I'll have what the poodles are smoking

Old Gold cigarette ads regularly puzzle me. They resort to some of the most surreal associative images of all the 50s ads (LOOK! WE'RE NOT TALKING ABOUT NOT CANCER!). This has to be the strangest so far though:
The attempted sleight of hand is just so bad. The cigarettes come in two sizes; fine--put some cute dogs in there to illustrate the sizes!

And show the dogs smoking, because everyone loves dogs and they wouldn't do anything bad!

And make them French poodles because . . . well, because we know they come in different sizes!

And juxtapose the terms "treat" and "treatment" to make people mad at those other cigarettes that remind you smoking is bad for you!

And tell people they can "take comfort" in the fact that Old Gold has been selling tobacco for a long time. Clearly, since no one has ever died of cancer, this proves the product is safe.

Whatever the creators of this ad were smoking at the development meeting, it wasn't tobacco.

DIY

Apologies for the hiatus--if you could see my sunburn you would understand.

My daughter and I made this Checkerboard Cake from the Betty Crocker Cake & Frosting Mix Cook [sic] Book a couple of weeks ago:

My suggestions:
1) Use 8-inch round pans. We used 9" rounds as recommended, and the sections didn't come out square, but rectangular. You'd have to do three rings of batter to get squares, I think. I'm not sure why this is. Do cake mixes rise less today than they did in the 60s?

2) When you put the batter into the inner ring, hold the ring in place with one hand (or one of your helper's hands). Otherwise it will slide around in the pan and your circle will be off-center. I filled the inside circles first, as the recipe directs.

3) Hold back a little white batter in case you can't get the batter levels to match inside and outside of the circles. You can add a little more food coloring to your reserve batter if you need to, and even things out.

4) We used pink gel food coloring because I had some (who doesn't? Don't you?). But other colors would look just as cool (or strange, take your pick). I didn't use almond extract because I forgot it, and I'm not sure a two-flavored cake would really be the kind of surprise my family would appreciate. Checkerboard colors, OK. Almond flavoring, I might be trying to kill them.

5) I used butter frosting because I always do, because it was good enough for my mother and who really likes that marshmallowy stuff anyway?

Frosting Nog!

I don't suppose there's anything wrong with making milkshakes out of frosting mix, really . . . it's mostly packaged sugar, after all. Still, there something not quite right about frosting mix plus corn syrup plus butter plus milk plus a raw egg.

Don't you think so?








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Products and flavors no longer available from Betty Crocker

As found in the 1966 Cake and Frosting Mix Cookbook.

Cake mixes:
Tropical Mist
Honey Spice (you can still get plain Spice)
Butter Brickle (now Butter Pecan)
Lemon Velvet (now just Lemon)
Lemon Chiffon (I think Chiffon cake went out with Nixon)
Cherry Fudge
Chocolate Malt

Frosting mixes:
Golden Caramel
Coconut Pecan
Chocolate Fudge
Butter Brickle
Lemon Velvet
Cherry Fudge
Chocolate Malt

In fact, the only frosting mix you can still buy is Fluffy White. There are 21 flavors of canned frosting to choose from though.

Cakefight!

Can you even imagine, in this day and age, having an election returns party with both Democrats and Republicans attending? This is what Karl Rove and his ilk have done to our country--we can't even eat cake together anymore. Which I guess is a minor point compared to our lost moral standing, economic implosion, and decaying infrastructure and health. But it's still sad. If cake can't bring us together, we're screwed.

I didn't realize until I posted this that I cropped off the title; it's for an "Election Returns Party Cake." There are lots of recipes like this in the cake mix cookbook; you make a shaped cake by baking a square or round cake and then carving it elaborately into the shape you want. Simpler times.

What I like best about the instructions for this recipe is that they stipulate you should construct the marshmallow-and-gumdrop eyes so that the elephant and donkey are looking at each other.

If you want to try this on your own, you can click on the image for the larger version.









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