Movie Review: Being Elmo

This weekend we went to see Being Elmo. We had to drive 30 minutes and sit in a hot and kind of stinky theater, but it was definitely worth it.

The movie is basically the story of Kevin Clash, the man who is the movement, voice and personality of the beloved muppet Elmo. The film first chronicles his childhood, during which his love of puppets started and grew, and moves on to his career as a puppeteer. We learned how he met adversity from his peers, but gained confidence and knowledge by working with masters like Jim Henson and Frank Oz (Kermit & Miss Piggy, as well as Ernie & Bert for those of you who don't know). And of course we find out how Elmo came to be and how Clash has been dedicated to the essence of Elmo's character throughout the tremendous growth in the little red puppet's popularity.

My thoughts on the film; well like the poster says it was a "feel good movie". I was amazed that Clash was able to find his passion at such a young age, and makes it into something fantastic, especially when I feel most of us might never find out true passion. I know I haven't found mine yet. I also enjoyed the fact that Clash is a genuinely good person and that it comes through the love Elmo shows towards everyone. I know I would have been thoroughly disappointed if Clash turned out to be a jerks, and my perceptions of Elmo as pure niceness ruined.

One other thing I have to mention about this film was I was so surprised about how much old footage they had. For instance, they have film of the first meeting between Clash and renowned puppet maker Kermit Love. How the heck did they get that?! The story was that Clash went off on his own to meet Love while on a school trip to NYC, but it's all filmed as if they had been making the documentary all along. Baffling to me, but quite cool that they had it.

Check here to see if Being Elmo is playing by you. If it's not, there's an option that let's you "demand it" to try to get it playing in your town.

~emy

Sandwich (and soda can) Cake!

Another birthday mean another cake. Actually 2 cakes in this case - though one was more of a cake wreck :(

Why a sandwich? Well really it was supposed to be the Coca-Cola can due to the birthday-er's addiction to Coke, and a sandwich with a coke seemed to be at good match at the time.

So here's how it went:

Leveling off the cake to make the bread - because no one wants domed bread aka the end slice - with my super awesome leveler thingy. In this case I actually pulled the cake on the pan and kept the leveler still


Carved out slices of bread - meant to make them more even in size, but it actually worked out okay because you could see the toppings more with the smaller piece on top


Made it in to white bread! Maybe if I used just white cake instead of Funfetti I could have just done crust as it would have already been white. Pizza cutter worked much better than the butter knife I've used in the past.


Now the crust! It was actually really hard to get one long piece for the crust - I had to do it in pieces and had a hard time getting rid of the seams, but did the best I could


Rounds for soda can cut of out of leveled chocolate cake using hamburger patty maker thing



Three stacked rounds not so bad - couple of straws for support


Five doesn't look so bad here but it was a problem because the cakes were so airy and not dense enough so the bottom layer was actually crumbling/collapsing under the weight :(


It looks passable from the top


But not from the side - oh yea the saran wrap was an attempt to hold it together while it was in the freezer to maintain the shape, it kinda worked...

I even had a frozen butter cream transfer to put on the can - but it was too lumpy and falling a part


On the bright side here are some finished sandwich shots


I think the fondant bacon turned out pretty well


I wish i had a picture to show the scale - maybe one of my friends will have one


~emy

Experimental Baking - w. Twin - Irish Carbomb Cupcakes

I guess it's not P.C. to say Irish Carbomb cupcakes - but I was making them with and Irish person, and my name sounds Irish so maybe it's okay this time?

These cupcakes weren't for any particular reason except for my friend sending me some handy tools to make baking easier so we decided to try them out using Smitten Kitchen's Recipe. with some changes of our own. It's basically a chocolate Guinness cupcake, with whiskey ganache filling and Bailey's buttercream frosting. Unfortunately my pictures are a little blurry - oh well.

Okay so here's the batter - something to note is that it seemed to be runnier than other cupcake batters. We thought something might have been measured wrong due to it's low viscosity, but it all worked out in the end


Bakes cupcakes! The do rise some so best not to over fill the cupcake papers


The corer! It looked like it was going to take WAY too much out of the middle, but it was the perfect amount


24 Cupcakes - just like the recipe said


Filling with whiskey ganache with another handy tool.

Note on the ganache we did the following changes: less butter more whiskey, diff chocolate
Ganache Filling
8 ounces semi-sweet chocolate (we used chocolate chips - you don't have to chop it up that way)
2/3 cup heavy cream
1/2 tablespoons butter, room temperature
4 teaspoons Irish whiskey

Frosted cupcakes - we weren't that good at using the icing tool - but we had fun decorating. Some got the ganache mixed into the frosting because we didn't replace any part of the core (because we had already eaten them...)

For the frosting we didn't measure out the powder sugar - we just added it to the stick of butter & Bailey's until we liked the flavor, texture and consistency. I believe we did 3 Bailey's and 1 heavy cream.

~emy

Chihuly: Through the Looking Glass at the MFA

This adventure is from a while back, but over the 4th of July weekend we took advantage of the MFA's Free Fun Friday and went to see the Chihuly: Through the Looking Glass exhibit. In the past I've seen some other Chihuly pieces at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, the Albert and Victoria Museum in London, and the Mohegan Sun Casino in CT but this exhibit was great because you could get so close to the glass. There was also a special movie showing Chihuly through the years in action with his team creating new installations around the world. Here are some of the shots I got.

From a distance I thought this one was a real plant. It was custom made for the MFA's atrium and they are trying to raise the money to buy the piece for the permanent collection


Chandeliers!


Close Up - looks like orange grubs


Zoomed out - still kinda looks like orange grubs


This is a shot of underneath ones of the chandeliers.


I took this photo and then like 5 other people turned around to take the same one.


Kind of a funny narration about the next photo


Close ups



Glass mystical forest


Glass in a boat - the mirror reflecting was cool too.


One last light


~emy

Experimental Cooking - Grilled Pizza

Much like the Jersey Shore my friends and I have started to have a weekly family dinner on Sunday night. Granted this has only happened twice and the next few weeks are iffy and then football will start. So maybe it will be very short lived but it has been a lot of fun.

Getting to the food point. It's summer which mean pulling out the grill, but hot dogs, hamburgers and grilled chicken was getting old, so we decided to try out grilled pizza. It didn't seem that hard roll out dough, brush with olive oil, grill add toppings, grill some more. All the article about grilling pizza said the key was being organized, which we were - but that didn't help out our first pizza from being half a disaster. I say half because only half of it burned into an blackened mess.

Key point missing from all of those "How to grill pizza" articles: Cook smaller pizzas!!! Don't use all the dough at once!!! Being lazy, we bought pre-made dough and mistakenly rolled the whole thing out and try to put it all on the grill at once. It folded on itself and wasn't really spread out because it was super hard to get on the grill. The 2nd rolled out pizza we cut into 3 smaller pieces and it worked out soooo much better.

Check out the results - the messed up pizza isn't there, though we did eat it still:

Closest pizza = arugula, prosciutto and cheese
Middle = cheese
Farthest = grilled peppers & onions and cheese (it was also kinda shaped like the USA, but it's hard to tell from this angle)

~emy

Carrot Cake Cupcakes

Mother's day was brunch and father's day was carrot cake cupcakes. I got the recipe from Smitten Kitchen and you can get it here. I can't actually tell you if they were any good, because I'm not the biggest fan of carrot cake, but my parents ate them all up and said they were really good. Though my parents would probably tell me anything I make tastes good.

Here are all the ingredients before the mixing. I actually only made half a batch and was grating my carrots super fine, but then got tired of it and used the next grater size up after that.


The batter! I didn't use the kitchen aid to mix it because of all the "chunks" aka the carrots, walnuts and raisins


Cupcake with frosting. I didn't use Smitten Kitchen's frosting recipe totally. It is a maple cream cheese frosting, but I didn't use butter and not as much sugar. I also used the fake kind of maple syrup and it tasted fine.


~emy

Brunch Cookin'

My poor neglected blog. It's been such a busy few months with a new job, school and life in general.

This is from awhile back, when I put together a nice spread for a Mother's Day Brunch:


Bagels from a local shop with cream cheese, lox, tomatoes, red onion and cucumbers for the fixings. Cinnamon rolls from a recipe that I don't remember where I got from, but I didn't pack the brown sugar that much because the time they were made before they were way too sweet.

And then there were the avocado and bacon deviled eggs (on the square plate in the above picture)

Pretty simple recipe I don't actually measure either:

• Hard boil 6 eggs
• Cut in half and scoop out the yolks.
• Add in half an avocado (diced), about 2 tablespoons of mayo, paprika and garlic powder to taste.
• Mix/Mash - then scoop filling back into the white of the eggs.
• In this case I added in cooked bacon on top as a garnish, but the next time I made them I actually crumbled in about 5 strips of bacon into the filling. It ended up being easier to eat it that way

hmm now I really want to make some of those eggs...

~emy

Twin's Hello Kitty Birthday Cake

Another birthday means another cake! This one with the theme of Hello Kitty because she's just so cute and Twin loves her.

I always forget to take enough pictures when I'm doing this, but here are the ones I remembered to do:

Top layer of funfetti cake carved in the shape of Hello Kitty's head


Frosted with butter cream with marshmallow fluff fondant rolled out next to it


The covered and trimmed layer - it actually got stuck to the plate, (I was holding it vertical and it wouldn't budge) so thanks to the boyfriend for getting it off with a spatula


Finished cake - the base cake is actually 2 layers of funfetti - one was dyed purple because I was thinking about attempting a checkerboard cake but didn't end up doing it. I also didn't get any picture of the cake after it was cut to see the layers :(


It didn't look as good from this angle - I think I should have tried to use the cake edge instead of cutting the cake from the center because it made it more lumpy and hard to cover on the sides


With a flash! I think it looks better because you can't tell that the left ear collapsed as much


~emy

People Say - by Portugal. The Man

Good song - weird music video:



~emy

Google Autocompleter Job

So Google has a posting for Autocompleter Jobs - it pops up in the section of the autocomplete:


It's kinda hard to see, in this shot - but it's on the bottom right hand corner.
The main skill you need to be an autocompleter is to be able to type really fast - around 34,000wpm. Check out the whole posting here, complete with interview from a current autocompleter, which follows for your viewing convenience.


~emy

A Container Contest...

So I'm reading me normal blogs and I come across this post about Dekalb Market having Not Just A Container: A contest! Basically they're going to have an outdoor market where every vendor is housed in a standard steel shipping container - It's actually pretty amazing some of the stuff they make out of these containers, check some shipping container houses here. The contest is to design any container you want with the guidelines of creativity, sustainability, design and community impact. If you win, you actually get to build it. So I had recently downloaded Google Sketch Up and decided to give it a shot - unfortunately the results are poor at best:

The idea was a bouldering cave/sitting area in the container, because I imagined that outdoor market type people would also like climbing and sitting. I think it might have went better if I watched more than just the intro vids for Sketch Up - oh well

Here's the frame - in my mind it was sustainable because recycled wood - or some other green material would have been used to make it.



This is when all the framing would be walled in


That's part of the wall being having the holds and a couch for sitting. It was actually pretty hard to make all the holds, which is why only one section is covered. It might look better in this pic because it's so small, but seeing the CAD drawing they are really nothing like really rock climbing gym holds. The couch looks super good because it's one of the objects that comes with Sketch Up - I just made it purple.


So looks like I won't be winning any design contests, but doing this sure ate up some of the time I was super bored.

~emy