Fluff stuff

Guess what I committed to? I need to bake a Halloween-themed wedding cake for a friend's Halloween party. This is my practice cake. I'm thinking the real one will have several layers, but I haven't figured out how to mount them. The red stuff is a raspberry reduction thickened with a little corn starch and the white is a creamy custard. It's filled with fresh strawberries in a glaze made from the raspberry sauce.


My poor sister struggled with a broken fridge for a couple months before I finally brought it over to my house to fix it. It had a bad condenser fan motor; the rotor separated from the shaft. You can see it was merely held by three thin sections of cast aluminum which broke (the light spots on the rotor).

See, the fridge is nothing more than a heat pump, removing heat from the cold section and emitting it from the condenser coils. In older fridges, these were the coils located at the back of the fridge that were warm to the touch. Nowadays they are located underneath, away from view and they're tiny so a fan is used to run air over them to make sure they remove as much heat as they need to. That's why you often feel warm air coming out from the bottom front of most refrigerators. If the fan breaks then not enough heat can be emitted from the condenser coils and as a result not enough heat gets pumped out of the cold section and you wind up with a warm fridge.

Stupid Corolla. After looking at the insurance report I realized this is the THIRD time the car has been totaled. I straightened it out as best I could and plan to re-register it, but it's turning into an ordeal because I require a "brake and light inspection." It was hit only on the rear corner; the front is perfect, except that the headlight adjusting mechanisms are broken, apparently from a past accident and now I have to spend another $100 to fix a problem that's not even a problem because the lights work and point in the proper direction. I hate stupid laws with a passion. This is one of them.


Tortillas. Homemade. It was 2 am and I couldn't sleep. I ate well, though.