This is the time of year when bloggers do their retrospectives, but I don’t feel like doing a blog retrospective for 2015. For one thing, I did hardly any blogging, and barely kept up with reading other blogs. For another, the end of 2015 was made absolutely horrible for us by the disappearance of our beloved cat, Mystery. She slipped out on the evening of December 22nd, and has not been seen since. We’ve letterboxed and doorknocked and rung vets and visited shelters, but to no avail, and at this stage, we hold out little hope. It’s been a painful and distressing way to end an exhausting year, and it’s very hard to look ahead and come up with plans, resolutions, or even hopes for 2016 at this point – because right now we are all too aware that life is uncertain and cannot truly be planned for.
So no perspectives from me, just a remarkably silly recipe, inspired by Rosanna Pansino’s Nerdy Nummies Cookbook. She has a very fun recipe for a cupcake that looks like a cheeseburger, with a brownie patty, coconut lettuce, and buttercream piped to resemble cheese, tomatoes.
It’s very cute, but it also looked terribly sweet. Also, I was cooking in part for Steph, so I needed a vegan recipe, and frankly, I found the idea of a vegan cheeseburger cupcake absolutely hilarious and thus irresistible, so off I went.
To avoid the excessive use of buttercream, I decided it would be more fun to give the burger a fruity sort of theme. Mango fruit leather strips make an excellent (and truly revolting-looking) substitute for plastic cheese, jam makes a fine substitute for tomato sauce, and tinned plums replace the beetroot that is a necessity in any Aussie hamburger. Mint leaves made a delicious substitute for lettuce, and at that point, you’re done.
You may be getting the impression that my workplace is all about cake, or at the very least, all about morning and afternoon teas. And… you might well be right. But, you see, our research covers so many different things, and they all have fundraising days! And then there’s the fact that a goodly proportion of staff and students are also involved in non-medical-research-related fundraising, and basically the outcome is a lot of morning teas.
My brother and I did a gift swap this year for Christmas – he bought me a ticket to the cricket (in the Members’ Stand, no less), and I catered lunch for his party. Vegan lunch, because one of his friends is vegan and it is of course absolutely necessary to cater for the most interesting / challenging set of food requirements in the bunch.
