can do cooked frostings with aquafaba, too, but that's an experiment for another day...
Pictures later when I figure out where I'm posting them now that my Flickr is out of space, including the one of a half-eaten meringue that everyone on Facebook thought looked like I was eating a minature dinosaur skull, evidently...
