Ah man, the days get away from me... I never like it when I look up and three or four days have passed. We've been in a time loop recently! A very nice one, granted, but with the family still in France (they're coming back tomorrow, all good), and us having to stick fairly close to the house for piggo breakfast and dinner and also because they get lonely, it's been hard to get out of the house and do stuff. We've been night owls, really! Been meaning to update the journal with stuff I've been drawing and also call my mom and all that, but I keep putting it off. Such is life with no schedule and no employment.

Thankfully, still got the better part of a month left on the trip, so nothing feels wasted, we have been very creative, and it's been nice doing more domesticore things with Caby, chores and chatting and going out for ice cream. We fixed the dryer the other day! Their dryer doesn't drain to the outside world like mine at home does, so we were experiencing weird pauses in the drying routine (and they normally air dry their clothes, so she wasn't sure what the issue was). Pulled up an owner's manual, found it was a full water tank, emptied it, and all was well. We're so smart and handy. (Then we burned some burger buns in the convection oven really badly, so. Well.)

We also baked! It's really funny. Caby sent me a compilation of Dylan Hollis historical baking shorts and prefaced it that she didn't expect me to watch the whole thing. I'm pretty sure I've seen more of them than she has now. This guy is great. He's the wittiest fruit in the bag, he makes weird and sometimes delicious-looking cakes and breads from the last century, and he's the only guy I've seen who can do an energetic, zingy personality in his shorts, and then pull off a calmer, more informative, but still highly entertaining personality in his longer videos.

I was looking through his shorts to find one Caby and I might wanna do, and the one for strawberry fluffies always intrigued me. It's an oddly really simple recipe. They're effectively cake cookies. Empty a box of strawberry cake mix and Cool Whip into a bowl, mix, form balls, roll in powdered sugar, bake. Little did I know that cake mix is as rare a beast as an unfinished bottle of rum in Trys' room in the UK, and Cool Whip doesn't exist here. Sainsbury's does sell the Betty Crocker stuff, thankfully, and we were able to thicken up some British cream as a substitute. (As for why I picked this instead of, like, a real cake or loaf, it was easy, and we've very rarely baked before. Start small.)

They were really good though! Like I said, they're effectively cake cookies, so you're getting the fluffiness of a cake from a pan or a loaf in cookie form. The color differences come from us experimenting with the baking time. The 13 minutes from the Dylan Hollis video gets you that ideal pinkness, but Caby thought they were still not done at first, so we did some for a few minutes longer and they got crunchier and slightly caramelized as a result. Still very good though. Highly worth the confusion I gave everyone in the group showing them the unbaked "batter" early on.

Since these went so well, Caby and I have been looking at other recipes we might be able to pull off from his repertoire. The peanut butter bread is apparently really good, and we both like peanut butter. Anything more in bread form is easier for us, since her family doesn't have a full-sized oven, only an air fryer and then a convection oven. (Both of these gave very similar results with the fluffies, so if you're wondering, yes, you can indeed air fry bake things. I'm sure I'm the last person on Earth to know though.) Also, her mom loved the idea of these, because the whole family likes simple and easy, and you get a lot of fluffies out of one box of cake mix. I wouldn't be surprised if there's more batches to be made.

Anywho, I will be posting more art on the journal, I promise. I also have an exciting announcement for a new place to see art from me soon, so stay tuned. Back to cleaning up the house before the folks get home!