#Extraction Homogenizer

[mpbiomedicals]

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[deesblanketfort]

Edible cookie dough recipe for regressors ☆´ˎ˗︶︶︶

gif credits

Who doesn't love cookies? Or, alternatively, who doesn't love scraping the bowl for leftover cookie dough? Because I love it, a lot, it makes me feel very small! That's why I started looking for edible cookie dough recipes, and after some tests and adaptations I made my very own recipe!

Basic Ingredients ☆´ˎ˗

for every 1 cup of all purpose flour, you'll need...

🥣: 1/2 cup of brown sugar

🍪: 1/2 cup of softened salted butter

🥣: 1/4 cup of milk

You can use granulated sugar instead of brown sugar for a more sugar cookie-like flavor

You can use edible flours (such as: almond flour, coconut flour) instead of all purpose flour and skip the heat treating step altogether

Instructions ☆´ˎ˗

🍪: Heat treating the flour: to make sure the flour is safe to eat raw you'll need to heat treat it. This can be done in three ways

With an oven: Preheat the oven to 350°F (180°C). Spread the flour on a tray, over baking paper, and bake it for 5-8 minutes

With a stove: spread the flour in a saucepan, turn the heat to low and stir it for ~2 minutes. Be careful to not burn the flour!

With a microwave: Microwave the flour for 30 seconds and stir the flour so the heat can be evenly distributed, and repeat the process 2-4 times. Remember to use a microwave-safe bowl!

🥣: Mix in the butter and sugar, and whisk them together until fluffy

🍪: Add the flour and the milk to the mixture and mix until homogeneous. The end result should have a soft and thick texture and hold itself together well.

Adding in flavor ☆´ˎ˗

Now, if the plain cookie dough isn't enough, here's some extra ingredients for specific flavors

🥣: 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract for a classic vanilla flavor

🍪: 2 tablespoons of peanut butter for a peanut butter flavor

🥣: 2 teaspoons of coffee powder for a coffee flavor

Adding the sprinkles ☆´ˎ˗

To finish off, a perfect cookie is usually adorned with sprinkles for added texture and colorfulness! This step is completely optional

🍪: Traditional chocolate chips

🥣: All kinds of confetti, hundreds & thousands, etc

🍪: M&Ms or skittles

🥣: Chopped chocolate

🍪: Chopped nuts

Enjoy! ☆´ˎ˗

🥣: This recipe serves around 6 portions and the measures can be cut or increased for less or more portions

🍪: This recipe can be stored in a fridge for around a week and can be added to ice creams and milkshakes

🥣: This recipe cannot be baked! It was made to be eaten raw

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Writing Notes: Honey

Honey

Sweet, viscous liquid food, dark golden in colour, produced in the honey sacs of various bees from the nectar of flowers.

Flavour and colour are determined by the flowers from which the nectar is gathered.

Some of the most commercially desirable honeys are produced from clover by the domestic honeybee.

The nectar is ripened into honey by inversion of the major portion of its sucrose sugar into the sugars levulose (fructose) and dextrose (glucose) and by the removal of excess moisture.

Honey is marketed in several different forms: liquid honey, comb honey, and creamed honey. Sometimes the predominant floral type from which the honey was collected is indicated.

Liquid Honey

If liquid (strained, extracted) honey is desired, additional supers are added directly above the brood nest.

When one is largely filled, it is raised and another is placed underneath.

This may continue until several have been filled, each holding from 30 to 50 pounds (14 to 23 kilograms), or until the nectar flow has ended.

After the bees have evaporated the water until the honey is of the desired consistency and sealed in the cells, the combs are removed, the cells uncapped with the uncapping knife, and the honey extracted.

The removed honey is immediately heated to about 140 °F (60 °C), which thins it and destroys yeasts that can cause fermentation.

It is then strained of wax particles and pollen grains, cooled rapidly, and packaged for market.

Comb Honey

In production of honey in the comb, or comb honey, extreme care is necessary to prevent the bees’ swarming. The colony must be strong, and the bees must be crowded into the smallest space they will tolerate without swarming.

New frames or sections of a frame with extra-thin foundation wax, added at exactly the right time for the bees to fill without destroying them, are placed directly above the brood nest. The bees must fill and seal the new comb to permit removal within a few days, or it will be of inferior quality.

As rapidly as sections are removed, new sections are added, until the nectar flow subsides. Then these are removed and the colony given combs to store its honey for the winter.

Creamed Honey

Almost all honey will granulate or turn to sugar.

Such honey can be liquefied without materially affecting its quality by placing the container in water heated to about 150 °F (66 °C).

Liquid and granulated honey is sometimes blended, homogenized, and held at a cool temperature, which speeds uniformly fine granulation.

If properly processed, the granules will be extremely fine; the honey, which has a smooth, creamy appearance, is referred to as creamed honey.

Floral Types

Some honeys are sold by floral type; that is, they are given the name of the predominant flowers visited by the bees when they accumulated the honey.

The beekeeper has no way to direct the bees to a particular source of food but through experience learns which plants are the major sources of honey.

Different flowers produce different colours and flavours of honey. It may be heavy-bodied or thin-bodied, dark or light, mild-flavoured or strong-flavoured.

Most honey has been blended by the beekeeper to a standard grade that can be supplied and marketed year after year.

Different regions in California produce distinctive honeys:

Orange Blossom Honey: Sourced mainly from Southern California's vast citrus orchards.

Sage Honey: Harvested in the coastal areas and foothills.

Buckwheat Honey: Found in Northern California, with a robust, molasses-like flavor.

Sources: 1 2 3 ⚜ More: References ⚜ On Beekeeping ⚜ Writing Resources PDFs

[exhaled-spirals]

« This is what happens when we allow so many of our previously private actions to be enclosed by corporate tech platforms whose founders said they were about connecting us but were always about extracting from us. The process of enclosure, of carrying out our activities within these private platforms, changes us, including how we relate to one another and the underlying purpose of those relations. This goes back to early forms of enclosure, beginning in the Middle Ages. When common lands in England were transformed into privately held commodities surrounded by hedges and fences, the land became something else: its role was no longer to benefit the community—with shared access to communal grazing, food, and firewood—but to increase crop yields and therefore profits for individual landowners. Once physically and legally enclosed, the soil began to be treated as a machine, whose role was to be as productive as possible.

So, too, with our online activities, where our relationships and conversations are our modern-day yields, designed to harvest ever more data. As with corn and soy grown in great monocrops, quality and individuality are sacrificed in favor of standardization and homogenization, even when homogenization takes the form of individuals all competing to stand out as quirky and utterly unique. This is why The Matrix and its sequels have proved such enduring metaphorical landscapes for understanding the digital age: it’s not just the red pills and blue pills. In The Matrix, humans, living their lives in synthetic pods, are mere food for machines. Many of us suspect that we, too, have become machine food.

And, in a way, we have. As Richard Seymour writes in his blistering 2019 dissection of social media, The Twittering Machine, we think we are interacting—writing and singing and dancing and talking— with one another, “our friends, professional colleagues, celebrities, politicians, royals, terrorists, porn actors—anyone we like. We are not interacting with them, however, but with the machine. We write to it, and it passes on the message for us, after keeping a record of the data.” »

— Naomi Klein, Doppelganger

[communistkenobi]

Hi, genuine good faith question if you'd like! How is TOS racist? It was my understanding that the OG Series was like, huge for equality in media?

I’m speaking primarily about the content of TOS itself, not its historical impact - I understand it had various historic firsts in terms of having characters of colour in respectable roles, which I’m not dismissing. My experience with the discourse on here surrounding the show is that people front-load these character representations as emblematic of the show’s progressive politics. Which, if we want to go that route, TOS was contemporary to the US civil rights movement, which provides us with a handy measuring stick to see how TOS actually grapples with race, not just the presence of characters of colour themselves. I'm going to be kind of defensive in this explanation, not towards you specifically, but because I have had this conversation with people online many, many, many times, and so any defensiveness on my part is in anticipation of arguments I know will come up as a result of making the basic claim that a show made in America in the 1960s is racist. I'm also going to be copy + pasting from an older post I've made on the subject since it's been a while now since I've watched TOS so some of the details are fuzzy.

Like okay, the premise of TOS is that the Enterprise, as an ambassador of Starfleet/the Federation, is seeking out new alien life to study. The Prime Directive prohibits the Enterprise crew from interfering with the development of any alien culture or people while they do this, so the research they collect needs to be done in an unobtrusive way. I think this is the first point at which people balk at the argument that TOS is racist or has a colonial conception of the world - the Enterprise’s mission is premised on non-interference, and I think when people hear ‘colonial’ as a descriptor they (understandably, obviously) assume it is describing active conquest, genocide, and dispossession. Even setting aside all the times where Kirk does directly interfere with the “development” of a people or culture (usually because they’ve “stagnated” culturally, because a culture "without conflict" cannot evolve or “develop” beyond its current presumed capacity - he is pretty explicitly imposing his own values onto another culture in order to force them to change in a particular way), or the times when the Enterprise is actually looking to extract resources from a given planet or people, I’m not exactly making this claim, or rather, that’s not the only thing I’m describing when calling TOS racist/colonial.

The show's presentation of scientific discovery and inquiry is anthropological - the “object” of analysis is alien/foreign culture, meaning that when the Enterprise crew comes into contact with a new being or person, this person is always read first and foremost through the level of (the Enterprise’s understanding of) culture. Their behaviour, beliefs, dress, way of speaking, appearance, and so on are always reflective of their culture as a whole, and more importantly, that their racial or phenotypic characteristics define the boundaries of their culture. Put another way, culture is interpreted, navigated, and bound racially - the show presents aliens as a Species, but these species are racially homogeneous, flattening race to a natural, biological difference that is always physically apparent and presented through the lens of scientific objectivity, as "species" is a unit of biological taxonomy. Basically species is a shorthand for race. This is the standard of most sci-fi/fantasy genre work, so this is not a sin unique to Star Trek.

Because of this however, Kirk and Co are never really interacting with individuals, they are interacting with components of a (foreign, exotic, fundamentally different) culture, the same way we understand that a biologist can generalize about a species using the example of an individual 'specimen'. And when the Enterprise interacts with these cultures, they very frequently measure them using a universalized scale of development - they have a teleological (which is to say, evolutionary) view of culture, ie, that all cultures go from savage to rational, primitive to advanced, economically simple to economically complex (ie, to capitalist modes of production). And the metrics they are judging these cultures by are fundamentally Western ones, always emphasising to the audience that the final destination of all cultures (that are worthy of advancing beyond their current limited/“primitive” stages) is a culture identical to the Federation, a culture that can itself engage in this anthropological mission to catalogue all life as fitting within a universal set of practices and racial similarities they call “culture.”

This is a western, colonial understanding of culture - racially and spatially homogeneous people comprise the organs of a social totality, ie, a society, which can then be analysed as an “object,” as a “phenomenon,” by the scientists in order to extract information from them to produce and advance state (ie Federation) knowledge. The Enterprise crew are allowed to be individuals, are allowed to be subjects with a capacity for reason, contradiction, emotion, compassion, and even moments of savagery or violence, without those things being assigned to their “race” or “culture” as a whole, but the people they interact with are only components of a whole which are “discovered” by the Enterprise as opportunities to expand and refine the Federation’s body of knowledge.

Spock is actually a good example of what I'm talking about, because he is an exception to this rule - unlike the others in the crew, his behaviour is always read as a symptom of his innate Vulcan-ness, where his human and Vulcan halves war for dominance in his mind and character. Bones (the doctor, one of the main cast) constantly comments on Spock's inability to feel things, that he is callous and unsympathetic, ruled by Vulcan logic to such an extreme that his rationality is a form of irrationality, as his Vulcan blood prohibits him from tempering logic with human emotion and intuition. Now you can argue that Bones is a stand-in for the racists of the world, that Spock proves Bones wrong in that he is able to feel but merely keeps it under wraps, that Vulcans are not biologically incapable of emotion but merely live in a socially repressive culture, but this still engages in the racial logic of the show - Vulcans are a racially-bound species with a single monolithic culture, and Spock's ability to express and feel 'human emotions' is the metric by which he is granted human subjectivity and sympathy.

And on the flip side you have the Klingons - a “race” that is uniformly savage, backward, violent, and dangerous. In the episode Day of the Dove, where Klingons board the Enterprise along with an alien cloud that makes everyone suddenly aggressive and racist (this show is insane lol), the Enterprise crew begins acting violent and racist, but the Klingons don’t change. They aren’t more violent than before (because they already were fundamentally violent and racist), and they don’t become less violent when the cloud eventually leaves (because they are never able to emerge from their violence and savagery as a social condition or external imposition - they simply are that way). Klingons are racially, behaviourally, psychologically, and culturally homogeneous, universally violent and immune to reason, and their racial characteristics are both physical manifestations of this universal violence as well as the origin of it. The writers and creators of TOS are explicitly invoking the orientalist idea of the “Mongolian horde,” representing both the American fear of Soviet global takeover as well as blatantly racist fears about “Asiatics” (a word used in the show, particularly in The Omega Glory where a fear of racialised communist takeover is made explicit) dominating the world.

This is colonial thinking! Like, fundamentally, at its core, this is colonial white supremacist thinking. Now this is not because TOS invents these tropes or is the origin of them, it is not individually responsible for these racial and colonial logics - these conceptions are endemic to Western thought, and I am not expecting a television show to navigate its way outside of this current colonial paradigm of scientific knowledge. I’m also not expecting an average person watching this to pick out all the intricacies of this and link it to the colonial history of Europe or the colonial history of western philosophy/thought. But this base premise of Star Trek is why the show is fundamentally colonial - even if it was the case that the crew never intervened in any alien conflict, never extracted any material resources from other people, this would still be colonial logic and colonial thinking. The show has a fundamentally colonial imagination when it comes to exploration, discovery, and culture.

I think a good place to end is the opening sequence. The show's first line is always "Space! The final frontier." I do not think the word frontier is meant metaphorically or poetically - I think the show is being honest about its conception of space as an infinitely vast, infinitely exotic frontier from which a globally Western civilisation (which the Enterprise is an emblem of) can extract resources, be they material or epistemic

[liminalsoul]

How to make ointments

The base of making ointments is infusing herbs in some kind of oil or fat, resulting in a substance that is solid but melts at body temperature.

I usually use one part of herbs and four parts of the ointment's base, but it can vary.

The ointment's base I tend to use is olive oil, although it can be another one like almond or sunflower oil.

In order to infuse the herbs in the oil we will use the bain-marie technique. Two containers are needed: a saucepan with water and a bowl with the oil and the herbs that will go inside the other one.

This must stay over low heat for two hours, having a temperature around 40 °C (104 °F) .

An alternative to this step can be leaving the herbs and oil in a jar for two to four weeks, in a dark and dry place. To accelerate the extraction of the active principles of the plant it is convenient to shake the jar twice a day.

The oil can be filtered with a gauze and, once we have the infused oil, we will have to solidify the ointment, for which I usually use beeswax. The amount depends on the desired texture but 15% of the final volume is a good reference.

We will use bain-marie again to incorporate the beeswax. In the final jar we will put the oil and the beeswax, taking into account that the beeswax melting temperature is around 60°C (140°F) and that it isn't convenient to exceed it too much.

We will stir while the wax is melting until everything seems homogeneous. Additionally, Vitamin E can be added to extend the duration of the ointment. Finally, we will let it cool.

Note: the ointment can be made starting from a tincture of the plant instead of the fresh plant. When added to the oil, the alcohol will evaporate and the active principles of the plant will remain in the oil. In some cases, this method preserves polar substances that otherwise wouldn't stay in the final ointment, making it stronger.

[fatehbaz]

Didn't wanna clog up your post, and these sources are more about relationships of time with space/place, but here's some stuff that I've encountered:

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“Temporal sovereignty”. Contemporary US/Australian claims over time-keeping. Aboriginal/Indigenous time-keeping. The importance of the “time revolution” in the Victorian era to Euro-American understandings of geology and deep past, precipitating nineteenth-century conquest of time (British longitude; Victorian fascination with death, antiquity, paleontology). Mid-twentieth century understanding of “deep time” and its co-option by the Australian state. "Deep time dreaming".

Laura Rademaker. “60,000 Years is not forever: ‘time revolutions’ and Indigenous pasts.” Postcolonial Studies. September 2021.

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How "time is a form of enclosure". Checkpoints, "baroque processes to apply for permits to travel", fences, incapacity to change residences, and other "debilitating infrastructures" work to "turn able bodies into a range of disabled bodies" by "stretching time". This is a "slow death" and a simultaneous "slowing down of life" because "it takes so long to get anywhere" and "movement is suffocated". Thus "time itself is held hostage". This "suspended state" of anxiety and endless wait-times "wreaks multigenerational psychological and physical havoc". "Checkpoints ensure one is never sure of reaching work on time. Fear of not getting to work then adds to the labor of getting to work [...]. Bodies in line at checkpoints [...] [experience] the fractalizing of the emotive, cognitive, physiological capacities" through a "constant state of uncertainty". "The cordoning of time through space contributes to an overall 'lack of jurisdiction over the functions of one's own senses' [...] endemic to the operation of colonial rule". This "extraction of time" produces a "depleted" and tired person "beholden to the logistics" of administrative apparatuses, community suffers and "communing is thrawted".

Jabir K. Puar. "Spatial debilities: Slow Life and Carceral Capitalism [...]." South Atlantic Quarterly 120. April 2021.

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The "apocalyptic temporality" that presumes extinction. Indigenous Polynesian/Pacific perceptions and ways of being "destabilize the colonial present" and also "transfigure the past" by "contesting linear and teleological Western time". How United States and Europe colonized Oceania for weapons testing and conquest of tropical Edens while rendering local Indigenous people "ungrievable" and "without future". "Pacific time is a layering of oral and somatic memory". Instead of accepting an apocalyptic future or doomsday or nightmare, assert the possibility of a livable future, in spite of "Western temporal closures".

Rebecca Oh. “Making Time: Pacific Futures in Kiribati’s Migration with Dignity, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner’s Iep Jaltok, and Keri Hume’s Stonefish.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies. Winter 2020.

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Colonial "space-time homogenization". The experience of "homogenous, empty time". Orientalist "time lag" and the naturalization of a supposed East-West hemispheric divide. Late Victorian imperial conceptions of temporality. The British establishment of the Greenwich meridian and International Date Line. The influence of British imperial seafaring and cartography on the establishment of time and on European/US feelings towards the Pacific Ocean. How the origin of English science fiction literature, space travel aspirations, and time travel narratives coincided with the Yellow Peril and xenophobia targeting East Asia.

Timothy J. Yamamura. "Fictions of Science, American Orientalism, and the Alien/Asian of Percival Lowell". Dis-Orienting Planets: Racial Representation of Asia in Science Fiction. 2017.

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Imprisonment as time-control. Here “the question of the past the present and the future indeed time itself looms” especially around the prisoner. “The law renders punishment in units of time”, taking away a the right to a future. There are alternative worlds, many of them, which have been practiced and brought into being, which colonization tried to obscure. There is “a whole anthropology of people without future embedded in the assumptions that justify mass imprisonment as poverty management”. "The prison’s logic exterminates time as we know it”. In prison, bodies have been alienated from time and history ... the punishment seems endless ... to “achieve a measure of agency and possibility it is necessary to redeem time”, to refuse the doom, fated to a life of abandonment.

Avery Gordon. “Some Thoughts on Haunting and Futurity.” borderlands. 2011.

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Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution (Martin J.S. Rudwick, 2010) explores how the advent of European sciences like geology, preceding the "time revolution" when Europeans experienced revelations about the scale of "deep time", happened alongside and after the Haitian Revolution and other abolitionist movements. French, German, and British naturalists translated the explosion of "new" scientific knowledge from the colonies, so that the metropolitan European audience became a market for historical and scientific "narratives" about how "nature" and time functioned.

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Prartik Chakrabarti's writing on time, temporality, and "the deep past" as British imperial concepts built in conversation with colonial encounters with South Asia. (British Empire reaching such heights in the middle of the nineteenth century at the same time that the newly professionalized sciences of geology were providing revelations about the previously unknown vast scale of "deep time". New colonial anthropology/ethnology also presumed to connect this "primitive" past with "primitive" people.)

See Chakrabarti's "Gondwana and the Politics of Deep Past". Past & Present. 2019.

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We must witness and consider "multiple space-times" to understand how "unfree labour" of plantations was "foundational" to contemporary work, movement, subjugation, health, etc. We must "trace the geneaology of contemporary sovereign institutions of terror, discipline and segregation" [workplaces, imperial/colonial nations, factories, mines, etc.] back in time to plantations. How "the [plantation] estate hierarchy survives in post-plantation" times and places, with the plantation "being a major blueprint of socialization into [contemporary] work". The plantation was "a laboratory for [...] migration regulation in subsequent epochs" that practiced methods of racializing and criminalizing.

Irene Peano, Marta Macedo, and Colette Le Petitcorps. "Introduction: Viewing Plantations at the Intersection of Political Ecologies and Multiple Space-Times". Global Plantations in the Modern World: Sovereignties, Ecologies, Afterlives. 2023.

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“Slow life” and the relationship between “settler colonialism, carceral capitalism, and the modulation of ... registers of time,” including “historical time, the stealing of time through the expansion of labor time, ... and the cordoning off of space through time”. For example, as in occupied zones or at border checkpoints, “the cordoning off of space through time” includes physical architecture like fences and customs, obstacles that impede movement and rhythm, so that “nothing ever happens on time” and there is “a stretching of time”. All the wasted time spent in line, showing papers, waiting for confirmation, etc. “is not a by-product of surveillance, it is the point of surveillance”. Such that “uncertainty becomes a primary affective orientation ... flesh as felt” with a racializing effect“. "This is a biopolitics conditioned through pure capacitation and its metrics”:

Jasbir Puar. In: “Mass Debilitation and Algorithmic Governance” by Ezekiel Dixon-Roman and Jasbir Puar. e-flux Journal Issue #123. December 2021.

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"Starfish time". Indigenous Australian/Aboriginal perceptions of time and "attending to more-than-human agencies of time". Acknowledging the timescales of entire ecosystems, as part of multispecies relationships, a "transcorporeal collaboration". Cyclical time vs linear time. Contrasting timescales experienced by insects that only live a few days and creatures that live for decades. "Starfish may seem to be still" but they slowly move; "larval time" and "the time it takes for eggs to develop and hatch"'. The "immensity of the alterity is literally incomprehensible"; "we can't know what these beings know" but we "should seek respect and be aware of how our lives are entangled".

Bawaka Country including, S. Wright, S.  Suchet-Pearson, K. Lloyd, L. Burarrwanga, R. Ganambarr, M. Ganambarr-Stubbs, B. Ganambarr, D. Maymuru. “Gathering of the Clouds: Attending to Indigenous understandings of time and climate through songspirals.” Geoforum. January 2020.

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The use of calendars, dates, clocks, and industrial/corporate temporality as fundamental to the rise of plantations and financialization in United States/Europe, with a case study of the modern Colombian/Latin American state. Observance of certain dates and strict adherence to specific calendars support "mythologized deeds and heroic retellings" of colonization and industrialization. “The evolution and internalization of disciplined concepts of time” were intimately tied to the rise of wage labor in industrializing England and later during the global ascendancy of work and industrialized plantation monoculture, but the persistence of alternative time should “serve as a reminder that futures and the demarcation of epochs are never as simple as a neatly organized calendar”.

Timothy Lorek. “Keeping Time with Colombian Plantation Calendars.” Edge Effects. April 2020.

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Indigenous people of Alaska and the US control over time management. For the past 50 years, Yupiak people have been subject to US government’s “investment in a certain way of being in time” which “standardized the clock” and disrupted human relationships with salmon. This US management model “anonymized care” and made “a way of attending to the life and death of others that strips life of the social and ecological bonds that imbue it” with resilience and meaning, which “ignores not only the temporality of Yupiaq peoples relations with fish, but also the human relations that human-fish relations make possible”. This disregards “the continuity of salmon lives but also the duration of Yupiat lifeworlds ... life is doubly negated” ... “futures depend on an orientation to salmon in the present”.

William Voinot-Baron. “Inescapable Temporalities: Chinook Salmon and the Non-Sovereignty of Co-Management in Southwest Alaska.” July 2019.

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"Idling" and "being idle" as a form of reclaiming agency and life. Case studies of fugitive Blackness in Caribbean plantation societies. “Disruptive waiting”. “The maroon’s relationship to time challenges [both] the totalizing time of the modern state, but also the [...] narratives to negotiate struggle in the [...] present" in "antagonistic relationship with colonial power". Defying the “European narrative of modernity”. Refusing to be productive.

Amanda Lagji. “Marooned time: disruptive waiting and idleness in Carpentier and Coetzee.” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies. March 2018.

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Indigenous futures. "It is important to remember that some futures never went anywhere" and "yet they survive. These are futures suppressed and cancelled by colonial power." These are "parallel futures". "Colonial power must control the past so as to deny the emergence of" an alternative future; "colonial power creates a future in advance so that no others will take its place". Poor, racialized, Black, Indigenous people manifest alternative futures.

Pedro Neves Marques. "Parallel Futures: One or Many Dystopias?" e-flux. April 2019.

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The "legacy of slavery and the labor of the unfree shape and are part of the environment we inhabit". The "idea of the plantation is migratory" and it lives on "as the persistent blueprint of our contemporary spatial troubles", so we must seek out "secretive histories" that no longer "rehearse lifelessness".

Katherine McKittrick. “Plantation Futures.” Small Axe. 2013.

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“The temporal dispossession” of Congolese people. There is an “impossibility” of “predictable time” because temporal dispossession “disrupts the possibility of building a future”. Livelihoods/income is driven by market and price fluctuations in United States and Europe tech industries, so “there is an inescapable day-to-day sense of uncertainty”. As Mbembe says, “in Africa, the spread of terror ... blows apart temporal frames”.

James H. Smith. ‘Tantalus in the Digital Age: Coltan ore, temporal dispossession, and “movement” in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.’ American Ethnologist Volume 38 Issue 1. February 2011.

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“Slow death”. Chronic illness not just as a byproduct of colonialism/dispossession, but also as part of its aim, a weapon that debilitates people, who become exhausted. Dooming poor and racialized people to lives “without future” through debility, “a condition of being worn out”. Relationship of illness, lack of healthcare, and debt as functionally incapacitating, a form of death sentence. A “zone of temporality” unfolding unlike abrupt/sudden traumatic events and becoming an inescapable condition.

Jasbir K. Puar. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. 2017.

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The extension of poverty, landlessness, homeless, and imprisonment. "To be unable to transcend the horror of such a world order is what hell means", and "without a glimpse of an elsewhere or otherwise, we are living in hell". The utopian is not only or merely a “fantasy of” and for “the future collectivity” but can be claimed and built and lived here, now. There is "no guarantee" of “coming millenniums or historically inevitable socialisms”, no guarantee that “the time is right” one day if we wait just long enough. Instead: "can a past that the present has not yet caught up with be summoned to haunt the present as an alternative?" The "utopian margins", an alternate world crossing time and place, an "imaginative space and temporality to trace the remains of what "was almost or not quite, of the future yet to come", living as if it were the present. Colonialism tried to crush the many headed hydra of the revolutionary Atlantic, those who challenged the making of the modern world system.

Avery F. Gordon. As interviewed by Brenna Bhandar and  Rafeef Ziadah. “Revolutionary Feminisms: Avery F. Gordon.” As transcribed and published online in the Blog section of Verso Books. 2 September 2020. And: Avery Gordon. “Some thoughts on the Utopian.” 2016.

---

The US/European "city is the site of regulatory regimes" that try to impose a definitive narrative about history, progress, and possible futures. But it cannot achieve "a wholly Apollonian, seamlessly regulated realm" because the land "continues to be haunted by the neglected, the disposed of, the repressed". The "commodification" of landscapes "circulates an imaginary geography" mediated through advertisements, labels, soap operas, television, etc. which celebrate "sanctioned narratives and institutionalized rhetoric". A "wild zone" of informal spaces, debris. "Ruins are places where the things, people, and "other memories can be articulated". There is "a spectral residue" that "haunts dominant ways of seeing and being". "Alternative stories might be assembled", so that we can respect the people banished to abandonment, the periphery, and reclaim agency.

Tim Edensor. “The ghosts of industrial ruins: ordering and disordering memory in excessive space.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space volume 23. 2005.

Also, how "master narratives of history as progress decompose" when faced with "a continuously remembered past" when "the ghosts of this past rear up in the ruin" to expose "the debris of unprecedented material destruction" of colonialism/empire-building. These "hauntings rupture linear temporality" and recall those people beaten down as "the trash of history". It is "essential to see the things and the people [...] banished to the periphery [...]."

Tim Edensor. "Haunting in the ruins: matter and immateriality". Space and Culture Issue 11. 2002.

---

"Many kinds of time" of bacteria, fungi, algae, humans, and "Western colonialism meet on the gravestones". Some creatures, like lichen, are very long-lived and "these temporal feats alert us that modernity is not the only kind of time, and that our metronomic synchrony is not the only time that matters". The "long duree evolutionary rapprochements to the quick boom and bust of investment capital" where "minor forms of space and time merge with great ones". Extinction is "a breakdown of coordinations with reverberating effects". Ghosts remind us that we live in an impossible present, a time of rupture. "Deep histories tumble in unruly graves that are bulldozed into gardens of Progress". "Endings come with the death of a leaf, the death of a city, the death of a friendship".

Elaine  Gan, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, and Nils Burbandt. “Introduction: Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene.” Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. 2017.

---

Everywhen: Australia and the Language of Deep History. (Edited by Ann McGrath, Laura Rademaker, and Jakelin Troy. 2023.)

Chapters include: "Bugarrigarra Nyurdany, Because of the Dreaming: A Discussion of Time and Place in Yawuru Cosmology" (Sarah Yu et al.); "Songs and the Deep Present" (Linda Barwick); "Yirriyengburnama-langwa mamawura-langwa: Talking about Time in Anindilyakwa (James Bednall); "Across 'Koori Time' and Space (John Maynard)

[artbyblastweave]

Any ideas to connect SU Diamonds and Worm Entities for a crossover?

For the past three years and change, I've been kicking around the idea of the Gempire as the residual result of an entity that botched its own cycle so badly that the central Zion-style figurehead holding the entire operation together is a hundred-thousand-year-gone memory. The result amounts to an entity with serious brain damage; The gems retain elements of the original programming for the cycle- namely, the ability to create anthromorphized avatars reflective of the local culture, and the drive to reproduce and consume planets to perpetuate themselves- but they've completely lost the plot on other important elements, namely the importance of hybridizing with local host species, their historical record, the full extent of their dimensional manipulation capabilities, best practices for resource extraction, and, most crucially, mutation, change and innovation as a desirable outcome.

Rather than an avatar, White Diamond is an intelligence analogous to a Endbringer or Titan who slid into the vacant role as the next-most-powerful autonomous portion of the network, holding the consolidated, stretched-thin remains of the original Network together by her fingernails while also deleteriously superimposing her own residual instinct from her original role onto the entire network- namely, to pacify, homogenize and sterilize host planets if and when a cycle is beginning to get out of control. This hybridized with residual data from previous host species that caused the gempire to organize in a fascimile of imperial structures encountered back when their cycle was still functional; essentially "Playing House" at the societal level, aping the culture of a host species without really remembering why.

The result of this is a "cycle" that's bad at everything it's supposed to do but effective enough that it limps on regardless- supremely energy inefficient, stripping planets bare rather than experimenting, and utterly developmentally stagnant. In the unlikely event that an entity were to cross paths with the Gempire, they'd have an uncanny-valley reaction to it and likely attempt to euthanize it, but compared to most entities the Gempire is tiny- while Shards canonically deploy in the hundreds of millions, the gems tend to reproduce only a few tens of thousands of themselves each time they claim a planet, and they usually only strip mine the handful of "active" worlds that would feature in a normal cycle rather than obliterating all dimensional iterations of it.

Yellow, Blue and eventually Pink are similar constructs to White, brought online to assist her in the project after the "imperial" territorial holdings grew too vast to micromanage. Unfortunately (for the cycle) another one of the things that got lost in translation were the controls meant to keep individual shards from developing autonomy or attachment-to-hosts. When the Gempire hit Earth, Pink Diamond and a significant contingent of the network, after patterning themselves after humans and spending a significant amount of time on the ground, pulled a fragile-one and went native, leading to a localized civil war that ended under unclear circumstances when the other the diamonds glassed the planet from orbit and pulled back their operations to prevent whatever affected the rebels from spreading.

All of this happened about 8000 years before the events of Worm, in a universe about 43 dimensions down the line from anything seen in the Earth Bet Cluster; due to the Gempire having mutated so much as to no longer be immediately recognizable as fellow Entities, and with so few active gems left on the planet in the aftermath of the rebellion, Zion ignored the crystal gems and folded them away into the inaccessible dimensional space, where the events of the show played out much as they did in SU canon. Ironically, Steven is the first ever example of this cycle successfully empowering a host, in the most roundabout way possible.

In my notes, and in keeping with the religious-theme-naming of the canon entities, I usually refer to this whole situation as Nirvana (what else would you call it when they break the cycle?)

[underground-archives]

Bbymutha, "Gun Kontrol" 2024

Special Artist Spotlight: In Conversation with Bbymutha (Part 1/2)

For this first Special Artist Spotlight, I had the pleasure to sit down with Chattanooga, TN’s very own Bbymutha to discuss the evolution of her sound, the industry, and the future of hip hop. 

“So,” I begin, “Who is Bbymutha?”

The rapper giggles, “hmm, I don’t know…I guess I’m a rapper, and a mother, and a artist in general-” 

“and a girlfriend too” her boyfriend and fellow artist Fly Anakin chimes in from somewhere off camera. 

I ask Mutha how they would define their music as an artist, and what the driving forces behind it may be. From a sonic standpoint, the rapper states that whatever beats “tickle her brain” and get stuck in her head are the ones that make the cut. Emotionally, Mutha says that she has always used music as a way to vent, and take out her frustration, stating that if she wasn’t rapping, she would be doing things like journaling instead. 

The rapper also mentions the concept of vanity as a driving force behind her music. Though she is not so sure about this particular word choice, I feel like I understand exactly what she means - that “braggadocious” quality for which hip hop is adored as much as it is disparaged. I particularly connect with this point, and mention that that has been one of the overarching themes of the Underground Archives project; the idea of affirmation and manifestation as part of the vast appeal of rap music, even to audiences - especially those outside “the culture” - who may not relate to the circumstances the rappers describe, but relate to the feelings being communicated (which speaks to the power of music, but also makes cultural appropriation/extraction an ever looming threat).

It is no secret that Mutha has deep roots in the South, with Southern hip hop deeply influencing her own music. I ask her opinion on people’s tendency to homogenize the South when it comes to rap music, and if she has an issue with being defined in that way. She responds:

“Of course I’m a Southern rapper but what bothers me is when they try to box you in and say “oh you [only] make trap music”

I thought this was valid, noting that there is a certain stigma that comes with that label - “trap” music - in general. As if her catalogue would be somehow less worthy if it was all “just” trap, though the genre has been so commercialized and oversaturated, that you can understand the tendency to underwrite it.

I decide to pivot and ask the spooky rapper to tell us about some of her influences on her sound and aesthetic as an artist. She names horror movies and game soundtracks as a major inspiration, as well as horror manga like Junji Ito’s. She also adds that her kids are, of course, a major inspiration, and that they keep her “in the loop” with what’s in these days.

Mutha also names fashion as a major source of inspiration, and a key component of her identity as an artist.

“My fashion reflects my music, my music reflects my fashion” 

Anyone who has seen the rapper’s music videos or social media profiles can attest to that, as the rapper is always sporting a look - a mixture of dark and boldly colored; edgy and whimsical - a lot like the rapper’s music. Mutha briefly mentions how she has picked up crocheting in recent years, and has crocheted a number of her own looks, especially for her Sleep Paralysis tour last year. She even has an online storefront for her crochet items (https://freakbastard.bigcartel.com/), though she does lament the pressure to monetize every hobby or creative pursuit she has.

“Im the person that people want around cause I make everybody feel good about theyself but nobody listens to what I have to say”

To describe the influences on the content of her music, Mutha reminisces about her childhood, and what drew her to making music in the first place. She recalls how she would always write poetry, or write in her diary, so making music felt like a natural progression of that expression - simply another outlet. Now, the seasoned rapper’s music has effectively become her diary, but there are new challenges and limitations to that mode of expression due to how public it is.

I tell her I have to bring this up even though it will make her groan

We have to take it back to (almost) where it all began - Rules (Glow Kit, 2016). Mutha’s first big hit. A mega cult classic and fan favorite. And, coincidentally, the song the rapper wishes she could just lay to rest. 

Sure, the rapper was talking her shit. The iconic refrain “you can’t give your pussy to a  nigga who not used to getting pussy ‘cause that pussy gon’ be everybody’s business” is still quoted by fans to this day.

Yet Mutha hates it - and for a few reasons. She is tired of being requested to perform the song, which is nearly a decade old, when she has released so much music (two full length albums and a number of EPs) since. She also describes how the song is not even close to one of her best- in fact, she personally sees it as one of her worst, “the song was literally just a rant with a hook on it.” Most of all, she resents the idea of basically being asked to “turn up to [her] trauma”

I suggest that maybe people love the song so much because it’s such a relatable message, and that listeners may reclaim their power by thinking “oh, Bbymutha went through this too, maybe I’ma be alright” to which she laughs and responds: “don’t do that because you don’t even know if I’m alright for real!”

“If you still want me to be that same bitch then you dont know whats best for me”

There is definitely much to be said about the commodification of the artist and their experiences, as well as the audience’s inability to move on. Mutha certainly agrees that a lot of fans are stuck on her older stuff, like “Rules,” and laments the tendency for fans to try and box her in where she wants to grow. She also notes that she is through talking about men and their drama in her music. 

“I’m tired of talking about men, it's never nothing good to talk about them for” she giggles. Now, Mutha is much more interested in expressing vulnerability on her own terms, and choosing which songs she wants us to turn up to.

Mutha wants to continue along this trajectory, about the commodification and inevitable dehumanization of artists. She is disturbed by the idea of audiences wanting to “vibe” to artists’ real pain (TikTok trends like the dance to Kendrick Lamar’s “Money Trees” is another example that comes to mind). She describes this obsession with stuff like “sad girl music” as a type of emotion harvesting, which unfortunately comes with the expectation that the artist only makes that type of music. But where is the room for growth?

Mutha also believes stan culture and social media is partially to blame for this phenomenon, describing a sort of pressure - from the fans, but also from the labels - to have a viral moment and keep chasing or trying to recreate that moment. 

So, I ask the rapper how she keeps herself grounded while dealing with all this, and how we can open up space to have this conversation with those who are willing to listen.

She laughs as she reminisces about how she used to cuss people out online when they stepped out of line, but admits that she has scaled it back to protect her peace. The rapper keeps her X (formerly Twitter) account “on lockdown” by making her account private, but Instagram is more difficult to navigate because she does not want to make that page private.

One thing that has particularly grinded the rappers gears dealing with social media is the overfamiliarity, especially pertaining to a certain B-word (“Where’s the album BITCH??!?”). She acknowledges that people like this probably just get a little too excited, but she has definitely cussed a fan or two out for it in the past.

I ask her how we can find the balance between humanizing artists but not idolizing them, to which she responds “I would love to know.”

Mutha believes she has put in her 100 hours with all the cussing people out she used to do, and at this point in her career, just prefers to focus on the love and getting to know the people who love the music instead of feeding into the hate and drama. 

“I get it because I’ve done it but it aint really worth it…the fans be feeling important when you go back and forth with  them, when you could just talk to me normal and feel just as important going back and forth with a regular conversation. But they know if they say some negative shit to you that that’s going to get your attention faster”

So, Mutha is much more focused on engaging with the love and choosing what’s really worth responding to. Otherwise, she will just block you and go about her day (though, she will still cuss a b*tch out if need be. Be warned!)

“People gon be people life is life it’s like high school never ends”

[complexedandfruity]

ok so some of my friends like to play a game called “soup or sandwich”, where we decide if a certain food qualifies as a soup or a sandwich (there’s no third choice)

ex: jello is a soup, due to its homogeneous makeup. a pop tart is a sandwich, bc the filling is contained within a food structure, much like a sandwich

we’ve reached a bit of an impasse regarding a food, & i wanted to get some outside opinions (plus i think this whole game is rather tumblr-coded). no nuance/“im bald”/vanilla extract; make a choice

[tisguinho69]

Today was my birthday, and since i simply love Cookie Run Kingdom i decided to make my own thematic cake!

RECIPE BELOW!!!!!!

I absolutely love Shadow Milk and Pure Vanilla Cookie, from the lore to the designs, so I wanted to put my love into a cake!

Here's the recipe:

CAKE DOUGH

ingredients

300g of sugar

6 eggs

200g vegetable oil (sunflower, canola, corn or soy)

380ml of milk

15ml vanilla essence/extract

2 tablespoons baking powder(30g)

4 cups of wheat flour (500g)

In the bowl of your mixer, place the sugar and eggs and mix for approximately 2 minutes (or until it becomes slightly airy, if you don't have a mixer). When you have finished mixing, add the oil, milk and vanilla essence, mix again, next, add the baking powder and flour and then mix everything until it is homogeneous and smooth

Now, since this recipe is for a themed cake, we will dye part of the dough! separate half of the dough into another bowl, and take your food coloring of choice put the amount of food coloring needed in this new bowl, and mix well

When pouring the dough into the pan, you can alternate between the dough without food coloring and the dough with food coloring, you can try to make designs or other patterns

In the oven already preheated to 180 degrees Celsius, place the pan with the dough and leave it there, to know if the cake is ready just stick a toothpick or knife in the center of the cake, and if it comes out clean or with very little dough, it is ready! mine took 1h30 to bake

The filling is white brigadeiro, which can be made as follows:

1 can of condensed milk

3 tablespoons of powdered milk of your choice

1 tablespoon of melted butter

(optional) 1 can of cream

You need to mix all of these things very well before putting them on the heat. It is recommended to use a not very large pan and a silicone spatula. You need to stir everything until small bubbles appear on the edges, when the brigadeiro no longer sticks to the bottom of the pan or until the texture seems creamy. Let it cool in a clean container. After it cools, put it in the refrigerator to firm up (it is recommended to make it a day before if you're using it as a filling).

The chocolate syrup was the easiest part, you just need to make a ganache (melted chocolate with cream, usually made in a bain-marie, but it can be made in the microwave) and wait for it to cool before using it

I used 50% dark chocolate to break up the extreme sweetness of the cake (and added black food coloring), and in the end it all turned out really tasty!

[transgenderer]

I think "life in the US was more prosperous than life in the USSR during the cold war because the US had always been much richer" is a strong and significant argument, like there are other significant factors to quality of life but I think that's probably the main thing, pre Soviet Russia was poor. BUT it naturally invites discussion of Korea and Germany, two relatively neat case studies of a single nation with relatively homogenous wealth distribution before the war. And the communist argument from there is that the capitalist half got richer from the patronage of the Richer US. Which is obviously kind of true in like a causal sense but they weren't *propped up* by the US, they developed self sufficient economics. And if we, attribute the principal factor of welfare in a country to absolute wealth (rather than organization of wealth, with exceptions for purely extractive economies), then this sort of becomes a case for capitalism, in that the capitalist side was more successful at growing wealth in its client States. Obv there are arguments you make from here, either that wealth is purely relative/extractive, wealthy countries necessarily create poor countries, or that the US was only able to build wealth in it's clients by being rich and a rich ussr could have done the same thing (plausible, imo. I think we should have weak prior about out-there economics), etc etc. But the original argument ends up not really pro-communist but sort of fundamentally ambivalent

[sophiathe1]

A chocolate chip cookies! ⋆｡‧˚ʚ🍪ɞ˚‧｡⋆

Recipe made by: @phyyysalis on tiktiok!

ingredients:

250g flour

3/4 teaspoon baking soda

3/4 teaspoon salt

200g unsalted butter at room temperature

155g brown sugar

140g white sugar

1 egg

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

chocolate chips to taste

Preparing:

Dry base: In a bowl add the flour, salt, and baking soda, mixing well.

Wet base: In a mixer, add the butter and beat well until it is very soft (or you can put it in the microwave for a few seconds). Add one sugar at a time, beating very well so that the dough is homogeneous. Add the egg and beat once more, finishing with the vanilla extract.

Dough . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁

Add the dry ingredients to the wet base and mix quickly with a spoon, then return to the mixer. Beat until the flour is almost gone, stopping before adding the chocolate chips. Finish mixing with a spatula. Refrigerate for at least 1 hour.

Cookies ˚ ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁

Preheat the oven to 190 °C. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and make balls with the dough, separating them well* on top of the sheet. Repeat the process until all the dough is gone*. Add a few more chocolate chips on top of the balls and bake until the edges of the cookies are golden brown (I usually leave them in for about 12 minutes). Remove and let cool!

That's it, kisses!

(I made this recipe a few times and it worked pretty well for me, I hope it works for you too!)

[oh-he-grows]

Single-Serve Double Chocolate Chip Cookies

not gardening related in the slightest but this is my absolute favorite cookie recipe, it tastes so incredible even better, it's a 'single serve' recipe that just makes two big crumbl-esque sized cookies, doesn't dirty much kitchenware, has a small number of ingredients, and is great when you're in the mood for just a lil cookie

she has a cookbook coming out soon which i've already preordered; and she has a regular chocolate chip cookie recipe as well, but the double chocolate is a different recipe (and in my opinion is better). https://bromabakery.com/single-serve-double-chocolate-cookie/

Ingredients

2 Tablespoons unsalted butter, softened (not melted)

4 tablespoons brown sugar

1 egg yolk

1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 1/2 Tablespoons Dutch processed cocoa powder

1/8 teaspoon baking soda

1/8 teaspoon salt

4 Tablespoons all purpose flour

3 Tablespoons semisweet chocolate chips

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 350°F and line a baking sheet with parchment paper Set aside.

Place the softened butter and brown sugar in a medium bowl. Use a fork or a whisk to mix together until smooth and homogenous.

Scrape down the sides of the bowl and add the egg yolky and vanilla extract. Mix until combined.

Scrape down the bowl and add the cocoa powder, flour, baking soda and salt. Mix until just combined and no streaks of flour remain.

Fold in chocolate chips until evenly distributed.

Divide the cookie dough into 2 big cookies and place onto your prepared cookie sheet 2 inches apart.

Bake at 350°F for 11 minutes or until the edges are set but the centers are still gooey. Allow to cool for 10 minutes on the baking sheet until set. 

[mobilefruit-gundam]

Reading Rachel Laudan’s Cusine and Empire which really got me thinking about like- decolonized and deindustrialized food ways and what that looks like practically as well as the possibilities for new food technologies that remain unexplored due to the homogeneous adoption of the ingredients and processing of the colonial palate.

Just take wheat flours and refined cane sugar for example, the demand for which has for centuries justified the mass theft of land, forced labor of enslaved people, and widespread ecological destruction in order to cultivate. These products have unique qualities but are only one of hundreds of possible flours or sugars that can and have historically been processed by the human animal for consumption. But the vast majority of alternatives have ended up in stasis (at best) after colonization pushed aside traditional staple starches and sweeteners made from local ingredients and using regional methods. Food sources and technologies of course spread through more friendly means, not just via subjugation / cultural genocide, and when exchanged willingly can still outright replace extant staples but it’s infrequent. More often they are adopted alongside preexisting cuisines, ingredients or techniques mixed and matched with those already at use in a region.

Considering my own locale as an example i wonder what my diet might look like if methods of acorn meal and manzanita flour refinement and extraction of sugars from fruits and saps had been allowed their natural course of advancement. It also encourages me to get into more projects around this line of thought: making sustainable foods that are of place both in material ingredients and the processes of their transformation. Reforming the palate is a piece but we also continue to limit ourselves creatively, nutritionally, and practically by not looking beyond a small selection of staples. Literally a million sources for protein, carbs, fats, sugars, salts, etc and as many ways of refining said necessities without monoculture, factory farming, exploitive labor, or mass waste. And there are a lot of resources to start from when it comes to indigenous recipes and food ways, most of that knowledge isn’t totally lost it’s just been undervalued and ignored. Anyway… a long and likely incoherent post all to say i wanna start compiling a regionally specific cookbook for the post-industrial world.

[marozzoespabakingcooking]

Soft Chocolate Cake

With custard sauce or vanilla ice cream

Ingredients lists

Chocolate cake

7 egg whites, 3 egg yolks, 1 whole egg (total of 8 eggs).

150g 70% cocoa chocolate

150g butter

150g sugar

35g wheat flour

1 table spoon of cocoa powder

Custard sauce/Vanilla icecream (optional)

3 egg yolks

100g sugar

250ml milk

125ml heavy cream

1 vanilla bean or 1 table spoon vanilla extract

NB: The custard sauce can be served warm/hot with the chocolate cake, or put in an ice cream machine to make vanilla ice cream.

Instructions

Chocolate cake

Melt the butter and chocolate together.

Seperate the egg whites and yolks. In one bowl, put 7 egg whites, in another bowl put 3 yolks and 1 whole egg. This should leave you with 3 egg yolks. Keep those for the custard sauce.

Put half of the sugar in the bowl with egg yolks & the whole egg.

Beat the egg whites with an electric whisk. When the whites are getting foamy, add 1/3 of the remaining sugar. Continue whisking until they are firm, and add 1/3 of the sugar again. Whisk for 1min and add the remaining sugar and whisk another minute. Refer to picture below to see the texture it must have.

Take a sauce pan, put water in it and heat up the water. The water must be steaming, but not boiling.

Put the bowl with the yolks, whole egg & sugar on top of it, and whisk it with the electric whisk in this bain-marie. Whisk until the mix has whitened a lot and increased a lot in volume. Refer to picture below to see the desired texture.

Mix all the ingredients together in the following manner: First mix the yolks with the chocolate. Second mix the yolk-chocolate with the egg whites, and the sieved flour & cocoa powder.

Mix until homogeneous, but do not overwork the mix, and we want to keep the mix as airy as possible.

Preheat the oven at 170°C.

Pour the mix in a buttered and floured cake pan, and bake for 25-35min (use the toothpick/knife method to check if it's cooked).

Take it out the oven, wait until it cools down, and remove the cake from the cake pan. Cover with powdered sugar.

Custard sauce/Vanilla icecream (optional)

Cut the vanilla in half, take all the seeds out, and put the seeds and the bean shell in the milk, and half the sugar.

Put the milk to a boil, then stop and let it infuse.

Whisk the yolks and the rest of the sugar until it whitens and become fluffy (it'll be less airy than what we did for the cake, and it is not done in a bain-marie).

Pour the milk over the yolks, mix well, and put back in the sauce pan.

Cook & stir until it reaches 83°C.

Add the heavy cream to stop the cooking.

Either serve it as is as a sauce for the cake, or put in an ice cream machine to make vanilla ice cream.

NB: This cake is named "moelleux" in french, meaning "soft", refering to how airy and soft the cake is.