Baking cake and Apex Legends
Apologies, but I go gamer mode in this one.
Welcome to the Double Feature! Each week I write one thing about entertainment and one thing about food. They’re not related, unless for some reason you think they are, in which case it was definitely on purpose.
I made: Carrot Cake
Growing up, whenever someone in our family’s birthday would approach, my mom would ask them what kind of cake they wanted, then she’d bake it for them. I usually chose chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, my brother did the same. My sister, never one to shy away from decadence or making someone do too much with egg whites, asked for angel food cake.
In one of the most transparent and also extremely small scale examples of children following in their parents’ footsteps, a few years ago I took this up as a personal mission of mine. If it’s someone I love’s birthday, I bake them a cake. The only problem is, I didn’t used to be that good at baking. So for the almost four years that I lived in a house with four of my best friends, I forced them to let me bake them mediocre birthday cakes, when I could’ve gotten them an actually good one from Porto’s for like $20.
Yesterday was my girlfriend Beth’s birthday (everyone say “happy birthday, Beth!”), so naturally I baked her a carrot cake. Luckily for her, I’ve gotten better at cakes over time, or at least more willing to learn the technique that actually goes into making them rather than just blindly following some poorly written recipe that just happens to have good SEO.
This year for Beth’s birthday, I made relatable internet baking queen Claire Saffitz’s Carrot and Pecan Cake from her book Dessert Person. It’s extremely good. The recipe calls for a browned butter cream cheese frosting that I would do crimes for. I frosted the cake the night before serving it, then ate the leftover frosting for dinner that night.
The recipe is straightforward, but it’s also a fair amount of work. Last year I did it all in one day and while I ended the day with a beautiful cake, I was also exhausted and covered in all sorts of cake detritus. This year I made the smart decision to bake the cake on one day, then do the frosting the next day. It was much more manageable. It felt like a real #growth moment.
Make someone a cake! It’s fun and if nothing else they’ll probably share it with you out of a sense of obligation, because after all, you made them a goddamn cake.
I played: Apex Legends
Unlike movies, TV and music, video games are immersive, and live or die by the way it feels to play them. Games vary wildly — my favorite ones from the past couple years have been a hack and slash rogue-lite about escaping hell, a platformer about climbing a mountain and dealing with anxiety, and a life-sim where you play as a little cutie version of yourself who moves to a little cutie island to live among little cutie animals. But in all of them, the feel is the most important thing. All of the edges need to be sanded down perfectly, so that the world you interact with comes across exactly as the game’s designers intended it to. If a player bumps against anything, it takes them out of the game. That immersion is broken and it’s no longer fun to play.
Apex Legends is the best feeling video game I’ve played in a long time. Developer Respawn Entertainment took the best elements from hero shooters (such as Overwatch, players choose from a set roster of characters, each with distinct abilities) and battle royale games (such as Fortnite, players compete in teams of 2 or 3 to be the last group standing in a field of 60 players) and made a game that goes down incredibly smooth.
Each aspect of the game feels like it’s been honed to a razor’s edge. Moving around feels great. Shooting feels great. The game launched with an innovative ping system that lets you communicate with your teammates without needing to actually talk to them. And it feels? Say it with me: great. (The ping thing might sound small, but strangers (read: mean teens) yelling at me about being bad at video games has scared me off of online gaming for years, so this is huge.)
The only thing that doesn’t feel great about the game are the micro-transactions. Apex Legends is free to play, but most of the characters are locked when you start playing—unless of course you want to pay for them. Or if you want your favorite character to look spooky for Halloween, or festive for Christmas, or pirate-y for whatever in-game pirate event, etc. The characters can all be unlocked through just playing the game, but it’s a decent grind to do so. When I first got hooked on the game, I bit the bullet and paid $40 to unlock most of the characters. I’d say it’s been worth it for the amount of time I’ve spent in the game. (Do NOT ask me how much time I’ve spent in the game!)
The new season of Apex Legends starts tomorrow. They’re releasing a new character and a new limited-time game mode to mark the occasion. Here’s hoping they feel as good as the rest of the game!
Thanks for reading! And for letting me go full gamer mode. If you’d like my ramblings about food and media delivered straight to your inbox, please subscribe!