But the sugarcane was plentiful and tea grows on every tree

Yesterday I made a hazelnut cake with pears and two kinds of cherries. Being the kind of recipe that involves a race between the folding speed of egg white and the laws of gravity, it left me with a number of egg yolks. Somehow this translated into the belief that a good solution to the surplus problem was a king cake. I had never made or even eaten one before; I got the recipe out of Gourmet. Apparently the result is a brioche bigger than my head. Hello, breakfast for the next ten days.

(And then I iced it with the prescribed combination of confectioner's sugar and condensed milk. In retrospect, that may have been a tactical error, and not only because the icing behaved like something out of a '50's B-movie and attempted to engulf the cooling rack. I may end up scraping most of it off, or at least replacing it with jam. I don't actually eat a lot of very sweet things. I realize that doesn't explain why I turned the last of the egg yolks into lemon curd, except that I wanted something to put on the king cake . . .)

Otherwise I spent the afternoon at the MFA with rushthatspeaks, who then introduced me to the really awesome pork bao sold by a bakery in Chinatown whose name I cannot remember, although I could find them by walking from Downtown Crossing. My brother and I watched Ghost Town (2008), a small delightful movie that reminded me strongly of the classic screwball comedies without being any kind of pastiche or homage; having mostly avoided The Office, I may have to watch its British original just for another angle on Ricky Gervais. And it is my mother's birthday tomorrow. (By now, today.) Fortunately, I have discovered a mystery series she hasn't already read.