Miss.marni

anonymous asked: 80’s and 90’s movies ending with a rap over the credits that essentially summarizes the plot. Wack or fresh?

Flat out, this shit is the absolute best

For all you parents who think your kids have nothing but LEGO on the brain:

Found here, and made by Sweet on Cake

They do.

 

Or, ok, at least sometimes it seems that way. But really, who can blame them? And who can resist a cake made of LEGO that is actually cake?

By Cakes & Biscuits by Lisa, photo by Cracker's Art [more party pics at the link]

Part of me wants to play with that forklift. The other part wants a fork and a glass of milk.

 

The classic primary color bricks are still the most popular, of course:

By Cakes By Ashley

 

But now there are also pretty pastels out from the new LEGO Friends line:

By Star Bakery

Not to mention those mini-figs sure have come a long way, am I right? I love the little shoes.

 

The most popular LEGO series, though - at least going by the amount of cakes I've seen for it - is Ninjago:

By Cuteology Cakes

These little ninjas are EVERYWHERE. In fact, there's probably one behind you. You just can't see him, because he's a ninja. And also probably really small.

 

Then there are the LEGO video games, which have taught us that every beloved movie character is at least 43% cuter when LEGO-fied:

By Mike's Amazing Cakes

Na na na na na na na nanananaa...BATMAN!

 

By CakeCentral member natskys

You remember Luke, right? He's the guy who flew around in the Millenium Falcon...

Submitted by Mary Anne P., made by Cake Central member hvanaalst

...with that guy who found the Ark of the Covenant:

By Julia's Cakes

"Cakes. Why did it have to be cakes?"

:D

Here's a Sweet for a real LEGO wizard:

By MegMade Cakes

 

LEGO love isn't just for kids, though, and I have the wedding cakes to prove it!

By Mad Eliza's Cakes and Confections

Don't you love the brick borders? Such a fun touch!

 

Or for something a little less subtle and a lot more WOW:

By Couture Cakery

WOW. Look at those details!

Now there's a wedding built on a firm foundation of fun, fondant, and... er... flowers. Love it.

 

Have a Sweet to nominate? Then send it to Sunday Sweets (at) Cake Wrecks (dot) com!

From Serious Eats: New York

VIEW SLIDESHOW: Tanoshi Sushi is the Holy Grail of New York Sushi Restaurants

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

I've never been to Sukiyabashi Jiro, the restaurant featured in Jiro Dreams of Sushi, so I can't attest to its quality. But the concepts of simplicity, a reach towards perfection, and the humility of a chef who is in service to his ingredients and not the other way around—concepts that the movie represents so effectively—are the hallmark of all of great sushiya in Japan.

Likewise, having no basis of comparison, I can't really say that Chef Toshio Oguma at Tanoshi Sushi is doing Jiro-level sh*t, but conceptually, he hits every mark, so I'm going to say it anyway: The sushi at Tanoshi sushi is some serious Jiro-level sh*t, the likes of which I haven't seen anywhere outside of Japan. It's a hole-in-the-wall, run-down-before-it-even-opened sushi bar in the public transportation limbo just below Yorkville on the Upper East Side, and it serves one of the best omakase meals I've had anywhere.

There are a number of things that are extraordinary about the restaurant, not the least of which is the arcane reservation system outlined on their website: You have to physically go to the restaurant—a good hour and a half round trip from anywhere you are likely to work in the city—at 2pm on the day you would like to dine to sign your name into one of only 10 seats available for each of a 6, 7:30, and 9 p.m. seating. Our hostess who doubled as a sous-chef claimed that you can call ahead, but a couple of exploratory calls I made after our visit met with no answer.

In a way, it's understandable. With only the chef—former executive sushi chef of Morimoto in New York and Napa—and his assistant along with a single waiter working at the restaurant and a full house every night, answering the phone or setting up a better reservation system is not a top priority. If this is one of the corners that needs to be cut to keep the cost of a meal down to the ridiculously fair price of $50 (it goes up to around $60 if you opt for the seasonal menu) for 10 pieces of nigiri, a roll, and a hand roll, I can always pay a taskrabbit a few extra bucks to go sign up for me with the money saved.

Tanoshi Sushi is not the type of sushi temple where waiters float by to the sounds of trickling water and shakuhachi flutes, boughs of chrysanthemum and bonsai trees accenting sparse but tastefully appointed room. This is the kind of restaurant where you'll bump elbows with your neighbor as your wobbly saw-horse stool bucks while the single waiter squeezes behind you to refill your BYOB sake glass as the the entire Saturday Night Fever soundtrack gracefully transitions into The Band's Music From Big Pink. The brick walls and fluorescent lights say barbershop more than they do sushiya.

Meals start with a selection of small appetizers. Aside from gently suggesting fish that you would or would not like to try during the sushi-section of the meal, this is your only chance to decide what is served to you (but don't worry, you're in good hands). You might find ankimo lightly cured in soy and citrus, the monkfish liver rolled up and poached in sake torchon style, very much like the foie gras whose richness and creamy texture it approaches.

Firm tongues of Santa Barbara sea urchin as fat as you've ever seen come piled high with mild soy sauce for dipping, their briny, metallic flavor cleaner than you knew it could be. The same sea urchin later makes an appearance paired with crisply toasted seaweed and a raw quail's egg yolk.

Then the sushi begins. Chef Oguma seasons his rice with akazu, a lightly sweet Japanese vinegar that is remarkably fresh and aromatic. He calls his style "loosey sushi," which where I'm from in Harlem would mean "sushi you buy by the single piece from a shady guy on the corner who caters to homeless people," but in Oguma's more refined approach, refers to the way the rice block immediately falls apart in your mouth, spreading its lightly vinegared aroma and allowing it to blend harmoniously with the fish without weighing it down.

To those used to dense blocks of rice served at the typical mid-range sushi joint, it's like tasting nigiri for the first time—like the first time you had a loosely packed hamburger made from fresh ground meat after a life of frozen patties—and that's before you even get to the fish.

Tanoshi Sushi is not the type of restaurant where red-topped bottles of soy sauce sit at every table and small mounds of wasabi come piled up next to your fish any more than Per Se would leave ketchup bottles and salt shakers on their tables. It's the kind of restaurant where every bite is placed in front of you a completed bite, ready to be eaten.

At some point in your meal you'll find yourself faced with lean bigeye tuna (a cut chosen as much for its relatively low price as its subtle flavor), glistening as it slowly relaxes after being set on the counter in front of you, its flesh revealing a series of fine slash-marks where Oguma-san has scored it, gently severing the tough connective tissues that separate the layers of flesh.

Bigeye tuna

You pick it up with your fingers—chopsticks wouldn't fare well against the loose rice—and bite in, your teeth sinking effortlessly through the tenderized flesh. The first aroma to hit your nose is of clean, meaty tuna with a hint of vinegar. On your tongue, rather than the nuance-destroying saltiness of straight soy sauce, you pick up something milder. Salty, yes, but also sweet, lightly acidic, and almost floral—the yeasty aroma of mirin in the nikiri, a thin, mild glaze that Oguma-san brushes onto the fish just before passing it to you.

As you continue to chew, new flavors emerge—a touch of heat from a thin smear of wasabi hidden under the flesh, and finally the more direct capsicum heat and bitterness of yuzu-kosho, a condiment made from chili peppers and Japanese citrus.

Braided kohara with shiso

It makes you reflect on the power of simplicity and balance, makes you feel a bit more zen about life as you reflect back on the bites that preceded the tuna: The braided, cured shad, its silvery skin glistening on top of rich flesh cut by a whisp of shiso leaf. The tiger prawn and its sweet-and-savory profile accented by the cured crumbled egg yolk it's topped with. The pickled cherry blossom leaf that pulls back to reveal a pearly white slab of fatty hamachi belly. You're instructed to inhale its sweet aroma as the fish dissolves on your palate.

This is the way sushi is supposed to be. Simple, balanced, subtle, and restrained.

Hamachi belly with pickled cherry blossom leaf

There's more: Glazed giant squid is scored so finely that it melts in your mouth like pork fat. Tiny squid strapped to a block of rice with crisp toasted seaweed secured with a dab of kani miso—the scooped out and pureed innards of a crab. King Salmon (oh, how pedestrian!) given new life with a brush of nikiri and a brief kiss of smoke from a blow torch, its rich flesh warmed by the rice it rests on, its fat melting over your tongue as soon as you put it in your mouth.

Giant squid with sweet soy glaze

Tanoshi sushi not the type of restaurant where chefs clad samurai-style in perfectly crisp pressed gi artfully arrange pristine slices of fish on hand-made Japanese clay plates artfully decorated with swoops of exotically flavored sauces. This is the kind of restaurant where a brawny chef in a bandanna and T-shirt that has seen better days places the same pristine fish on top of a block of rice and places it directly on the bamboo leaf-lined countertop in front of you, or sometimes directly in your hand, depending on the fleetingness of that particular piece's moments of perfection.

And when you're instructed to eat that piece quickly, you'd do best to heed the advice. The hand rolls that finish off your meal have a half life of seconds before the warm seasoned rice begins to soften the nori that was toasted mere seconds before being filled and passed to you.

Cured salmon roe come piled into a ship-shaped gunkan-maki, the brightly flavored beads threatening to spill over their crisp nori vessel. It looks like any other ikura gunkan-maki, but its seaweed crackles and beads pop in a way you're not used to. It's as much about textures as it is about flavor.

Makizushi—easily the most industrialized and bastardized form of sushi—is again revelatory, the seaweed snapping before melting away on your tongue to reveal the vinegared rice and mild fish within: tuna, salmon, or perhaps hamachi with a sprinkle of crisp pickled daikon radish.

At some point towards the close of your meal you'll get one final mind-blowingly familiar-yet-new experience: a small thimbleful of warm miso soup made from broth distilled from the bones of the fish you just ate, seasoned with just enough rich red miso to add depth.

In a city where sushi restaurants fall into either the transcendent-but-too-expensive-to-feel-good-about-eating-at or the cheap-but-too-questionable-to-feel-good-after-eating-at quality, we've been searching for a long time for what Ed calls the Holy Grail of Sushi: a sushi restaurant that is not only reasonably priced, but is also transcendentally good.

I'm officially calling off the search.

There is no dessert at Tanoshi, so your meal may seem to finish rather abruptly. Chances are by the time you are finished with your meal (and the BeeGees have looped back around) the next wave of patrons will be peering in from the street past the neon "open" sign and scoping out their seats.

That's totally fine. This is not the type of meal that you really want to end.

About the author: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is the Chief Creative Officer of Serious Eats where he likes to explore the science of home cooking in his weekly column The Food Lab. You can follow him at @thefoodlab on Twitter, or at The Food Lab on Facebook.

Jeff Pruitt, the man who served as the stunt coordinator on Buffy the Vampire Slayer from 1997-2000, has uploaded a special treat for all us Buffy fans. The embed above features a 30 minute video of behind the scenes footage from season 2 of Buffy and it is AMAZING! Fans of the show will recognize [...]

I was trying to figure out why I love this so much, and then I realized it's all those orange touches. (Of course!) Who knew orange, pink, and lavender could look this fabulous together?


There are tons of boring ol' "print out some art & slap it under resin in a plain bezel" necklaces on Etsy, which I'm generally not a fan of. However, this Haunted Mansion Tightrope Walker pendant is an example of Doing It Right:

One of my favorite desserts on this planet (yes, we’re going for High Melodrama today, also, it’s that wonderful) is affogato, which translates from Italian as “drowned.” The lucky drowner is top-notch vanilla gelato, and it is draped in a single shot of freshly-pulled espresso. I see you arching your eyebrows and you are full of questions, aren’t you? Isn’t that horribly bitter? Doesn’t it melt the ice cream? How can it be your favorite dessert if it has neither butter nor chocolate with it? All are legitimate concerns but the thing is, when it’s done right — and there really is a magical balancing point between the volume of ice cream and the amount of espresso, that is, sadly, rarely achieved — the resulting mess is a semi-slumped mound of cold and sweet vanilla cream with a trench of faintly bitter latte around it. It is the ultimate grownup dessert — sure, you get the ice cream you’ve been angling for after dinner since you were 3.5, but you also get a bracing hit of espresso, just enough to keep you up past your bedtime, you know, when all the fun begins.

Of course, we’re not going to talk about affogato today because, well, you already know how to make it now. Instead, we’re going to talk about the cups of granita di espresso con panna we fell head over heels for in Rome, which reminded me of an inversed affogato. Instead of unsweetened espresso coating sweetened creamy gelato, it’s the coffee that’s icy and sweet and the cream that’s plain and soft. The result is the same contrast of bitter versus sweet, soft versus icy that I love in affogato, but stacked in a cup that you can eat with a spoon as you wander the ancient cobblestoned center of Rome on blazing hot day when even the dapper businessman we passed along the Tiber was licking a gelato cone with the utter abandon of a kid. (Rome, you are wonderful.)

... Read the rest of espresso granita with whipped cream on smittenkitchen.com

---

© smitten kitchen 2006-2012. | permalink to espresso granita with whipped cream | 179 comments to date | see more: Ice Cream/Sorbet, Italian, Photo, Summer, Travel

From Serious Eats: New York

View Andy Choi's Kensington, Brooklyn in a larger map.

Put some popcorn in front of Andy Choi, the executive chef of Cherry, and he's hooked. Give him a Jameson neat with the popcorn and he couldn't be much happier. While Choi has worked in kitchens from upscale places like Le Cirque to downtown's trendy Momofuku Ssam Bar, he simply craves good, unfussy food when he's home in Kensington, Brooklyn. He moved the to changing neighborhood a few months ago, and with a few stops in nearby Park Slope, Choi chatted with us about his favorite spots.

Pizza: If I'm in Kensington, I order from La Forchetta. I read some reviews on Yelp, and I just ordered it for delivery. It's my go to delivery now. I like to get spinach and chicken with broccoli. The crust has enough crunch and enough chew.

Burger: I like to get the burger at The Farm. It's really good farm-to-table style food. It's seasonal. The fat ratio to the burger ratio just makes your mouth water. They're also big and served on brioche bun. I order it rare with lettuce, onion and Swiss cheese.

[Photograph: Max Falkowitz]

Sandwich: I'll to go to Pork Slope, typically on a Sunday. I like their shrimp po boys and the pulled pork sandwich. The pulled pork is just cooked perfectly. It's not dry; it's falling off the bone good. The shrimp po boy...for me, I love seafood, so any seafood in any shape or form, I can't get enough.

Coffee: When I go for coffee, I like to go to Gorilla Coffee. Just black coffee. I walk when it's nice out and take my daughter, probably once a week. It's a good family thing to do. At home, my wife gets Stumptown.

[Photograph: Robyn Lee]

Bagel: I like the Bagel Hole. At other places they'll do their baking early in the morning and that's what they have. The reason that drives me to the Bagel Hole, they bake all day long, so you're pretty much guaranteed a fresh bagel all day. The bagels are crusty on the outside, pillowy inside. Especially with Brooklyn water. I'll get a toasted everything bagel with lox and cream cheese. That's a Sunday thing for me as well.

[Photograph: Robyn Lee]

Breakfast/brunch: For brunch, I also like to go to the Farm or sometimes Vanderbilt. I like that they do a lot with homemade sausages. As a cook, I respect charcuterie and the art of sausage making. They did a merguez that was really good. The spice blend they used was really nice. It wasn't too overpowering in your face like some merguez can be. It was very well balanced.

Delivery: For delivery, we really like to get Szechuan Garden. Our regulars are beef and broccoli, Singapore mai fun, and house fried rice (they use white rice then fry it, not that yellow rice). We tried everything almost once by us, and this one was by far the best one and closest.

Dive bar: High Dive. It's a dive bar. It's a little grungy. What drives me there is they give free popcorn. I'm a popcorn fanatic. If you give me free popcorn, I'll be there. Theirs is run of the mill, lightly buttered but salty. It's addictive. You can't stop and you have to keep drinking. I usually get Jameson neat.

Ice cream Amorino but that's in the city. That's the one I'll ever go to. I actually don't eat much sweets.

Can't-miss spot: My favorite is definitely Pork Slope. Their selection of beer and just the food they have. It's pork centric, but it's very approachable. It's good to go with a group of friends and share beers.

Epbot reader and crafty mom extraordinaire Nikki recently gave her four-year-old daughter Niamh the birthday party to end all birthday parties, and I just about flipped when she sent me all the photos and details. Seriously, prepare to be very, very jealous of a four-year-old.

Here, let's start with the invitations:



(Funnily enough, little Niamh actually wanted a Gollum-themed party, but her mom was afraid of terrifying all the other kids. Ha! Good call, Nikki!)

The kids got to wear flip-flop Hobbit feet:
 

And they were given bubble wand "Sting" swords and bubble pipes to blow on:





The party was held in a back yard decorated with pennants, maps of Middle Earth, and hanging lanterns:



Check out the cake: Smaug sitting on a pile of gold!




Dinner was served in the Green Dragon, of course, where the kids drank (Ginger) Ale and (Root) Beer and feasted on a whole smorgasbord of Hobbit-themed treats - each carefully prepared and labeled by Nikki herself.



Then for activities, Nikki handed out kid-friendly replicas of Thror's map:



Each location had special "moon rune" instructions that only showed under a black light(!!):



In this case, it was "Defeat Smaug" - the pinata, that is!


The birthday girl wore a sweet rhinestone-edged Hobbit door on her birthday dress - also handcrafted by her mom Nikki:

Thanks so much for sharing the fun, Nikki! Oh, and be sure to let us know what you do for Niamh's FIFTH birthday, k? (May I suggest...The Fifth Element? PRETTY PLEASE?!)