This is artist and photographer Christine McConnell, a/k/a my role model. She does everything, and does it well. She bakes (Miss Cellania featured the cake she baked of her parents' house last month), and some of her creations are delightfully dark.
She is lovely (see photo four) and, according the photo captions on her imgur albums, she personally delivers her baked goods in a beautifully restored classic car (photo five). She does oil paintings. She does house painting. She makes most of her clothes from scratch. She designed a Halloween decoration concept for her parents' large home. She makes skeletons, aliens and snakes out of sugary tastyness. I just love that Christine!
Yes, you're looking at a computer screen. But I'll bet that if you take a good slurp, you'l be able to detect a bit of chocolate from Danielle's Rolo cheesecake bars. They're made with Rolo candies, which are gobs of caramel encased in chocolate.
Danielle made them by first putting down a layer of graham cracker crumbs, then adding a mixture of cream cheese and mini Rolos. She topped it with chocolate and Rolo halves. Yummy! I'd try to make it, but I'm afraid that I'd eat the ingredients before finishing the recipe.
The actual title of the article at Atlas Obscura starts with “sinless sweets,” which sounds like something to eat with no fat, no sugar, and no pleasure. That’s a bit misleading, because these sweets have plenty of what makes food worth eating -but they were developed specifically to celebrate the feast days of certain saints. That in itself should make you feel virtuous as you stuff your face! For example, in Italy they enjoy bigne for the feast of San Giuseppe, or St. Joseph.
Like many stepparents, St. Joseph doesn’t get the respect he deserves year round, but at least his feast day is a big deal in Italy where it’s essentially the equivalent of Father’s Day in the United States. No San Giuseppe feast would be complete with out the bigne, or zeppoli — sugar-covered fritters filled with custard or cannoli filling and topped with chocolate or candied cherries.
Though most people think of Joseph as a carpenter, he’s nicknamed “frittellaro” in Rome. According to local legend, he sold fried pancakes after the flight to Egypt to support Jesus and Mary, hence their inclusion in his feast day.
After all, it’s pretty difficult to eat tables and chairs to celebrate a carpenter! This list has ten different saints, feast days, and decadent traditional desserts you can try at Atlas Obscura.
Cake makes everything better, including apologies. Like this one above, for example. We can tell that the person is truly sorry for trying to sacrifice another humanbeing to Satan. How can we tell? They put extra sprinkles, of course.
Here are a few more fantastic photos of "I'm sorry" cakes making their rounds on the Web:
Sorry I Spoiled Game of Thrones Cake
via bloglovin
I'm Sorry You're on Your Period Cake by
redditor derolle. We're guessing it's a red velvet cake.
I'm Sorry I Blacked Out, Tried to Kill You, and Almost Got Us Arrested Cake
If you want the best in sports concession food, head to Wisconsin. Those people know how to eat well! This is a bratwurst lollipop, a snack on sale at a recent Madison Mallards baseball game. It's a bratwurst patty deep fried in funnel cake batter and maple syrup. Yummy!
When Brennan Gleason got an idea, he sure "hopped" to it. The web and graphic designer and home brewer decided to combine his love of brewing his own blonde ale and his search for gainful employment by making and sending his resumes in the form of a four-pack of beer.
Gleason described it as "Resume + Beer = Gleason's Resum-Ale." The designer printed his resume on a specially printed box, while each of the four beer botle labels feature a piece of his work. To add a finishing touch, the bottle cap sports his custom logo.
This is so cool we can "barley" stand it! You got a resume mashed up with alcohol? "Ale" take two! Via Design Taxi
The Facebook user Leo Morten Lund from Roedekro is behind the trick, as he has great success. In a video showing Morten how simple potato cleaning can be done.
- Rather lazy than stupid, writes Leo The shit Lund about his trick on Facebook.
I’m not all that sure how accurate the entire translation is, but you get the idea. The concept is quite close to how industrial potato peelers work. -via Digg
The very Scottish gentleman you see pictured above is ready to cut into the largest haggis ever made. The Scottish meat company Hall's produced it for the Royal Highland Show, an agricultural fair held last week.
Sky News reports that the haggis contains 1,537 pounds of pork and pork offal, as well as 734 pounds of oatmeal, 51 pounds of onions, and 86 pounds of seasonings. When cooked, it measured about 8 feet long, 3 feet tall, and 3 feet wide. It was served to people who attended the show. By my calculations, that's enough haggis for over 20 people.
Jill at Kitchen Fun with My 3 Sons (previously at Neatorama) is playing with her food again. One of her sons is a real Napoleon Dynamite fan (and the other boys like it, too), so she tried recreating the faces of Napoleon and Pedro in pancake form! All it took was pancake batter, scrambled eggs, Nutella, and some marshmallows and chocolate chips for the details. See the resemblance?
These should be served with a side of Tater Tots. Read more about them at her blog, in a post laced with movie dialogue. -Thanks, Jill!
“It must be Zorro: he has his black hat and Capon.”
Has anyone ever told you that you should dress up your chicken dinner? Jill Alexander Essbaum, aka Emily Chickenson, dresses hers up in costumes to illustrate puns in photographs. She makes the costumes, builds the sets, and sells the resulting photographs in a set of greeting cards. See the full-size pictures at Buzzfeed.
People who write for online media outlets, and those who are avid readers of these sites, know that commenting can go from positive and friendly to shockingly horrible in the blink of an eye.
Case in point- a well meaning baked goods enthusiast named “Web Guy Josh” from Melbourne, Australia posted a recipe for a deliciously psychedelic Amazing Rainbow Tie-Dye Number Surprise Cake on Fox 101.9's site (blogged about on Neatorama previously), and one helpful commenter offered a suggestion to make the recipe better.
What happened next is one of those real life moments too strange to be made up- comments quickly turned from snarky corrections to a full blown crapstorm of craziness, full of insulting name calling and political ranting, all because someone asked a simple question about one step in the recipe.
This pallet of delicious pork rectums was spotted outside of a dumpling shop in Taipei, Taiwan. Please note that it is a product of the great republic. Despite complaints to the contary, American workers can still produce goods sought across world.
It appears that pork rectums must be properly deboned and inverted before they become sellable. These can be made into dumplings. Here in the South, we deep fry pork intestines and call them chitlins. Alternatively, we may use them as sausage casings. To my knowledge, these practices do not include the actual rectum portion. Perhaps the people of Taiwan prize quality American pork rectums so highly that they price domestic producers out of the market.
How many pork rectums are present in this picture? How many would fit into a standard shipping container? W.M. Briggs, a statistician, learned that just one South Korean food company imports 2-3 shipping containers full of American pork rectums a month. He crunches the numbers:
The 20-foot container is a standard size; we have all seen these containers on the highway. They measure 20′ x 8′ x 8.5′ feet. The volume is 1,360 cubic feet.
We only need one more piece of information. The size of the average, deboned, inverted pig’s rectum is two feet long, and 2 inches wide. For the purposes of this calculation, we can assume that the rectum is a parallelepiped, which is to say, a rectangular box of size 2′ x 0.167′ x 0.167′ feet.
A standard rectum thus takes up 0.056 cubic feet. We’ll ignore packing considerations for now and imagine that we’re trying to stuff as many rectums as we can into a container. This calculation, which will represent an upper bound, is easy: we have 1,360 available cubic feet, and each rectums takes up 0.056 cubic feet.
That makes about 25,000 rectums per container. Using the universal principle “one pig, one rectum”, this makes it 25,000 pigs slaughtered per container. Of course, packaging adds bulk, so that the actual number of rectums that can be transported per container must be less. A figure of 20% to 30% increase per rectum seems reasonable. That is, each dry rectum, considering the plastic, dry ice, cardboard, etc., is like 1.2 to 1.3 packaged rectum.
This means that each takes up about 0.067 to 0.072 cubic feet per rectum. That gives us a low of about 18,500 to a high of around 20,000 rectums per container.
Now, those Koreans are importing 2 to 3 of those containers every month. Pick the middle figure. That makes 30 containers a year, just going to this one company. That gives a grand total of between 560,000 to 610,000 rectums per year sailing across the high seas on their way to Korea.
It seems like everybody knows somebody or someone else who shops at Costco these days, buying massive packs of food stuffs and other stuffs they don’t necessarily need at a decent price, and if you don’t have a membership you might feel like you’re being left out of all those member type benefits and mega deals.
Truth is- there’s lots of cool stuff you can do at Costco without having to pay annual dues, and maybe if you hang around the store long enough they’ll make you an honorary member!
Buy some pizza while you have your eyes examined and stock up on some vodka, all without needing a card. Now that’s what I call free validation!
What better way to commemorate the National Jerky Day than to recreate Mount Rushmore with meat jerky?
Beef jerky manufacturer Jack Link's commissioned a team of artists led by art director Alex Valhouli to recreate the iconic granite sculpture of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln* in jerky. The team spent 1,400 man-hour "meatsculpting" a scaled replica of Mount Rushmore with 1,600 pound of jerky.
Isn’t this cute? Cut open a birthday pound cake and every slice has your age -or actually, a child’s age, because anything over nine might be hard to fit. How did they do it? The secret is to bake the number first, then the rest of the cake around it. And the icing is fondant. Honestly, I’d lose the fondant and keep the surprise, if I were making this cake. But you’ll want to use it if your goal is to be the talk of the neighborhood moms. You’ll find the recipe and instructions at Tablespoon. -via Bits and Pieces
