Our Blog

Searching for a baking project? Consider National Applesauce Cake Day on June 6th for your inspiration. Scents of cinnamon and apple will remind you of the holidays, you won’t spend too much on ingredients, and it’s wonderfully delicious.

You can make the cake with or without frosting. It’s tasty no matter what. The pictured cake was made with the walnuts mixed into the frosting, but you can always bake the walnuts (or raisins) into the cake itself. Applesauce cake is flexible to your whimsy. I recommend using coconut flour, which is loaded with nutrients and contains less carbs. The flavor blends in nicely, and the prevailing belief is that it’s a healthier alternative to regular flour. You will be doing your tastebuds and your body a favor.

An historical aside…applesauce cake was promoted as a patriotic dessert during World War 1 because applesauce was easy to produce and affordable for customers. Also, it used fewer expensive materials such as eggs, butter, and sugar. The economical cake made its debut into cookbooks in the 1910s. In today’s cake world, applesauce cake is still very popular, and after stocking up on essential baking items it is still pretty lean on the pockets. Enjoy!

A still from the Secret Garden film adaptation

From Gilgamesh’s Garden of the Gods to the Garden of Eden, cultivated green spaces have found their way into writing since the practice began. Recently, garden clubs across America have declared June 6th as National Gardening Exercise Day, a reminder that exercise in nature is more fun than hitting the treadmill indoors yet again.

Some of our favorite fictional gardens have been the sight of some serious exertion as well, both mental and physical. Check them out.

Kublai Khan’s Garden in Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino: In this strange and beautiful novel, Marco Polo sits in Kublai Khan’s garden and describes to the emperor the various, wondrous cities he has seen on his travels.

The garden itself is as magical as the invisible cities Polo describes. As he tells Khan, “Perhaps this garden exists only in the shadow of our lowered eyelids, and we have never stopped: you, from raising dust on the fields of battle; and I, from bargaining sacks of pepper in distant bazaars… Perhaps the terraces of this garden overlook only the lake of our mind.”

The Gardens in Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence: This scandalous 1928 novel tells the story of Constance, Lady Chatterley, a bored and frustrated young wife who begins an affair with the estate’s gamekeeper. Lawrence’s novel was censored for its explicit descriptions of sex, but the garden details are racy enough in themselves.

Take, for instance, this brief snippet: “Yellow celandines now were in crowds, flat open, pressed back in urgency, and the yellow glitter of themselves. It was the yellow, the powerful yellow of early summer. And primroses were broad, and full of pale abandon, thick-clustered primroses no longer shy.” Whew!

As we approach Gay Pride 2012, we start to hear the rumblings (from the gay community itself) to the effect of “Why do we even need Pride celebrations? Nowadays we’re all over the TV and more visible and accepted than ever. Even Obama loves us now!”

While much of that is true, there are still religious organizations calling for blatant discrimination against us, as well as presidential candidates and a chunk of this country who’ve made it clear that we are still 2nd class citizens in their eyes. And for every out, proud, and headstrong gay adult, there are still those scared or confused gay kids (millions of them, actually) who are just coming to terms with their own truth.

As a gay teen, I had no idea there were other people just like me. Or that there was a place I could be and feel safe, let alone a yearly celebration that wasn’t hidden or shameful.

So our Pride celebrations are still essential, because they give us the opportunity to be among only friends, to feel 100% free to be ourselves without judgment, to rejoice in our uniqueness, and to discover that we can create a family with people we’re not even related to.

Many gay people in Born This Way have shared those exact revelations in their own growing up experiences. Perhaps someday very soon, the LGBTQ community will finally have complete and full equality. But until that time comes, we still need to gather together to remember our past and celebrate the possibilities of the future.

And yes indeed, look fabulous doing it!

Photo by Lee Haywood

It’s almost June and everyone knows what that means: weddings!

June is the most popular month for weddings, and that makes sense as it was named after Juno, Roman goddess of marriage and childbirth. If you believe the latest rom-com, weddings are the perfect end to our search for a soul mate. But if we’re being honest here, there is almost nothing more terrifying than the incredible amount of potentially-tragic scenarios that a wedding can produce. Okay, it’s not exactly as dangerous as kayaking through the Amazon surrounded by cannibalistic tribes and poisonous frogs. But, you are combining your family, his or her family, liquor, high expectations, lots of money, and the most important decision of your life.

It’s honestly hard to pick just one terrifying possibility from The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Weddings, because they would all be pretty traumatizing.

It’s Wednesday again, which means it is time to prepare yourself for yet another worst-case scenario.

Today, we’re going to reach into The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Paranormal for some advice. This book may be particularly useful if you plan on having a vampire-werewolf-human love triangle at some point in the future, or you are looking forward to the next season of True Blood as much as I am.

Tobey Maguire and Michael Douglas in Wonder Boys

Hipster bookworms crawl out of the woodwork when an adaptation makes its way to the silver screen. “Oh, you’re seeing “The Hunger Games” this weekend? I read those books before anyone knew about them.”

Here are some book-to-movie adaptations that are “really obscure.” I mean, you’ve probably never heard of them.

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (2008): Based on the Michael Chabon novel of the same name, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh explores the complexities looming in the mind of just-out-of-college Art Bechstein. In order to make the novel more cinematic, writer/director Rawson Marshall Thurber merged best friend Cleveland Arning with the novel’s homosexual love interest Arthur Lecomte. Cleveland’s girlfriend Jane was given a much larger role in the adaptation, turning what was in the novel a periphery character into a central one.

The choice to “simplify” Art’s experience by creating a love triangle rather than letting the characters live in this complex experience where not everyone knows everyone else would be enough to turn a Chabon purists away. But the pure fact that there is a commercial version of this coming-of-age novel gives those same Chabon purists hope.

Wonder Boys (2000): Another movie based on a Michael Chabon novel, The Wonder Boys was a box office flop. So much so, that after the initial February release director Curtis Hanson and producer Scott Rudin lobbied to have the movie re-released in November 2000. The ad campaign was redesigned to emphasize the ensemble feel of the film — a sharp contrast to the original poster, which featured a sole headshot of Michael Douglas accompanied with the tagline “Undependable. Unpredictable. Unforgettable.”

While the poster and trailer were arguably more accurate the second time around — capturing the essence of this potential one-book wonder author as he navigates relationships with his colleagues, lovers, and students — the re-release was also a financial disappointment. This adaptation, however, left all the major players in tact, trusting its audience to find the beauty in complexities.