Saturday, February 25, 2006

King Cake Arrived :-) ... King Cake (Almost) Gone :-(

My folks sent up our annual king cake Friday (well, they actually sent it earlier; it arrived on Friday). It's been pretty much demolished already, which means I'm a little twitchy from too much sugar.

This year, the cake came from The Cocoa Bean* in Hammond and it was very tasty, but still not the unattainable McKenzie's traditional king cake that is lost to history. I'm wondering if I should poke through some of my older Louisiana cookbooks to see if they have a recipe that's more the traditional brioche and not so much of a sugared cinnamon roll.

The funny thing about this king cake was that the baby was poking out of the top of the cake; there was no risk in finding/not finding it in a stray bite. Maybe it's because so many king cakes are being set around the country in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Thursday on "Morning Edition," there was a nice segment about king cake and how busy Haydel's is making enough king cakes to meet the need: people who are back, people who are still displaced, people who are in New Orleans working on reconstruction, people who were sent king cakes as thanks for hosting people during the evacuation, etc.

Oh, and thinking of New Orleans and NPR, my grandmother is slated to be on "Morning Edition" Monday as part of a segment about the effects of Hurricane Katrina.

*Googling The Cocoa Bean to see if they had a website to link to or anything, I ran across a cite of it being a "release site" for BookCrossing. I've heard about BookCrossing, but haven't really been a participant, and while I've picked up free books in stray places, I don't think any of them have ever been part of the BookCrossing library.

However, I have gotten hooked by similar Internet-assisted hobbies. Until Celeste was born, I was an active user of Where's George?, which uses serial numbers to track dollar bills as they travel. From May 2000 up to Celeste's birth, I entered 8,739 bills; since then I've entered 54, and 47 of those were in the November after Celeste was born. I just don't have the time or energy to log every bill, mark it with a notation about the Where's George? site. And I'd have to say Celeste for georging was a pretty good tradeoff. I do register bills when I find them, but other than that ... fugetaboutit.

I am now trying something that, hopefully, is a little less odd, as well as easier to keep up with: Postcrossing. Instead of leaving the cards at random, you sign up and get up to five addresses to send a postcard to; then your name goes into the pot to get some postcards. The more you send, the more you get (in theory at least). I figure it can't become too time consuming, and it should yield some interesting postcards and/or stamps for Celeste and her sibling down the line. (Discovered via Néablog)

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