Weeping Angels are Scary...

I'm sure you're well aware that I'm kind of a nerd.  If not, I suggest that you take a peek at the title of this blog.  It's easy to read since I still haven't gotten around to 'Shopping a nifty header for it, so the name looks all boring.

Anyway, I'm pretty obsessed with Doctor Who, so I decided that I wanted to make a Who-themed pumpkin for Halloween.  But what to make?  I saw some TARDIS templates online, but I like making faces on pumpkins.  That's when I realized that there's nothing scarier than a Weeping Angel.  I don't know why, but they creep me out more than any other Who monster.  They're terrifying.  I found a couple of templates, but I didn't think I had quite enough pumpkin carving talent to pull them off.  Plus, my printer was out of ink.  I decided to free-hand a template of my own.  This was a major accomplishment for someone like me who never quite progressed beyond the ability to draw stick figures.  This is what it looked like:

Then I taped it to my hollowed out pumpkin and traced it with a poking stick (I'm assuming this has a technical name, but I have no idea what it is.) so that I could carve along the dotted lines.

This was the final result.  It's pretty scary if I do say so myself.  DON'T BLINK!

Oh, and since I'm such a huge nerd, I decided that it would be fun to dress up as the Tenth Doctor.  A perfectly timed gust of wind helped my hair live up to Ten's awesomeness in this picture.

Don't even blink.  No seriously, don't do it.

The Angels Take the Ponds...

It takes a lot to get me to cry for a tv show or a movie, but Doctor Who managed to do just that last night.  And I never even loved Amy all that much.  I didn't dislike her, but I just never really connected with her terribly closely.  Whatever your feelings for the Ponds, though, I think it'd be hard not to admit that Moffat created the perfect farewell for them.

There were a few things that were a bit predictable in the episode.  I could see some of the plot points coming beforehand, which is fairly unusual for the show, but that didn't make it any less enjoyable.  In fact, I loved pretty much everything about it.  Except River's fedora.  I wasn't a fan of that.  I also did take mild offense when Rory told the Doctor that he's the only person who could be attracted to characters in a book because pretty much all of my major crushes have been on fictional characters.

The set-up as a detective noir story was fantastic.  I'm a sucker for that kind of thing.  I love the dark atmosphere it gave to the story we already knew was going to be heartbreaking.  As if the angels weren't scary enough on their own, it added another level of creepiness.

I loved the fact that the Angels were back to their time zapping hunting ways again.  I somehow find that even more scary than the way that they killed people in the "The Time of the Angels."  There were so many throwbacks to "Blink" (one of my favorite episodes of all time) in the show last night that I was enjoying myself so much that I almost forgot that there was major sadness on the horizon.  Plus, now I get to be terrified of the Statue of Liberty too, so I'm super excited about that.

My only real question with the episode is the part about the TARDIS not being able to go back to 1930s New York.  In series three, the Doctor and Martha visited New York during the Great Depression in "Daleks in Manhattan."  I'm not sure exactly which year that was, but it would've had to be sometime during the '30s.  So now I'm trying to figure out whether the time problem applies only to 1938 and beyond.  If so, why was he able to land the TARDIS perfectly fine in 2012.  Maybe I'm over-thinking it.

At any rate, I thought it was the perfect goodbye to the Ponds in a sad, but sort of happy way.  I'm super excited for the Christmas special and finding out more about Oswin/Clara and how she meets the Doctor.  There are so many great things to come and I can't wait to see how the dynamics change with the Doctor starting a relationship with a new companion.

TARDIS Cake...

...It's more fattening on the inside.

For my recent birthday, I requested that my cake be decorated like a TARDIS.  This was awkward because I then had to explain what a TARDIS is and print a picture of it so my mom knew what it was supposed to look like.  Even more fun ensued on my birthday when I tried to explain it to my dad.  He chooses to not understand such things on principle.

Anyway, after making my TARDIS request, I started thinking about the cake that was to come.  I decided that in order to live up to TARDIS standards, there would have to be a bit more to the cake than just a box mix with some dyed frosting.  It would somehow have to be bigger on the inside.  Since our kitchen is not equipped with any Gallifreyan technology, I would have to come up with a creative way to make this happen.

One of my great dessert obsessions is cookie dough.  I'm assuming that this applies to a lot of people.  Thanks to Pinterest, I came across a recipe for egg-less cookie dough a while back.  This seemed like the perfect opportunity to put it to good use.  My sister and I immediately set out to create the perfect bigger/more fattening on the inside cake.  (Yes, I helped make my own birthday cake.  I really like baking things.  I did at least claim birthday privileges and make her clean everything up.)

Do you have any idea how hard it was to not just eat these straight up?

We made the cookie dough and then rolled it into small balls and put them in the freezer on a cookie sheet for an hour.  Then we made a chocolate cake mix and poured it into the baking pan.  Right before putting it in the oven, we dropped the cookie dough balls on top of the batter.  We had enough cookie dough to almost completely cover the top of the cake.  We baked the cake according to the directions on the box, but had to add a few extra minutes (probably because of the fact that the cookie dough was frozen).  The cookie dough bits sank to the bottom of the pan and remained in their delicious, uncooked glory.  We flipped the cake upside down out of the baking pan, which perfectly positioned the cookie dough at the top right underneath the frosting, thus bringing together my two favorite parts of the cake together in harmony.

The hardest part of the cake process was trying to find food coloring that would dye the cream cheese frosting a proper TARDIS blue.  The regular liquid food coloring just doesn't do the trick.  It never did get quite right, but there's only so much you can do.  Color aside, the cake was delightful.

Look at that delectable layer of cookie dough.  My mouth is watering just thinking about it.

Here's the edible cookie dough recipe:

1 cup butter, softened
3/4 cup sugar
3/4 cup brown sugar
4 tbsp milk
1 tbsp vanilla
2 1/2 cups flour
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 cup mini chocolate chips

1.  Blend the butter and sugars together.  Then add the milk and vanilla.
2.  Mix in the flour and salt until smooth.  Add extra milk if the consistency of the dough is too dry.
3.  Stir in the chocolate chips.
4.  Shape the dough into small balls and place on a wax-lined cookie sheet.
5.  Freeze for at least one hour (or just eat them if you're not planning on using them in a cake).

Series Seven Excitement...

I'll be honest: I'm a late-comer to the Doctor Who universe.  I heard of it for the first time last fall when a friend of mine repeatedly tweeted about how hot some guy named Matt Smith was and I had absolutely no idea who she was talking about.  I'm far from up-to-date on pop culture, so this wasn't at all surprising. She informed me that Smith was a British actor from a tv show I'd also never heard of, and I left it at that.

However, I kept seeing references to this show online and I finally decided that if I was going to be a fully literate nerd, I would have to watch at least a few episodes so I could understand what people were talking about.  I didn't expect to like it (a show about an alien who time travels inside of a phone box?) since outside of my Star Wars obsession, I'd never really been much of a sci-fi fan.  I watched the first episode of the new series this January and plowed through all six series in about six weeks, despite making a major move in the meantime.  I was officially hooked.  I made myself a Who quotes screensaver.  I picked up a brown pin-striped blazer at a thrift store (Tennant is "my Doctor"). I set my text alert to the TARDIS engine noise.

I tried to talk to other people about it, but once I started explaining what it was about, their eyes kind of glazed over and they looked at me like I was crazy.  I have a tendency to inspire that reaction in people anyway, but I suspect that the subject matter played a role too.  Nobody really got it.  And since nobody understood the show, nobody understood the agonizing wait for the new series to premiere.  There's nothing quite like watching a show from start to finish in a matter of weeks and then facing the reality that there is no more to watch.  You've seen everything there is to see.  It's especially bad when that tv show has become an instant obsession.

To say that I was eagerly anticipating the premiere of series seven would be an understatement.  This was my first chance to experience the show in "real time," to wait week by week for a new installment.  In honor of the new episode yesterday, I started reading Doctor Who: Shada by Gareth Roberts and finally got around to Scotch Garding my new white Converse sneakers so that I could wear them in public.  Moffat and crew more than delivered.  The episode was fantastic from start to finish.  I'd even go so far as to say that it was my favorite Matt Smith one.  I'm beyond excited for next week's dinosaurs episode.  I can't wait to see what happens when the Ponds leave.  I finally feel what it's like to be at the mercy of Steven Moffat.  It's great.  And agonizing.  And I just want next Saturday to be here already.