Stupid cakes

I just finished being frustrated with cake--I'm in a vegetarian dinner group (!) and it's my turn to cook tomorrow. One of the guys has a birthday tomorrow, and he is from Texas. I have a Texas shaped cake pan! So I baked a cake to eat after dinner tomorrow. However, I took the Texas cake out of the pan backwards and then couldn't flip it because it kept threatening to break beyond recognition. So now it's backwards Texas. Also my roommates and I were going to frost it to look like the Texas flag, but we had no red food coloring. Thinking quickly, we dyed some of the frosting red with grenadine. Listen, never mix cream cheese frosting with grenadine. It tastes like citric acid and awful cherries.

Scrapping the red idea, we decided to frost the cake blue with a white star in the middle. Guess what, making stars out of frosting is really hard. So right now what this guy has to look forward to is a backwards sky-blue slightly bulgy Texas cake with an uneven white diamond in the center. Also my roommate added two packets of pudding mix and an assortment of dark chocolate chips to the cake batter. I hope he likes pudding and dark chocolate chips. Aaaaand I hope he's getting another form of birthday cake tomorrow.

To all my British fans

Just kidding.
But really, according to the blogger view tracker, I've had more views from the UK than any other country. This makes no sense.

Hey, I went to Chile this summer! It was great. I'll probably post Chilean flashbacks every once in a while, but right now, I want to write about my inane college day to day life.

Today, the place where I work was sponsoring Choose to Give, which asks students to donate money. The money goes toward other student scholarships, so it's like a beautiful educational circle of life. They do this by luring students in with free ice cream.

I was working the ice cream tent, and I actually ended up flinging my first scoop of ice cream backwards onto my shirt instead of into the waiting student's cup. Probably because I was so excited about giving. If I recall correctly it was in front of a group of nice looking guys from my ward, actually, but my memory is hazy.

It was a fun event, despite how cold and sticky my shirt was, but we ran out of ice cream pretty fast. After than it was a lot harder to lure students in. We had free pens (and pins!) but those things really don't move in the student population like ice cream. But I had to stay out there, and so I just ended up yelling some dumb things, trying to get people to donate and take the pens.

Here are some keys to my success: Yelling "free STUFF!" works better than "PENS!! They are YELLOW!!"
"WRITING UTENSILS!" attracts more attention than "PENS!" but I think because nobody actually says WRITING UTENSILS.
"THIS LAST PEN IS FOR YOU!" is too personal. 
"PENS AND PINS!" will make people think you are saying 'pens' twice, once in a Texan accent.
Mumbling "Pens?" as someone walks by is more creepy than effective.
If you aren't good at body language, don't use it to attract customers. I feel like I did a lot of weird open-mouthed smiles, gesturing octopus arms, and awkward dance moves that probably scared people off. I smiled at a guy and shook my fistfuls of pens like maracas and he looked sort of horrified. I felt like I should apologize.

Anyway, choose to giiiiive! Yeah! You can donate online!