风和日丽

some photos from the class picnic last week.
this is the sara lee chocolate pound cake that beejuan bought, slathered with peanut butter. i think it's perversely delicious. thank god for healthier snacks like the biscotti in the box too.
picnic! in the middle of a park beside the swan lake, on two plastic sheets, like trash bags... the weather was nice; no sun, no rain, just gentle breezes.
scrabble! haven't played that in ages. we played 'snakes and ladders' too; after moving round and round the lower rungs, i finally climbed straight to the top and won.
i almost, almost, caught a photo of the swans forming a heart-shape. but they moved away =( anyway, you would think that a pair of swans in the lake is highly romantic, but you would soon hear them grunting and decide it's not so pretty anymore.
not a bad turnout for the class picnic. 9/25. it's really a good turnout already. (plus weiyang left earlier, so it's actually 10/25.)

now, photos of the ugly cake that i'm bringing to amanda's farewell party. it was supposed to be a nice-looking layered cake, but no, the cake layers turned out too hideous for cutting, and the icing too runny. so i couldnt' do anything but slap the layers together and spread icing over it in childlike, messy fashion. i think it can replace the ugly cake at nydc.
the batters were made with the high ratio method, which combines the butter, sugar and flour together before adding the eggs, instead of creaming the butter and sugar first. the yellow butter cake puffed like crazy in the oven, and i realised it was not just the top doming, but it pulled the entire cake upwards so that there was a huge void underneath the cake. don't know what kind of cake-acrobatics that was. in short, it was... ugly.
clearly, cake decorating is not my strong suit. but it will have to do. i have no time to make anything else for the farewell party.