The power of young people is shown to the world as the 30 year reign of dictator Hosni Mubarak comes to an end. The 21st century January 25th protests were a more peaceful echo of the Black Saturday of the 20th century.

President Obama just spoke of how the youth of Egypt has actively pursued a government that represented”[their] hopes, not [their] fears.” It is very inspiring to see that if we choose to, young people can change the world. It is perhaps the greatest trick the cynics ever pulled, to tell young Americans that the system is broken and populated by criminals and opportunists and that there is nothing to be done about it. Egyptians have proved that is not so, under circumstances much worse than here.

It reminds me of the words of John Green from his book “Looking for Alaska”:

When adults say, “Teenagers think they are invincible” with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don’t know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.

Congratulations, Egypt, on your new beginning.

via.

happy shamrock day to one and all.

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NAHS [where I work] was announced as a winner thrice-over in the Twenty-Fifth Annual Educational Advertising Awards of 2010, sponsored by the Higher Education Marketing Report [yay for me]. NAHS, an award-winner for the past two years [also my doing], won a Gold, Silver and Merit award for advertisements [my design], admissions posters [ditto], and our weekly email blast [yep, that too], respectively.

The Educational Advertising Awards is the largest educational advertising awards competition in the country and recognizes excellence in educational marketing and advertising. This year, over two thousand entries were received from more than one-thousand colleges, universities and secondary schools from all fifty states and several foreign countries. Only 218 schools received Gold awards.

For more about the HEMR, visit their official site here.

(try saying that five times fast.) dark chocolate cake mix, made with coke as a substitute for water, and cherry buttercream icing. cola made the cupcakes very light and fluffy, though the icing was a bit too sweet for my liking (flavored with marachino cherry juice).

white cake cupcakes with strawberry cream cheese icing, inspired by the fabulous dessert menu at toscana 52. a very refreshing and light summer cupcake, that went really well with pinnacle ridge’s chambourcin rose.

this monstrosity was created for ryan, a seven year old with a six flags fixation. the cake itself is chocolate, covered with homemade marshmellow fondant and vanilla buttercream icing (also from scratch). (shout-out to the incredibly helpful website of Peggy Weaver, baker extraordinaire, whose fondant recipe I swiped.)

after baking this, my appreciation for the ace of cakes crew increased exponentially. it is a hard thing to build up layers of cake, even harder to drape fondant without assistance, and the sheer amount of powdered sugar consumed in the making of this cake was obscene. (and yet, it wasn’t overly sweet. how the hell did that happen? not complaining, just… weird.)

i am gearing up for another cake at the end of august, but as this was my first try in ever a) making and using fondant, and b) “constructing” a non-traditional cake, i’m actually absurdly confident that the next attempt will be even better.

(oh, and it was yummy, too.)