Inauguration Cake: Raspberry Vanilla Cream Cake

Happy Inauguration Day!!! What a historic and joyful day :D! We now have a president with both a pandemic plan and a climate change plan ready to go and a female Black-South Asian American Vice President in the White House! To quote Kamala on Election Day, "We did it!"

I have been waiting for this day to come for so long! It has been so heartbreaking to see the division and polarization within our country these past 4 years, and this past year has been particularly rough. To celebrate the inauguration, I baked this mini Raspberry Vanilla Cream Cake, because all celebrations deserve some cake! We still have so much work to do these next few years, but today I finally feel the first twinges of hope.

Dumpster Fire Cookies

Happy New Years!!! I'm a couple days late, but we survived 2020! It was a tough, eye-opening year for all of us, filled with lots of "it can't get any worse, right?" dread and disappointment. This year for New Years I was debating what to bake, and instead of the usual gold glitter, pretty sparkles, champagne and strawberries type of dessert I would normally made, I decided to switch it up and make something more representative of how awful 2020 was.

It was a dumpster fire of a year, so why not make dumpster fire cookies? Some people make gingerbread houses, apparently I make sugar cookie dumpsters now :P. I had an internal debate on whether to make 2D vs 3D cookies, as usual 3D won. I decided on a base of colorful sugar cookie dough that would be cut into parts and glued together with colored royal icing. I free hand cut the cookie flames and baked them with my fingers crossed hoping they would turn out ok (they ended up way better than expected!). And made a chubby little trash panda (meet Kevin!) with the leftover dough. So there you have it, 2020 in cookie form.

I wanted to ring in the New Year with some "out with the old, in with the new" positive affirmations. I decided to symbolically "throw away" all my disappointments and frustrations from 2020 into the flames (to name a few: never-ending construction while working from home, everyone who spread false information about COVID-19 and undermined medical experts, the current administration, all those cancelled vacations, "all lives matter", fake news, racial and socioeconomic injustice...) and smash them with a hammer. It felt very cathartic :)! From the ashes and debris of 2020, we see a new dumpster representing 2021 (it's green because we're going to work on climate change this year, along with continuing the fight for equality :D). Hopefully 2021 will be a better year!