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Something might be wrong in the baking world today. Bakery shelves are stacked high with the trendiest dessert, filled or flavored or “kissed” with the latest popular ingredient, and hidden under a crazy design. These are delicious and fun to look at, but somewhere along the line, we have to ask ourselves, “Where is the cake?”

Look friends, birthdays happen and nothing hits the spot like a good old-fashioned sugar-eggs-flour-butter birthday cake. Every decent baker should have a good cake recipe as his or her trump card. If someone tells you they don’t agree, they’ve never had a from scratch birthday cake, and since you are reading this, it is now your responsibility to make them the birthday cake of all birthday cakes—Yellow Cake.

Yellow cake is a cake Ron Swanson from Parks & Recreation would appreciate. It’s no nonsense, has a couple ingredients, and tastes like cake. Let’s remember that on a birthday, it should be ok to indulge. This cake requires a couple more eggs and some more butter than most which gives it a rich taste while keeping the texture airy and moist. Paired with a simple fudgy frosting, which can be whipped together in a food processor, yellow cake is a marriage of kid birthday party nostalgia and adult sophistication. Adding touches like neon dinosaur shaped nonpareils (a friend of mine picked these up for me at Home Goods) or an assortment of colorful jimmies makes the decoration even more fun.

In my experience, if you show up to a birthday with a messy, handmade cake, you’ll be forgiven of faults and suddenly attract many more friends.

Raspberry Lemonade Marshmallows by Culinary Cory

The competition is heating up! The East Coast brought their A game in this past week’s around of #MarshMadness. Scope out this week’s participants below.

Small Kitchen College: Honeyed Grapefruit Marshmallows

Cinnamon Spice & Everything Nice: Banana Split Marshmallows

Culinary Cory: Raspberry Lemonade Marshmallows With Coconut

The Queen’s Notebook: Mango Banana & Purple Yam Bunny Marshmallows

And if you tuned in to Cleaning Plates this week, they hosted a special guest podcast with Marshmallow Madness’ editor, Margaret McGuire. Give it a listen. They chat about marshmallows, cooking, books, and more in the short and sweet episode.

Caroline over on Serious Eats has the full recap. Remember to keep up with the campaign via #MarshMadness on Twitter.

We love it when people enjoy our books, but when people take our content and use it to inspire their own creativity… well, that's even cooler. 

Sam Cushion has not only created a fansite for Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, he is also working on composing a soundtrack to the book! Cushion says he has always loved music and literature, but only recently did he start to put his two passions together. He has created music for other books, most notably the Hunger Games trilogy, and hopes to complete an entire album of music inspired by Miss Peregrine.

He has four songs recorded already, and my personal favorite is Flashlight Fish. You can listen to everything he's created so far over on his Bandcamp page.

Don’t forget to check out his fansite at PeculiarChildren.net.

Here at Quirk, we absolutely love Justin Lutsky and his Epic Image Entertainment crew. He’s responsible for a number of our book trailers, including Night of the Living Trekkies, The Meowmorphosis, Bedbugs, and Taft 2012. Two weeks ago, Justin finally released his multiple award winning short film to the Internets, The Action Hero’s Guide to Saving Lives.

And you need to watch it.

The film stars Patrick Warburton (you might recognize his face from Rules of Engagement, and his voice from Family Guy), is a little over 17 minutes long, and is perfect to watch during your lunch break. Enjoy!

The Action Hero’s Guide to Saving Lives
www.actionherosguide.com

Even though she's busy taking over the Internet with #MarshMadness, Shauna Sever isn't going to stop there. She's hitting New York this week, visiting Posman Books at Chelsea Market.

At Posman Books at Chelsea Market, Shauna will be signing books for an hour and handing out samples in the cozy bookshop. Chelsea Market is the food mecca for a lot of New Yorkers, so we're psyched to see Shauna in such an awesome place. For more information on the signing, visit Chelsea Market's official website.

Marshmallow Madness Signing @ Posman Books
March 7th, 6:30pm – 7:30pm

Chelsea Market
75 Ninth Ave.
New York NY 10011
www.chelseamarket.com

Lucky Charms Marshmallows by Barbara Bakes

The (marsh) madness continues! Last week we saw some incredible recipes, whipped up by Barbara Bakes, Foodie Bride, and Baked Bree. Here on Quirkbooks.com, we joined in the fun by posting some recipe cards on our Facebook page, which you can grab here. Caroline over at Serious Eats has the full recap, and here are the links to the recipes below.

Barbara Bakes: Lucky Charms Marshmallows

Foodie Bride: Baileys Marshmallows

Baked Bree: Chai Latte Marshmallows

And bonus, check out Eat The Love’s custom made carrot cake marshmallows. Wow!

Keep an eye out for the next contenders! And make sure you’re following the bracket on Twitter via #MarshMadness.