steampink commences (+ giveaway)

If you haven’t already done so, you should really head over and check out vvb’s steampink celebration. The event goes June 1-4 and will feature awesome steampunk lit (and more) with a female focus. For my part, I’ll be highlighting young adult steampunk novels with a strong heroine. Some of the ones I think fit the bill are highlighted below:

The Girl in the Steel Corset by Kady Cross

Corsets & Clockwork edited by Trisha Telep

Leviathan and Behemoth by Scott Westerfeld

Fever Crumb by Philip Reeve

A Web of Air by Philip Reeve (sequel to Fever Crumb, UK edition)

The Iron Thorn by Caitlin Kittredge

Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare

The Boneshaker by Kate Milford

The Fire Rose by Mercedes Lackey

The Native Star by M. K. Hobson

And just to share the steampink love, I’ll be giving away one book from that list to two separate winners. All you need to do to qualify is fill out the FORM. Giveaway is open internationally and ends June 4, 2011 [EXTENDED to 6/10] at 11:59pm EST. Winners will be picked randomly and notified via email. Books will ship from the Book Depository. Good luck!

teaser tuesday (60)

It's Teaser Tuesday, a bookish blog meme hosted every week by MizB of Should Be Reading. Here's how it works:

Grab your current read and let it fall open to a random page (or if you're reading on an electronic device, pick a random number and scroll to that section). Post two sentences from that page, along with the book title and author. Share your find with others in the comments at Should Be Reading, and don't give anything vital away!

"Darri didn't see the ghost until he was upon her, a solid weight that dropped from the branches above and threw her sideways off the saddle. Because he was solid, she didn't realize at first that he was dead."

p. 1 of Leah Cypess' Nightspell (out today from Harper Teen, with the first four chapters available for free here)

banana buttermilk cake with cream cheese frosting

One of the recurring dilemmas in my kitchen is what to do with overripe bananas. Sure, there’s banana bread. I’ve even played around with different kinds of banana muffins. But until today, I’ve never thought of making a banana CAKE. Genius, kids, absolutely genius. Since I had buttermilk in the fridge, I just searched ‘banana’ + ‘buttermilk’ + ‘recipe,’ and found this dandy. Oh. MY. GOSH. Delicious doesn’t even start to describe this.

Banana Buttermilk Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting (from this recipe)

INGREDIENTS

Cake
1 1/2 cups bananas, mashed, ripe
2 teaspoons lemon juice
3 cups flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup salted butter, softened
2 1/8 cups sugar
3 large eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups buttermilk

a floured pan and a filled one. that batter was so tasty i was tempted to sip it with a straw!

Frosting
1/2 cup butter, softened
1 (8 ounce) package cream cheese, softened
1 teaspoon vanilla
3 1/2 cups icing (powdered, confectioner’s) sugar

Garnish
chopped walnuts (or pecans)

DIRECTIONS

Preheat oven to 275°. Grease and flour a 9” x 13” pan (I used two 9” round cake pans). In a small bowl, mix mashed banana with the lemon juice; set aside. In a medium bowl, mix flour, baking soda and salt; set aside.

my unglamorous counter space. and some cake and frosting.

In a large bowl, cream 3/4 cup butter and 2 1/8 cups sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in eggs, one at a time, then stir in vanilla. Beat in the flour mixture alternately with the buttermilk. Stir in banana mixture until completely blended.

Pour batter into prepared pan and bake in preheated oven for one hour (I kept my cakes in the oven for about an hour and a half because they were taking for-EV-er) or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean.

Remove pan from oven and place directly into the freezer for 45 minutes. This will make the cake very moist (it was already QUITE moist, but, you know).

For the frosting, cream the butter and cream cheese until smooth. Beat in 1 teaspoon vanilla. Add powdered sugar and beat on low speed until combined, then on high speed until frosting is smooth. Spread on cooled cake, and sprinkle chopped walnuts over top of the frosting, if desired.

double layer delicious!

Notes: I made one and a half times the frosting recipe so that I could do a double-layer cake, and it was the perfect amount. Also, I thought the frosting was too sweet, but all of my friends assured me that it was perfect. One roommate even declared that this was the best cake she had ever had. Ever, folks, is a long time. I am proud. And another thing: this cake took a long time. Prep time is about 15 minutes, but with baking and frosting, we’re talking 2 hours.

Recommended for: whenever you have overripe bananas in your fruit bowl, and basically any special occasion that deserves a ‘wow’ factor. I think this is my most universally appreciated baking experiment in recent history. Yay (or should I say, YUM)!

what is life without love?

One of the best quotes I jotted down while reading The Psychopath Test was this bit, from page 113 of the ARC version:

“Sociopaths love power. They love winning. If you take loving kindness out of the human brain, there’s no much left except the will to win.”

Reading is weird. The mind makes connections and keeps things stored away until they merge and create a new network of knowledge. That passage jumped out at me in part because of my criticism last year of Lauren Oliver’s Delirium – something that I’ve been contemplating on and off ever since. In the dystopian world Oliver created, love is taken out of the equation by a medical procedure performed on all citizens at age 18.

My biggest problem with that scenario was that I could not imagine how a society would function successfully (or even semi-successfully) without love. Perhaps this is due to a lack of imagination on my part. But ever since, I’ve been validating that thought with observations and quotes from other places. And in this case, from a journalist working on unraveling the world and identifying psychopaths.

My take? If you remove love and empathy from the human experience, no one can function. You fundamentally break society, and the world won’t go ‘round, even in a limping, dystopian, empty sort of way. What do you think?