No bikes, but CaICIC instead!

(NB: Though I am publishing this in September, it was started in August. So there.)

This month has been about revising things. Well, this whole summer has.

I'll get to the "trying" in a sec.

On a side note, I feel like this has been a weird summer. I've been keeping myself busy, but things just kind of aren't going how I wanted. I've seen my husband not that much, and primarily on vacations. He's had a bunch of projects keeping him busy, least of all the deck railing he set out to do this summer, which has become a huge deal. People: it's a deck railing. And by people, I mean husband? Only yesterday has all the construction detritus been taken away. I'm glad, but...like 2 months too late, you know?

Maybe that's what August is about. Trying to be patient.

But who am I kidding, that's beyond entirely unlikely and possibly the subject of a whole other blog.

So...I don't know. I've just felt like this summer has been kind of strange--not bad!--just strange. Like it wasn't the happy-go-lucky party party summer that I had kind-of-sort-of-but-not-really envisioned? I tend to have things in my head that only ever sort of vaguely get actualized.

Soon, we will have a patio. Well, okay, maybe not soon. That's another issue. The stove that we bought in May is now in its final resting place and kicking ass.

So! Guess what?

It's August 30 (!) and I still haven't learned to bike.

Part of it is because I haven't gotten a bike yet. Can't buy one. Don't even have a helmet. I'm admittedly not very motivated. It will probably take me another running injury (bite your tongue!) to get on one. I can just see myself getting on a bike and getting injured or having a bike accident...yeah, you can't live in a bubble and fear everything, but you know what? I don't think it's time. The person who's going to teach me is about to leave on a 3-week trip anyway.

So I'm going to get on a post that is two weeks late and talk about something else: Ice Cream.

Specifically: Cake and Ice Cream Ice Cream (CaICIC)

Yes! Ice cream.

I love cake. It's probably my favorite dessert, really. But I can't eat most cakes nowadays due to the gluten-free thing. But regardless, you know what's the best? Having frosted cake, with ice cream, when it's all in one bowl and you can mush it all together? I love that.

But they're usually separate.

Cake. Then ice cream. Cake and ice cream. Separate things.

Why is this?

There is cookies and cream ice cream. It's okay. I never got the whole dunking oreos in milk thing.

But there's not cake and ice cream ice cream (CaICIC). Why not? They throw everything else in ice cream. There is cake batter ice cream (Ben & Jerry's, I think). There is birthday cake ice cream (well, there was. Umpqua made it for a limited time last year, but it was more cake flavor with sprinkles than actual chunks of frosted cake).

But there's not CaICIC to speak of.

It was time to bring in the big guns.

My friend J. has an ice cream maker. And she is an incredibly able ice cream devotee and sugar gourmand. An apt hand in the kitchen, that J. And we have similar takes on food in general (except she disagrees that raisins in food immediately ruins the food. and I just discovered, does not like Nutella. we will forgive).

J. is a big gun. Actually, she's a person, but suffice it to say she knows her shit.

So: Though J. has made many, many ice cream flavors, J. had never made cake and ice cream ice cream. So we both would be trying something new.

I baked the cake in advance. It wasn't just any cake. Since I'm gluten-intolerant, the cake had to be gluten-free. Rather than come up with the proper alchemy and money outlay for the necessary flours, I picked up a mix. Whole Foods has really good gf cake mixes, and they're relatively inexpensive. The white cake, which I have made before, is pretty good, although tends to be a bit sugary sweet. This isn't bad, and it beats the Bob's Red Mill cakes, which require more ingredients and tend to have a beanier flavor. (But their gluten-free cornbread mix is wonderful. If you add salt. And maybe some cheddar. And jalapeno. But I digress again.)

We were to make the ice cream on a Sunday. So late Thursday evening prior, I baked the cake, according to the guidelines on the package. I went along with the bread pudding principle, that the longer it takes to get dried out, the better (mold notwithstanding).

While the cake was baking, I made frosting from scratch, involving melted Ghiradelli bittersweet chocolate, butter, vanilla extract, and powdered sugar. (It's basically the recipe on the back of the box. Frosting should trend sugary, not buttery. The ideal is a buttery cake and a sugary frosting, not the other way around IMHO.)

The frosting was good.

The cake sat in the fridge.

It is very hard for a cake to sit in the fridge. Not hard for the cake, but for me.

Come Sunday, the cake came out of the fridge and it and I headed over to J.'s.

Chico, J's dog, wanted to help. I heart Chico. You know how there are some animals you just like? Chico is one.

That isn't cake he's got there, though.

This is a closeup of the cake. Note the slice that was removed prior to making the CaICIC. For quality control, of course.

The cake was good! The icing was better. This is not to say that the cake was bad, because the cake wasn't bad. The cake was good. But sometimes icing gets better by sitting. This is one of those times.

J. had already made the base for the ice cream. Very vanilla, nice loads of bean flecks in there. I think it would also work well with an eggy custard-type, or maybe even custard texture, like we did that day with another ice cream.

Getting ready to assemble in J.'s cool kitchen.

The cake needed to be cut in pieces prior to adding to the ice cream. We did this while the the ice cream was churning. I think we ate about half of this. It was cake! It was good! It was hard, all that waiting!

Hmm, I thought I had a photo looking into the ice cream maker, but I guess not.

We added the cake chunks in about the last 2-3 minutes or so, slowly. My concern was that it would crumble and be crumb-ey, rather than cake-ey.

It kind of did but it didn't. What did crumble added a nice, pleasing, pebbly texture. There was enough of the cake chunk to give it some heft and body and like you were aware that there were actual cake chunks in the ice cream, not just something that was making the ice cream thicker somehow.

So that was good; I like my ice cream loaded with goodies, so much that the ice cream is almost a delivery vehicle for the add-ins. I think J. is more of a purist.

But what really stood out was the icing. Not only was the icing good on its own, fresh or slightly stale and cooled, so that it chipped off the cake like fudge, but blended into the CaICIC, it provided these great stripes of sweetness. I found myself digging for them like in a Ben & Jerry's pint. Mining, if you will.

Here's a closeup, with an artful chunk of cake placed atop.

And how it looked, after overnight in the freezer:

In sum, I'd say it was a successful experiment. The rate at which I ate the two pints I took home was a pretty good indicator of that (I don't think the stuff was home even 24 hours).

There are, however, several things I would do differently in the future, providing J. is interested in another go:

* Higher frosting: cake ratio. This was about 1:4 frosting to cake. I would up that to 2/3 frosting, 1/3 cake. Make it in a shallower pan and ice the crap out of it. Because you're already making CaICIC, you know?

* Marble cake? Chocolate and vanilla together, with chocolate frosting in a vanilla base would work. Like the ebony and ivory of ice creams.

* Churn the ice cream for longer. I think we were just overeager, and didn't want this to turn into a brick.

This makes me want to do future endeavors, for sure. My only sadness is that summer is slipping away, and soon it will be time for things like crockpots and holiday cookies. Right?

So that was the August try. What will September's be...?

Next try: Biking

I can't ride a bike.

I never learned.

I was a kid once, believe it our not.

I had a bike. It was pink (I'm a girl). I had training wheels. I remember my dad used to take me up to the local elementary school (where I did not go) and I used to ride my bike around the parking lot.

I liked it a lot.

Then the training wheels came off. We were on the sidewalk, in front of my house. I fell down. I said," This is stupid, I'm never doing this again."

And I didn't.

I wonder if that's how it really happened, though. You know how memory changes as you age? Maybe it didn't really go down like that.

Maybe I fell down and had a neighborhood kid laugh at me.
Maybe I fell down and cried and my parents told me I didn't have to do this.
Maybe I yelled at my parents that I didn't want to do it and they made me.
Maybe my parents taught me wrong. They are kind of inept people. Maybe my dad was holding when he shouldn't, and didn't let go when he did. They aren't normal. They don't do things right.

I can blame it all on them, right? That's the thing to do, right?

Any of these things could have likely happened.

So I want to learn now.

But I don't know how. A friend has offered to teach me. This is my running partner's boyfriend, who is a friend in his own right (you know how sometimes that's not always the case, it's X and her BF, or whatever).

But I don't have a bike. I don't want to buy a bike specifically for this purpose--what if I hate it? I guess that's what craigslist is for...but I prefer not to deal with the initial cash outlay if I don't have to.

I need to borrow a bike. Or find a beater bike somehow.

I really don't want to pay for one.

I would rather pay someone, a group, a session, a clinic or something, for use of a bike to learn on. I don't know if I will be a bike rider. Just that I need to learn how to ride a bike. I need to be able to do it. I don't have to go out and do it on a regular basis. Just that I know how to do it.

I have done a precursory search. There don't seem to be any clinics or group adult lessons to learn how to ride a bike. Is that because Portland is such a bike-friendly city that it's assumed, like, why would you move here without a bike or at least knowing how to ride the fuckin' thing?

I'm striking out.

There are an obscene number of stores that sell bikes, bike accessories, bike this, bike that...I find it all so complicated and overwhelming. I don't want any of that. It's tools and jargon and I don't like tools and jargon. Even rowing had too much jargon (I'll get back to rowing in a sec). Biking seems like a good thing to do if you are mechanical person. A mathematical person. From what I have heard so far, biking involves a lot of numbers.

I'm not a mathematical, mechanical person. I want the kind of bike that people ride around canals in Amsterdam. Alongside the Mekong. I don't want to be able to go zipping by in some bike race.

I just want to be able to do it.

Let me tie up the rowing loose end: I didn't do the regatta after all.

Work had something to do with it. But the other things that had to do with it was the fact that I took an extra session on the Wednesday before the regatta (due to travel and oversleeping, I had missed the last class and the one before it, as well as an optional practice session).

And it was fucking horrible.

I was in seat 7. I was behind someone who was rowing at race pace. I didn't know what that was. Our usual coach wasn't out there. I didn't like the one who was. Jargon was called out that I'd never heard. I was rowing (if you could call it that) with people I'd never rowed with before. I had to try to pretend I knew what I was doing. It was the definition of failing miserably. I was miserable. And failing. I was my own FAILblog.

I was that person in the boat.

I didn't want to be that person in the boat. I didn't want to be the loser who made everyone fuck up. This was way over my head. I wasn't ready. It wasn't like, oh, I had a bad day out there and buck up...kind of thing. It was like, I'm going to be miserable the whole time if I have to do this.

So I took myself out of the situation.

I might take an intermediate class next year.

But for now, it's time to run. I've got a marathon I want to finally race. The past 2 years I've had a curse in August/September, where injuries sideline me until well into the fall. My foot's been feeling weird and I don't want that curse to pop up again.

Which is why I am completely terrified of falling on a bike and not being able to run.