The Thanksgiving weekend has made me fall behind on so many things… Let’s see–there have been two new Star Trek Re-Watches over at The Viewscreen: “Day of the Dove” and “For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky.” The former is kind of like an afterschool special (war is wrong!), while the latter has some gorgeous sets and a nice McCoy story but weak motivation and plotting. Coming up tomorrow: “The Tholian Web.”
The week leading up to Thanksgiving was Harry Potter-themed, incidentally. It was my sister’s sixteenth birthday and I promised to make her a cake. I enjoy making fun cakes so her request for a Harry Potter-themed one (white cake, strawberry icing–yay for parameters) had me in a tizzy1. A real challenge! I cycled through so many ideas–a Hogwarts crest? A caketopper of Neville and Nagini? But in the end, my fondant wound up too soft for a cake-topper, my experimental strawberry cake came out too dense and weird, and my food coloring was so shockingly pastel that at 10pm (after a full six hours of baking and decorating) I had to scrap the cake and start from scratch. The last thing I wanted was to give her a Cake Wreck. I was too ambitious. This time I used the fondant only for little decorations, and settled on the horcruxes as decorative elements around the HP logo. Can you identify them?2
The thing around the edge of the cake is supposed to be a Ravenclaw scarf (her favorite house) but unfortunately I didn’t have pure color fondant so it came out light blue. The photos don’t do the gold dust and the three-dimensional HP logo any justice, alas. It took until 4am but I was, in the end, satisfied enough to give it to her.
It was also delicious!
1 Full disclosure: my HP knowledge is scant at best, as I have no real love for the books, so I relied heavily on Wikipedia to furnish me with ideas and background. There is more information on that site about the world of Harry Potter than there is on, say, Hanukkah. Kind of scary…
2 From noon clockwise: Ravenclaw’s diadem, the Gaunt ring, Harry Potter (broom and glasses), Tom Riddle’s diary, the Hufflepuff goblet, Nagini, and the Slytherin locket.
Tags: awesome cakes, birthdays, day of the dove, for the world is hollow and I have touched the sky, harry potter, my sister, star trek re-watch, the viewscreen
You are an awesome sister for all that work. I can feel the love across the continent. I have read all the Potter books because my sweetie-wife likeds them and my reaction. Eh, they’re ok. I would have liked them better had there been one, just one, Muggle character who was redeaming and admirable.
Thank you! She is an awesome deserving sister.
I reacted lukewarmly to the books, too. I liked a lot of the world-building but it felt so derivative and more than anything I hated HP as a character. He’s a whiny little brat who relies on his friends to do everything for him, and even after seven years I didn’t feel like he learned anything about himself.
If he’s part of the dark lord, as heroes sometimes are, he has a dark side to him. For me, part of coming of age in fiction or in real life is understanding that you have the capacity to do terrible things. You must choose not to do them, but sometimes you will hurt the people you love and you have to accept that that doesn’t make you a bad person, it’s just part of being human.
There was nothing like that. He’s HP, and he’s the good guy, so he’ll never be evil. The end. Bleh. Narrow and shallow.
I didn’t hate Harry as a character, but I didn’t love him either. I agree that a little more darkness would have been more credible. I was more vexed by the fact that good characters are all good and bad characters are all bad, when I find that humans are much more complex than that. I mean really not one member of House Slytherin could see that they were on the wrong side? But I had the same trouble with Eric Flint’s 1632.