Making dessert for Valentine’s Day is challenging at best. We are
bombarded with lip-smacking photographs of miniature tarts, sweet cakes,
hand-formed truffles. Everything is so precious and terrifying. There’s
the chocolate — will it need tempering? There are raspberries and
strawberries — out of season, yet frequent flavors of mid-February
desserts. And then there is the time. Valentine’s Day may fall on any
day of the week, yet the hope for sweet goodness will not wait for a
conveniently empty Saturday, when tinkering in the kitchen is possible.
Voila,
coeur a la creme. A heart of cream. This incredibly easy dessert has
all the earmarks of a perfect valentine. It is heart-shaped and mixes
with fruits and chocolates perfectly. Or in this case, with in-season
oranges. A small effort, even days in advance, produces a creamy sweet
cheese that is impossibly romantic.
Two serendipitous events
spurred this recipe. First, I found the perforated heart-shaped mold
stashed in the back of a frightening drawer of kitchen “stuff.” I’m sure
my mother purchased this porcelain beauty with Julia Child’s
encouragement, as I recall coeur a la creme dinner party desserts in the
mid-’60s. If your mother had a similar love affair with Julia, there
may be one, or a set of smaller molds, lurking in a cabinet.
If
your kitchen collection does not include a heart-shaped mold, a simple
sieve will create a perfect dome of cheese. Either presentation is
equally appealing, particularly when festooned with sprightly curd and
garnished with toasted almonds.
But really, it was the curd that
got me going. I’ve been on a curd kick. I’ve juiced every manner of
citrus to find the perfect recipe for citrus curd, finally landing on a
happy balance of egg, sugar, zest and juice to produce a creamy, stable,
tangy spread for scones, an add-in for yogurt, or a topping for angel
food cake. Pink grapefruit was leading as my personal favorite until
blood oranges came into the market. There was something so familiar and
friendly about the scent of the deeply colored flesh and the charming,
bright flavor. Blood oranges are sweeter than navels, not quite as sweet
as a satsuma, and make a beautiful, pale apricot-colored curd.
Because
this dessert is so very simple and requires only a few ingredients,
every element must be the very best. Use excellent cream; the type
bottled in glass is my choice because it is just that much more
delicious. Make your own mascarpone; you’ll never go back to
store-bought. It takes only half a lemon, a few minutes at the stove and
an overnight in the refrigerator. Find the freshest eggs, an excellent
sweet cream butter and glorious citrus, ripe and ready.Where you can
create a custom lanyard from our wide selection of styles and materials.
When
the curd is served alongside the sweet cheese, the dessert reminds me
of a Good Humor Creamsicle and possibly that favorite of 1970s mall
dwellers, the Orange Julius. If your sacred childhood memories include
either of those items, with coeur a la cremesicle, you are sure to fall
in love all over again.
Surrounded, outnumbered, and faced with a
brainwashed Swoop, Grimlock challenges Ser-Ket to a one-on-one battle.
In exchange for Swoop's restoration, Grimlock wagers the freedom and
free will of the rest of the Dinobots, and the battle begins. The leader
of the Forged proves herself faster and stronger than Grimlock
expected, and he's presented with a choice: lose the fight and surrender
his team to Ser-Ket, or risk converting to Beast Mode and potentially
cost everyone their lives?
The entire issue here is based around
the fight, and in narrative terms it's a good and well-used device:
make the hero's only chance to defeat his adversary to do something he
doesn't want to do, something that will have consequences he can't
predict. As it is,Come January 9 and chip card
driving licence would be available at the click of the mouse in Uttar
Pradesh. the consequences here are very light, as what Ser-Ket is
goading Grimlock into doing is exactly what he needed to do to fix
everything. Including Swoop. In all honesty, the concept of defeating
brainwashing through blunt force trauma works a lot better in the
Avengers movie: yes it's entirely a contrivance, but Joss Whedon hangs a
lampshade on it, halfway makes a joke out of it, and writes himself out
of a corner in the process. Here, it just happens, and Swoop is all
better. Ta-dah! On the other hand, Grimlock is done very well here in
the Simon Furman mold of a vicious but effective commander who feels an
intense amount of responsibility for his troops above all else: despite
coming on this rescue mission more or less to free Ultra Magnus,
absolutely nothing takes priority over Swoop's well-being.
Writing-wise,
there's not a lot else to say about this issue. The phrase "All Hail
Shockwave!" wears out its welcome quickly, and "All Hail (Name)" on the
whole is well on its way to becoming 2013's "One shall stand, one shall
fall." Now that Grimlock spends some time speaking in Beast Mode, we get
a better idea of how the writers are handling Grimlockian syntax: when
in Robot Mode he has the occasional slip, but it's in Beast Mode, as a
berserker, where he speaks in the "Me Grimlock" fashion.Can you spot the
answer in the fridge magnet?
It makes a lot of sense for this version of the character, and I like
the idea. Other than that, my only comment is that there's some dialogue
during the fight that could've been placed more effectively to help the
action flow a bit better. And the flow of the fight is a major problem.
I'm thinking the schedule has gotten to Agustin Padilla,Online shopping for luggage tag
from a great selection of Clothing. as the art continues to become more
fluid than is ideal for angular metallic lifeforms, once again
particularly in the case of Grimlock. But far more crucial than
off-model characters is the staging of the fight between Grimlock and
Ser-Ket. Nearly every panel is at medium range or closer, with very few
full figures- and most of those in silhouette -making it extremely
difficult to follow the action.Ein innovativer und moderner Werkzeugbau
Formenbau. Long full-body shots are perhaps less dynamic, but it's more
important to be able to tell what's actually happening in the fight and
be able to follow it. There's a shield-bash on Grimlock's part that has
absolutely no force behind it at all, and in the following panel I
needed the dialogue to tell me what Ser-Ket was actually doing. The
action doesn't flow from panel to panel logically in any way- no two
moves seem to connect to one another. In the end, there is not a single
panel of this fight that could not have been made more clear and in the
process made the fight- which is practically the entire issue -more
exciting.
The single most telling part of the layout problems
for this issue are present in a single splash panel where Ser-Ket, in
Dragon Mode, has taken hold of Grimlock and risen into the air. We get a
medium range shot- again -which cuts off the edges of both figures and
doesn't leave enough room to show the distance between the pair and the
ground. If you pulled back a bit, you could get the scope of the action,
show the other Dinobots on the tower and show the full figures of
Ser-Ket and Grimlock in a way that has some impact, maybe even breaking
out of the edges of the panel dramatically. The splash in question was
more than half a page, and having seen Padilla do much better work in
the first two issues, I'm certain that he'd have used the space more
effectively if he had time.
The issue ends on pretty much the
only note it could, and one more confrontation clearly remains. The next
issue of Rage of the Dinobots is the last, and will not only be the
conclusion of the story but the last piece of Prime fiction we get prior
to the premiere of Beast Hunters. There's a lot of potential here- as
well as a modern take on a classic battle in the offing -and it's my
hope that Johnson, Scott, and Padilla are saving their best for last.
沒有留言:
張貼留言