Dancing with the... umm... stars.

Okay, now that they've voted off the people with any real claim to fame, what have we got left and what reality show would they be appropriate for in the future?

A. Shawn Johnson: Little Magilla Gorilla Jr. She's a gymnast. I'd never heard of her before I started watching Dancing with the Stars to see Ty Murray. To be a gymnast you have to perform to music. You have to deal with choreography. Not ONCE has this kid looked like anything other than a muscle bound gymnast on that dance floor. There has been no grace there and those arm movements, impressive in a gym or boxing ring, have no business getting anything greater than a 7 in a dancing competition. Perhaps they'll develop a show called "Boxing with muscle bound children destined to be severely arthritic" just for her. I have a hard time believing that her "fan base" is larger than Lil' Kim's.

B. Melissa Rycroft: The town cryer. She's a professional cheerleader (that's dance, of a sort, people). According to her own little bio video for DWTS she's been taking dance since she was a toddler. UMM.. Did I miss them change the name of the show to Professional Dancers Dancing with Professional Dancers? As far as I can tell, her only claim to fame is that she lined up with a bunch of other gold diggers (yes, that's what you call that) and got dumped on national television. WTH did she expect? You don't find true love when you're choosing out of a field of ONE so she's either a gold digger or a moron, either way she's not a star but she is a professional dancer. So, perhaps ABC will invent a vehicle for Melissa called "Are there people who stupidly think that someone can actually fall in love on command for a national audience or are they just gold diggers?".

C. Gilles Marini: Actor, at least that's what they tell me, I've never heard of him. To be fair, this season of DWTS has been my first foray into network television since my friend Cheryl's TV show got cancelled and before that Frasier. So if all the acting you're famous for is bad network TV, chances are good I haven't heard of you. I don't know how much acting training Gilles has had, but well rounded actors have had at least some dance because it's hard to get acting work and the more entertainment skills you have, the more marketable you are, and if you went to school for your acting you damned sure had dance classes. Perhaps a show for Giles called "Best Dancers Ever Beaten by Height Impaired, Clunky Boxing Gorillas" would be suitable.

Of all the trumped up undeserving pieces of garbage I have ever sat through, this one takes the cake. I should have stopped after watching Ty's Lindy Hop because once again that dance was GREAT and worth watching several times, but nooooo I watched to see Gilles take home the trophy. Never in my wildest dreams did I think little miss "OH was I supposed to be graceful??? I thought I was just supposed to out muscle Mike Tyson and then stick the landing!" win. Whatever...

Newer video of the baby!

She gets stronger every day and she's giving her momma and me more grey hairs.

FINALLY! It's a girl!

Dachsund Garden

My neighbors, the dog ranchers, asked me to do a birthday cake for a friend of theirs. This fellow was kind enough to come over with my neighbor while I was in Louisiana last summer to help her clean out and fill the water buckets in my barn. I'd never met him. When the opportunity to do a cake for him came along I was more than happy to to go all out for the neighbors who have done so much for me in the past hard year, as well as repay the debt owed to their friend.

Here is the finished cake. I call it "The Dachsund Garden". Yes, I made those dachsunds myself. I can't blame them on my kindergarten aged child, but only because I don't have one. I'm still not the Ace of Cakes. Duff's "people" make modeling with gum paste look easy too.

Dancing with the rodeo star!

I just have to put a note on the blog regarding how impressed I am with Ty Murray's dancing. I was already impressed with Ty. We've been impressed a long time with his cowboy capabilities. His sense of humor totally cracks us up. But never, nope not once EVER, did I expect he'd wow me in the field of ballroom dance.

No, he's no Gilles Marini... yet, but Gilles hasn't been a cowboy his whole life either. The physical movements of men who do hard physical labor are going to be quite different than young men who have had a softer life. We're not even going to go into all the broken body parts Ty has had in his lifetime that are bound to be stiff.

Each week Ty has rallied and improved until this week's Lindy Hop had us absolutely whooping and cheering. His score should have been at least 9s straight across. Especially if they give "Lil' Kim" (does she have a real name?) whose leaden, blubbery Tango got a 10 from one judge (that judge needs to go home and watch more old movies to know what a real Tango looks like... or just watch Gilles version). Honestly. Watching the scoring for Lil' Kim (has she got a condition that causes the weird mouth expressions or does she always have something stuck in her teeth?) week after week reminds me of some of the bloated scoring that goes on in bull riding. Melissa Rycroft (exactly how is she a star?) got scored too high for her Lindy Hop (although her other dances have taken my breath away). I saw many more bloopers in her dance than in Ty's, but, well, as bull riding fans, we know all about inflated scores.

Of course, unless the fairies of passion and grace liberally sprinkle Ty in the coming weeks, he doesn't have a realistic chance of winning the dancing competition, but he's got more try than any of the other competitors and certainly more talent and grace already than I'd have given him credit for 3 weeks ago. God knows he's got more talent than all but perhaps 4 of the other competitors including Lil' Kim (I suspect substance abuse for some of her facial gestures and expressions).

I hope Ty manages to last for a few more weeks. If he continues dancing like he danced tonight he easily deserves to be in the top 4. The sad fact of the matter is that someone like the at first amusing, but now stomach turning, Steve Wozniak has legions of geeks out there repeatedly deleting their cookies and casting millions of votes for Team Geek. Not because he's trying as hard as any of the others to improve or to actually learn, but because they think he's a geek like them. Got news for you geekmos, he's no longer a geek. He's just rich. I can see the competition coming down to a war between the Gilles fans and the Geeks.

Ladies, get your scissors and go after their computer cords.

Still not the Ace of Cakes

BUT I graduated my second cake decorating course tonight! I had to make a flower basket cake and about 100 flowers. Okay, not 100. It just felt like 100. After the first 50 who the heck cares if it's actually 100 or not?

I've decided that cake decorating is a lot of fun, but it's not nearly as much fun as people make it look on TV. I can tell you why it's not that fun. Duff, The Ace of Cakes, has "people". Duff's "people" even have "people". Therefore, they can all sit at their clean, roomy, work spaces while someone else scrubs bowls, spatulas, tips, couplers, pans and mixer attachments and takes out their trash. Heck, they even have their own baking guy that does all the oven watching for them.

I, on the other hand, have people that leave half eaten pizzas, empty milk jugs (the trash can is less than three feet away), dirty paper plates, etc. ON my workstation. Thus, not only do I have to toss my own trash and seal my own icing leftovers, but I have to throw away other people's trash and bag up other people's leftovers.

Roomy my workspace is not. Somehow all of my projects seem to require every tool, tip, book and ingredient I have. I have to keep moist towels, baggies, decorating bags, couplers, 60 plus decorating tips (and whatever project I'm working on is guaranteed to need tip 104 for use with at least 4 different colors), 4 spatulas, 2 boxes of gel color, paint brushes, fondant iron, parchment paper, waxed paper, plastic containers, plastic wrap, the stand mixer, 2 flower nails, and my tool box leave me with about 1 square foot of free space to actually decorate a cake or make decorations. The counter tops in back of me are filled with freshly washed bowls, spatulas, plastic containers, mixer attachments, tips and couplers. The sink is filled with unwashed bowls, spatulas, plastic containers, mixer attachments, tips and couplers.

One day I'd like to walk unannounced into Charm City Cakes and see if there are at least smears of daffodil yellow icing in anyone's hair.

Not Quite the Ace of Cakes... yet.

When my husband's appetite was lost due to his lymphoma, we started watching The Food Network. We hoped that seeing delectable delights might perk up his digestive system. We have watched little else since October. In that time I became addicted to watching Ace of Cakes. That addiction quickly expanded to the various cake decorating "challenge" shows that the network airs weekly. By January I was surfing cake decorating websites and at the beginning of February I found that a local craft store offered decorating classes. I signed up. There were about 12 people the first night, but we were down to 8 by the third night. Many of those had other obligations this week and our final class boasted 3 warm bodies other than that of the instructor.

In those 4 weeks I have learned that the beautiful piping designs we see done so effortlessly on TV, are not effortless. I'm not sure when I sprouted so many thumbs. My kitchen smells like sugar and vanilla. I smell like icing. Pink, purple, yellow and white smears of hardened icing can be found on nearly every surface of the kitchen. The dogs police up any cake droppings, so thankfully we don't have pink, purple, green, yellow and white footprints throughout the house. Half the "dust" in the air, is probably not real dust, but rather confectioner's sugar. Can one get white lung disease from sugar?



At any rate, the last class of the beginner's course was last night. I'd fought pink icing roses for 4 days trying to get them to look smooth and uniform like the photographs in the manual. While my flowers looked like roses, they looked like roses that had been attacked by hordes of aphids. Rather than smooth, rounded petals, my roses had the lacy look of carnations. I tried stiffer icing. I tried thinner icing. I tried firmer pressure on the piping bag. I finally gave up in absolute frustration.



When I got to class last night, I explained my problem to the instructor. I told her I was failing miserably in getting the icing consistencies correct because my petals all looked chewed. "NO NO! It's not you! It's the Crisco! I'm sorry. I should have warned you!" Apparently, when Crisco removed the trans fats from their shortening the change sent ripples out through the pastry decorating world. One of those tsunami sized ripples wiped out butter cream icing roses.



Thankfully, next session we will be moving into Royal Icing flowers and leave the Crisco cream decorations behind. Also thankfully, the only cake we have to bake is for the final class. For the past month I've had to produce at least one cake per week. I sure don't need to eat this much cake, William's appetite isn't recovered enough to eat cake and the only one here willing to eat a couple of pieces a day is John. Even as I type I have a practice cake in the refrigerator that is only half eaten and an entire cake full of lacy pink roses that I decorated for our final class sitting on the dining table. Having a month off from eating and storing cakes is going to be FABulous. Although... I'm willing to bet I'll just HAVE to bake one just for "practice" at some point during that time.



My best friend, Daphne, went through this course a few years ago. She sent me much of her decorating equipment when I told her I was going to try my hand at the craft. I didn't want her to send all these things because she was so brilliant at the art of decorating, I didn't want to have all her stuff if she suddenly decided she wanted to start making cakes again. She told me that no one wanted her to ever do cakes again. She was making cakes all the time. Daph's cakes became like my zucchini. People would shutter their windows, lock their doors and not answer the phone if they saw her car. She was even taking gigantic decorated sheet cakes to her fitness center every week!



I can see how this could happen. I have already told everyone I know to sit down and write a list of at least 10 people they know that they can hand off cakes to when they get sick of them. I don't visit a fitness center, but there are a lot of people who work at William's Oncology clinic. If nothing else, I have 11 hooved family members who would LOVE a sugar coated carrot cake from time to time.



Here is a photo of the final cake in my beginner's class.