Sugar High

 Just like you can't play Flight of the Bumblebee at your first piano lesson, you aren't going to be perfect the first time you bake. There are many things that have to go very right to make a baking session successful.

Is the batter supposed to resemble soup?

Does you batter look like soup? Yes? Ok, toss it. Let's start over.

When I first started baking, I made so many mistakes. I thought I could just jump into projects without reading and following instructions. As it turns out, fine print is pretty freaking important. So my first tip is to follow the instructions/recipe to the best of your ability. If you don't understand a term or direction, look it up. Don't take it upon yourself to improvise. Baking is a very delicate procedure and it needs everything to be exact for the correct results. Here are some of my best tips:

A. Remember to preheat your oven! Don't insert the batter into the oven until it is fully preheated. Reason: the temperature of the oven will be constantly rising working to get to the desired heat and the batter will cook unevenly because the oven's temperature is not right.

B. Gluten free, whole wheat, and cake flour are not the same animal. Don't think you can just switch them out. Reason: Each flour is made up of different components and react differently to ingredients added. If substitutions are wanted, simply look up how to compensate for the different flour.

C. Room temperature means room temperature. This is a big one! When the recipe calls for room temperature butter, please do not put cold butter into the mix. Reason: When the butter is chilled, it doesn't want to blend easily and evenly into the mix. It will end up chunky and lumpy. Not cool.

D. Set out all of the ingredients, tools, and towels before you begin. Reason: Searching around for ingredients and bowls isn't fun. If everything is laid out, then it's very easy to see if you missed an ingredient.

Prepare, Bake, then Decorate!

I always connect to the creative part of baking. My left brain rules my life.

When I start a project I always want to raise the bar from my previous piece of work. Sometimes that's really hard. I get carried away often and usually break my budget. My first project was inspired by The Black Plague. Doesn't death just scream icing and sprinkles?! I thought so. My lack of work done in the class also pushed me to really go out of the box to get an A. So I themed the cake around the song Ring Around the Rosie which is about the Black Plague. I littered the cake with shaved chocolate (dirt/ashes), a gummy hand (Walmart), plastic mice (also Walmart), and some bright red posies. To this day, this is my very favorite project. 

I then got addicted to food dyes. If something could be dyed, I definitely dyed it. Not one of my confections comes out a normal color because normal colors are boring. Here's a picture from my LSU GameDay cake. GEAUX TIGERS! The second one is from my mosaic cake that I'll mention again later. 

                               

Then my infatuation with cupcakes began. They were adorable mini versions of my large cake projects. The only problem I faced was making 24 exact replicas of the same design. That took a little practice, but I think I got the hang of it. These cupcakes are Shirley Temple inspired. I wanted to give the essence of the popular drink while not getting too literal. So I topped the cupcakes with a bendy straw and a sugared cherry.

Then I got very interested in chocolate. Not just the bar but the things I could create with it. I discovered I could manipulate it just like icing and it would stay more rigid. In these next designs you'll see the outside of the previously mentioned LSU GameDay cake and Mosaic cake. For the GameDay cake I piped the chocolate on a sheet of parchment paper, let it dry, and then placed it onto the cake. With the Mosaic cake, I spread melted chocolate on parchment paper and proceeded to break it into little chunks. Then I placed it around the outside of the cake in a mosaic-like pattern. The top of the cake is also solid chocolate.

Here comes my last (for this blog) and most sentimental project. My parents recently renewed their vows and my dad asked me to recreate their wedding cake. I thought it was a rather tall order but with the help of my grandmother, we did a full replica of the original cake. We added some chocolate covered strawberries to the cake because they are my mother's favorite. They were not in the original design. Here's a picture of the bottom tier of the cake and also a shot of the entire cake. 

                       

What is a baking blog without a little recipe sharing? Here is my favorite cream cheese icing recipe.

Cream Cheese Icing

1  8oz package of cream cheese

1 stick of butter (room temperature)

1 tsp of vanilla extract

1 lb of confectioners sugar

Beat cream cheese, butter, and vanilla in a mixing bowl until light and fluffy. Then gradually add in confectioners sugar, mixing well between adds. Enjoy!

Although I know a lot more about baking than when I started, I realize that I have a lot more to learn. 

“You'll never know everything about anything, especially something you love.” 

-Julia Child

"Friending" Your Fate

"Friending" Your Fate

Are police spending most of their time on Facebook?

For years, Police have been catching criminals the old fashioned way: wire taps and car chases. Imagine their relief when social media made their job much easier with sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. The sites seems like meaningless fun to the general public, but to a police officer it's the perfect fishing spot of reckless criminals but it is also a double edged sword. When there are little to no laws protecting criminals, there are little to no laws protecting their privacy as well. Have our laws protecting our rights to privacy caught up to the ever-expanding social media? Not quite. It seems that there are still issues to be resolved when it comes to keeping people's information secure. 

Is this LEGAL?

Police have been using social media for clues into criminals' lives since they first hit the internet. And why not? It's the fastest way to from point A to point B with the click of a button. But what do Police need to do to legally obtain this information and have it stand up in court? Get a warrant? Not exactly. The Facebook Legal Terms of Statement of Rights and Responsibilities include not engaging in unlawful multi-level marketing, no bullying or harassing, and not posting anything that is a hate speech, threatening or pornographic. These rules, if broken, would raise flags and may be looked into but would still require a warrant to access messages, videos, wall posts, pictures, and location information. But even if no huge laws are broken, there's no warrant needed to access the basic information of the user such as the email and IP address.  

There was an instance "in September of 2011, a Manhattan Criminal Court judge upheld a prosecutor's subpoena for information from Twitter about an Occupy Wall Street protester arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge." Twitter says "non-public information about Twitter users is not released except as lawfully required by appropriate legal process such as a subpoena, court order, or other valid legal process." But in this case the judge let the Police get the information from Twitter without making them secure a warrant. This was the first time ever that a warrant wasn't required for such an action. This is because "courts haven't issued a definite ruling on social media." ProPublica

Who does this impact?

The obvious answer is that is it impacts criminals! There are thousands of cases nation wide that would remain unsolved if criminals weren't stupid enough to brag about their winnings on social media. From my research, I've found that more criminals are caught due to their own recklessness than the Police actively seeking them out on Facebook. It was very rare that I found a case where an older individual got caught over the internet. I've found that the average age of these careless people range from teens to about 30 years old. For instance, a young man named Chris Crego was arrested for assault in 2009. He didn't show up for his sentencing and authorities found out he had fled the state via Myspace. He posted that he was in Indiana, where he was working, and his work hours. As seen here, criminals often "dig their own grave" when they get too cocky about dodging their fate. Mashable 

Another way people give themselves away is by clicking that "like" button. This is one of the very common ways an officer can access personal information instantly. There was a registered sex offender in Maryland who was on the run with his girlfriend. The cops discovered she had "liked" their Facebook page (The Tazewell Police Department). This gave them full access to her page and information. They were tracked down and both arrested. No warrant was needed because with that one click of the "like" button, she gave them permission to all of her information. Mashable.com also wrote about a convicted thief in Oregon that was sick of the court ordered therapy to avoid prison. He fled the state and on his journey from Oregon to Alabama he documented his travels on Facebook. The Police were able to successfully locate him when his late status read, "In Alabama."

Although this highly impacts the people that commit crimes, it also has a big impact on the officers themselves. What happens when criminals find out that an officer has a daughter on Facebook? They find out where the officer's family lives, where they go to school, when they're having a party, then all of a sudden, there's a problem. Since Policemen are "public figures more than ever now, the barriers between their professional and personal lives have diminished." FBI If certain individuals really wanted to, they could destroy an officer's sense of security. People have the knowledge and tools to google the officer's home address and see a satellite map of their house, leave intimidating notes at their doorstep, or even threaten their families. The FBI writes a "call to action" article to help protect their officers. They say that although it may be more cost effective to wait to deal with it after a situation happens, it would be better to be safe than sorry and to take care of the people that risk their lives for our safety. 

Will this ever get better?

There are certain steps to insure that privacy is secure. Make sure to visit the privacy settings on every social media site. Set them to your liking. Also the only people that can control what other users see are the people themselves. Don't post anything that would be incriminating. That is the biggest mistake among users. The careless posting of pictures, statuses, and comments, get criminals in trouble and then they get heated over their dumb mistake. Stop it before it even begins. This issue may never be completely solved. Now that Police have found a way to successfully beat criminals at their own game, they will not likely quit just because some feeble laws prevent them from accessing certain information. The laws around social media privacy are very weak and sooner or later they will be more defined: for good or for bad.