tamayuki Let Us Eat Cake

Tama: "I think the cakes are cool now Mommy. They are pretty cute. I'm not sure what kind of frosting we can use."

Mommy: "That's okay, we can figure that out later. I still need to wait and see if I can tolerate the sugar first."

Tama: "You can have the first piece Mommy and I can have the second."

Mommy: "We better hurry and eat both cakes before Yuriko finds out." 😁

~~~~~

Two and a half years in and I'm still trying to find out what foods I can eat. This is the first time in more than two years that I've eaten granulated sugar. Baking without leavening is still an adventure. These are the first 'shaped cakes' I've had in 3+ years. They need a lot of work. 😂 I slightly altered a rice flour "steamed buns" recipe and they are pretty dense. I think more egg whites, less flour, a different flour mix, and baking them would be a big improvement. I'd be delighted to end up with a muffin texture eventually, but both Tama and I are super excited that this worked in some silicone cupcake/doughnut molds I bought. This was the easiest 'baked' goods I could think of that only had the sugar as the unknown factor. I'm so hoping that my body will tolerate the sugar, not because i'll be eating it all the time but because it may be the last thing I still need before making sugar cookies and gingerbread with Tama will be something I can do again. The last two Christmases have been heartbreaking because his biggest wish was for us to make Christmas cookies together. We also accidentally found out that there is a brand of cheddar I can have as well as unsalted butter. I still can't eat a lot of dairy, but I can have some. The butter/fats issue was another massive stumbling block with relearning how to bake within my food tolerances.

Mostly Tama was super excited to have any form of real cake in the house that I could have and wanted to make sure we got some pictures. Even if it turns out that the sugar is a no-go, at least the rest of the recipe will still be usable with a sugar replacement. We are also still here, even though life has gotten really slow. I'm just trying to do the best I can everyday even when it seems my short-term memory is out to sabotage me. As always I'm still finding things that make me happy, even if I have to work it around Tama wanting to snuggle. 😆

~SK

...I thought you'd gotten a cake miniature there, but its a real DD sized cake!!
The whole kitchen setup is seriously impressive too.

LOL! Yeah the cakes look fake because they were so darn dense and almost rubbery, but tasted like cake! The original recipe had 100g. rice flour to 50g. sugar... I'm so glad I cut the sugar in half. Even at that it was way more sweet than I'm used to. If I had kept the original amount it would have been inedible. I think steaming them cooked it too fast (compared to baking) so the whipped egg whites didn't have a chance for the air bubbles to expand/rise, but even so I still don't think of it as a failure. I can cut out the sugar and reduce the flour to have a batter that will work for steamed "meat buns" (even though we would use meat replacements) if I steam them in silicone muffin cups. As far as the food testing for the sugar goes I have not gotten violently sick, so that's some positive news. I still have to test it for about a week to know if it's safe, but I'm sure Tama will have plenty of ideas on what we can try. 😁 It certainly feels weird testing sugar because I will mostly be using it in small amounts to add to the liquid stevia that I use. The only two things I know of that really need actual sugar is fruit pie filling (like cherry pie) and certainly frosting. Without powdered sugar frosting is impossible with my food restrictions. Even before my wacko food restrictions I rarely ate cookies when it wasn't Christmas, but just feeling like I can do 'normal' baking again has been a massive motivation for me to regain the baking aspect of my life. Another slightly weird reason is that baking takes less energy than cooking which often for me takes a lot more physical effort. Energy issues are still a problem even though I've learned how to deal with it the best I can.

The other thing I have been working on sorting out recently is pasta. By accident I found a roti recipe (Indian flat bread) that works excellently with my 1:1 rice & garbanzo flour mix and tastes like real (wheat) flour tortillas. The dough is cooked and really fun to play with and reminds me a lot of playdough. 😆 The dough however does not work for pasta. It just completely falls apart in water when I attempted to boil it. "Water pasta" works for wheat flour but it is almost a guessing game trying to sort out how non-gluten flour combos work in the same situations. So I played with a 1:2 rice & garbanzo flour mix and made an egg pasta dough and so far it seems to work great (because of the egg.) For my birthday last year I got a book called "Pasta, Pretty Please" written by a lady who is over in Seattle. She uses all wheat doughs but uses real foods to color the pasta in a literal rainbow of colors. She uses the water pasta recipes for some of the colors so I'm thinking I'll need to dehydrate the foods to make them into a powder before I can have them work in the gluten free dough. Plus it might work for natural food dye in things like frosting.

I'm just so excited to have a working dough so I can have pasta again even if I can't get all the colors sorted out. It's not really a big deal about making it by hand because I've done that when I could still eat wheat. Short-term it means that there is some food I can make at my own pace without having the physical drain of standing and cooking, but makes it a lot faster for Raven to be able to cook where we don't have to have lentil soup all the time. Longer term I'm starting to look forward to a 'fancy' meal of lasagna for our 20th anniversary at the end of July. For so long it has seemed like an 'impossible' meal. Some other benefits of figuring out pasta is it's looking like we can have gyoza again too. That's another food that is relatively easy for me to do in bulk when I'm feeling energetic and we can freeze ahead for the times when I simply can't do anything.

I know that all this food talk is probably boring you to tears but it is about one of the most exciting things in my life right now. Plus Tama has totally been my cheering squad with trying to sort out how to have normal (enough) food within my restrictions. He gets so excited about every little possibility we discover and often his exuberance is infectious. He was so ecstatic this morning when I found the simple cake recipe that his excitement was most of the reason why I got up and tested it. He is still pestering me to make him some MDD sized blue star pasta for the 'miso soup' bowl he got recently (it was a tiny cup that came with a small bottle of sake that Raven bought) and it's perfect size for Tama. Even when the water pasta dough failed, we still made it into crackers. We kinda ate them all before getting pictures. 😁 Tama and Dolly's favorite ones were the dinosaurs. And I'm still fascinated with making real DD sized foods. Strangely enough it often works well for me because to a point, smaller things take less energy to make but also I can have desserts/'junk food' and not be left with something like a whole cake that only I could eat because I can't use Raven's sugar replacements. There was two other cake shapes in the silicone pan I have but they were eaten pretty quickly. 😆 Even just once I want to see if I can make Tama sized gyoza but I'm still trying to figure out how to do it where they aren't burnt or overcooked somehow. Or make him a bowl of cold cereal that would be similar to the colored pasta/crackers but with white bean flour instead of garbanzo flour. I cooked some white beans a while back and dehydrated them intending to use the four for savory sauces. A few days ago I stared munching on some of the dehydrated beans and was surprised how much it tasted like wheat cereals, like a really mild Cheerios like flavor. (White beans are used in shiro anko so making the bean into a sweet cereal is not as freakishly weird as it sounds. LOL!) I do get frustrated at times at how much work 'convenience foods' actually take and it's hard not getting jealous that practically everyone else can just buy them from a store super easily, but I am very happy that I'm getting the most difficult/impossible foods figured out so I don't feel like I can never have the comfort foods I grew up with again. There are some of those but if it gets me too down I can just drink some of the kosher blackberry wine I discovered recently that I can have. 😍 (First alcohol in about 3+ years. Good thing I'm not a big drinker. 😅)

~SK

Woops! As for Tama's kitchen, I really need to find a more convenient place to set it up. I haven't worked on it because it is in an inconvenient place. I'm still struggling to decide what to do about the wallpaper instead of those darn white walls. With the 11cm rooms I can easily just print out wallpaper, but the paper seams would be way too obvious on the MDD scale. I think I may just have to design his wallpaper and have it made into wrapping paper on Spoonflower. Plus I'd like a space that wasn't so cramped.

~SK

1 hour ago, Sister Kyoya said:

Woops! As for Tama's kitchen, I really need to find a more convenient place to set it up. I haven't worked on it because it is in an inconvenient place. I'm still struggling to decide what to do about the wallpaper instead of those darn white walls. With the 11cm rooms I can easily just print out wallpaper, but the paper seams would be way too obvious on the MDD scale. I think I may just have to design his wallpaper and have it made into wrapping paper on Spoonflower. Plus I'd like a space that wasn't so cramped.

~SK

I bet you could find some transfer paper that would be in scale! My mom used to use it all the time for doll house walls when I was a kid.

TAMA WE HAVE MISSED YOU

On 5/21/2019 at 6:37 PM, Moonsour said:

I bet you could find some transfer paper that would be in scale! My mom used to use it all the time for doll house walls when I was a kid.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by transfer paper. All I can think of is tracing paper that's thin and translucent but surely doesn't have patterns on it. 🤔

 

Poofie: We are trying to be more social but it is really a struggle because my concentration is not what it used to be. It's also frustrating that most of what I can do photo wise is to just take pics wherever I'm at, which is normally in bed. 🙄 I'm still trying to get back to doing DD and 11cm stuff but I'm just not there yet. It's all too confusing because of the sheer amount of choices that need to be made for a single project. Tama has been getting rather vocal recently and makes sure he's sitting with me no matter what I'm doing. Other than food, he has been giving me lots of suggestions of what to build in Minecraft. He's certainly not a gamer so his advice is often not helpful, like why is it they have sheep, donkeys, and turtles but no elephants. 😅 It's been fun playing on a server for the first time but the chat box is certainly difficult and severely points out to me how dyslexic I am. Being a public space I finally have a reason to do fancy buildings and really think about what architecture I really like and just silly twists I like to add to things (like a villager's sign on another villager's lawn calling him a dunder-headed ninnypoppins just because it sounds funny.) 🤣 It's good that I'm able to do some level of creative pursuits at the moment, but I just don't think anyone would be interested in seeing bad phone pics of Tama sitting in front of my monitor trying to show off me trying to learn how to build in Minecraft. 😆 I'm still trying to think through the forum blog posts/DD family story that I still want to do, but again writing is something I'm not really able to piece things together to write coherently. So for now I've just got these little snapshots with Tama. Our family is all still here and the new additions of Dirk (Saber) and Luka are settling in and I have another one on preorder (the Neir boy.) DD are still filling our lives even if I have to work a lot harder to sort out what part of the hobby I can still do now that I've mostly adapted to my physical restrictions. I hate how I feel like I have to apologize for not being able to do hobby stuff like I used to. All I know is I'm trying my best. I've certainly missed you guys.

~SK

22 minutes ago, Sister Kyoya said:

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by transfer paper. All I can think of is tracing paper that's thin and translucent but surely doesn't have patterns on it. 🤔

 

I think I may not be remembering what it's actually called correctly. ^^ But I found what I'm talking about on the Walmart website by searching for "stick on drawer liner".

https://www.walmart.com/c/kp/adhesive-shelf-liners

 

Edit: :facepalm: My mom used to call it contact paper. Because the brand name is Con-Tact! TIL!

Edited May 24, 2019 by Moonsour