Laptop Lunches #80

Okay, I caved. I made a veggie run, and a fruit run may have to follow in a few days. I am close to fruitless, and so is this lunch. Carrot sticks and celery sticks with peanut butter to dip them in, grape tomatoes to fill in some holes, a Babybel cheddar wheel, a hard boiled egg with salt and pepper sprinkled over the top, plain yogurt with a granola cluster mix, and a yellow mini cupcake with chocolate frosting (America's Test Kitchen Cooking for Two 2009).

This is the first time I tried to get particularly fancy with the way I cut up an egg, and it turned out pretty well considering. The zig zag cut is actually a pretty simple one.

The cupcakes were a disappointment. Apparently they aimed for light and fluffy, and I do not like light and fluffy cake. I want cakey cake. Fudgy, maybe. Not fluffy. I entered a cake in the county fair when I was 15, a lovely, dense chocolate walnut cake that used ground up walnuts rather than flour and was drenched in a rich dark chocolate glaze. I lost. Losing is fine. Losing for the nonexistent judging criteria of "lightness" and "fluffiness" sent me away from the county fair forever. Seriously, the women judging the cakes said they picked the winners based on just how "light" and "fluffy" they were. Best in each category? "It was just so light and fluffy!" Best in show? "It was just so light and so fluffy!" The cake I made was neither light, nor fluffy, nor did it aim to be. If I wasn't prejudiced against light and fluffy before then, I assure you I am now. I will eat no angel food cake unless its lightness and fluffiness is removed by thoroughly drenching it in some kind of sauce and weighting it down with berries or something. Well, this recipe didn't tell me it was light and fluffy; it said it was an improvement on yellow cake mix. It wasn't. It was a lighter, fluffier, less interesting version, though I will say that I agree with America's Test Kitchen that it does not have a chemical flavor. And the frosting was nice, I will give them that. But if light and fluffy is your thing, I guess you have your winner. But this would have lost at the county fair because the frosting wasn't light and fluffy...

Who me, bitter?