Portraits in Chalk at a Karaoke Bar: CFI Interns Stef and Tony

A couple weeks ago I took the two CFI summer interns, Stef and Tony, to the classic Buffalo bar Klub Karaoke.  (Wow, that site is dated.) We had an hour to kill before Stef had to go to the bus station; a karaoke dive bar seemed like a “FUN!!” way to pass the time.

The website mentions that there’s a “69 foot” (*snicker*) chalkboard bar—with free chalk!—which is a little strange but can indeed be FUN!!1!OMGZ. The music was too loud for casual chatting, so at some point I grabbed a piece of chalk and whipped up these two quick-and-terrible portraits of the interns: Continue reading “Portraits in Chalk at a Karaoke Bar: CFI Interns Stef and Tony”

Baking on a Sunday Afternoon

On Saturday my coworker and roommate reminded me that there’s a CFI community potluck on Wednesday! It’s like the best day all month, with all sorts of tasty noms for eating and a fun crowd to hang out with.  He plans to make pork and vegetarian dumplings, although I can’t believe he’d want to spend so much time pinching so many little dumplings closed. I have little cooking experience (or interest), so I usually bake desserts instead. For some reason, I’m completely willing to spend hours baking—I even enjoy it!—but cooking for more than 20 minutes seems like an unnecessary chore.

There were leftover carrots in the fridge from Christmas weekend, so I decided to whip up carrot cake with some tweaks to the recipe. Because I know there are raisin-haters out there, I made one batch with raisins and one without.

The cake with raisins is two layers (nine-inch rounds) topped with cream cheese frosting from scratch, chopped pecans on the sides, and some almonds thrown on for decoration. I got impatient so didn’t smooth out the top as well as I could have. (It still tastes fine, I’m sure.) Continue reading “Baking on a Sunday Afternoon”