Clara has been busy in the kitchen. Funny the things she can create – yes, after 10 p.m. Two nights ago it was three brains – most delicious. This has got to be my favorite school project of all time. I didn’t even get psychology at Vero Beach High School (though I do remember philosophy, and humanities, my favorite classes). Biology is as close as I got, and all I remember is textbook, textbook and more textbook.
Clara, however, gets to create a model of the brain. Out of rice krispie treats. Of course, the rice krispie twist was her idea – the assignment was just to create a model, and other students chose clay, or created mobiles – one, she reported, used cauliflower, which also has a creepy kind of resemblance to an actual brain, but isn’t nearly as tasty as rice krispie treats.
Clara’s brains had to be in triplicate in order to have space to label all the parts properly. I haven’t heard the term amygdala probably since college biology – if I even heard it then – but in the past week I’ve heard it twice, once in the kitchen and once in a roaming conversation about how we try to overcome our brains’ primal fear/fight-or-flight mechanism through careful training and plenty of psychotherapy. I love having a child in high school, it makes me want to devour her textbook and learn all the things I missed or have forgotten when I was her age. They all seem so much more relevant now.
Clara’s brains turned out beautifully. Multi-colored affairs, the rice krispies, carefully molded into brain-like shapes, were smeared with colored frosting to differentiate frontal lobe from cerebellum from hippocampus and more than a dozen other parts. She stuck toothpicks with little paper flags attached into the brains to label each one. Clever girl.
She thinks her teacher approved, once she saw that the labels also revealed brain function – and once she tasted the parietal lobe.
In other, not so successful kitchen projects this week, Clara made a gorgeous looking chocolate lavender cake. I have been wanting to make this cake for a year, and finally got the recipe to try it (thanks Judy). I think it was a favorite at a potluck, but it’s been so long the concept became more significant that the actual cake. Chocolate! Lavender! Two of my favorite things! But guess what? Not so great.
I think we must have overdone the lavender. We used a half cup of lavender syrup (sugar, water and lavender) to soak each of two layers of the cake – maybe if we’d half the amount it would have worked. As it turned out, the cake tasted like my grandmother’s bathroom, with the lavender soap permeating not just my nose, in a good way, but my mouth, in a not-so-good way. I really wanted to like this cake. It was just too much.
Because it looked awesome, with a dark chocolate frosting and a sweet little purple design on top, we let it sit on the stove for three days before I finally relented and tossed it out. Cooking is all about experimenting – so it’s no great loss, just a lesson. Lavender, unless very lightly applied, is best left in toiletries and growing up alongside the steps that lead to my front door.
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