Meaghan's Blog

Sarah told me I was her hero. Mom said I’m never leaving home again. And Emma said it was the best cake I’d ever made. It was:

Rainbow cake

When I make cakes, almost every time I don’t use a recipe. I guess what would be right as I go, and somehow it just turns out right. However, I’ll write down what I did because I kept track. If you want to use cake from a mix, I don’t know how many boxes you’ll need, and you can use any icing you like. I’ll leave the recipe here for anybody who wants to try it out.

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups (3 sticks) of butter or margarine
2 cups sugar
1 large tsp of vanilla (I always use the lid to the bottle)
3 eggs
3 cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 1/4 cups milk
Food coloring

Now for directions:

Cream together butter and sugar with an electric mixer. Add vanilla and eggs one at a time, mixing well after each. Pour in one cup of the flour with the baking powder and mix on low (or you’ll be wearing white for the rest of the day) until nicely combined. Add a third of the milk and mix. Repeat with flour and milk (ending with the flour) until they’re both gone.

Now for the fun part! If you’re doing six layers in six colors, measure a cup of batter into each of six bowls, and color each a different color, or you could do what you liked. I found I had to add quite a bit of gel coloring to get it even close to as bright and vibrant as the person who first made this cake, so she must have used half the container of it or something. Anyway, color your batter to the desired shade. I would next recommend having more than one of the same-size round (or you could make it square) pan. I had to bake mine one at a time, take the cakes out while still hot, butter the pans again, and put new batter in. At least two would be a good idea. Mine was a 6 1/2” round pan with a bottom that popped up.

Grease your pan(s) and preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Put one color of batter in each pan and smooth out. Bake for 20 minutes. Let cool. If you don’t have six pans of the same size, take the cake out as soon as you can and prepare it for another cake. Make sure your cakes are cool before you ice it, since warm, runny icing wouldn’t be very good.

Icing:
1 cup (2 sticks) butter or margarine
2 tbsp milk
1 tsp vanilla
4 cups icing (confectioners’) sugar

Note: I didn’t make up this icing. I got it from a Wilton cake decorating book and switched out the shortening (bleh) for something a little more appetizing.

I think the icing should be pretty easy to figure out. Even if you dumped it all together and mixed it, it would turn out fine. Probably. If you wanted, you could omit the milk and vanilla and add the same amount of orange juice, maybe, or some other flavor, or omit some of the icing sugar and add cocoa powder for chocolate icing.

Here’s where I got the idea from.

This one, or this one?

On Facebook (and at least Farm Town is on MySpace, too), I play two games that you have a farm, you plow fields, you plant crops, and you harvest them to get further in the game and make money. The first one that came out was Farm Town (I’ll just say FT), and so I hear FV came out two months later. I started playing both at the same time, and for a while I liked FV better, but after a while FT was the one I played more and I barely play on FV now.

The main differences between the two are that the graphics are nicer and more cartoony on Farmville, and on Farm Town it isn’t quite as nice looking, but there are social places to go (the Inn, the Marketplace, the realtor’s office) in FT, as well as having a chat box and private messages. On FV you have little signs to leave on people’s farms (only friends) and I think messages to send back and forth. On FT, you can be hired (or you can hire people) to plow or harvest crops for the person that hired you, saving you cash and time. For FV, they have recently been putting out farm equipment, like a harvester, seeder, and plower. I like that it makes it seem more realistic, but it feels like they’re only adding more features every other day so they can have more people play on it.

I won’t be playing on FV until they make it so you pay to have a larger farm, because right now you need eight friends to make it a bit bigger, ten friends to make it a little bigger, twelve friends to make it a little  bigger, and so on. On FT, you only need eight or ten friends to be able to hire people to plow for you, and to be able to sell any trees, animals, or decorations like houses and bales of hay (both games have these things), and I don’t think they have anything else except awards you can get for having more friends. Since I don’t add very many people on Facebook, I had to resort to adding people I didn’t know for FT because it gets tiring to plow 1,018 fields a day, but they can’t see any information about me. On FV, for some things you have to pay real money (your own, not from the game) to get some items, and I think that’s the most ridiculous thing and one of their worst decisions.

The main problems that people complain about in FT is that the marketplace will be  filled with people spamming the chat with ‘plz hire me’ and things like that, or some people swear and some people are just plain innapropriate (I actually reported someone the other day, too). They keep saying that kids play this game, but you know what? I don’t think they really do as much as people think, and most of the people are middle-aged or in their twenties.  So even though it’s an issue, it makes up for it in other ways, and the internet is full of bad people anyway.

FV has also at least somewhat done the same things as FT has. Raspberries are 15 coins to plant and 20 coins to plow the field beforehand on FT, and they’re ready to harvest in two hours. On FV, it’s 15 coins to plow the field and 20 to plant the raspberries, and they’re also ready in two hours. They end up costing the same, even though they have it switched. Why couldn’t it cost only fifteen coins, or 25 to plant the berries? On FT you get awards for having a certain amount of friends, for spending and amount of money altogether over time, and so on. You only get bragging rights. About a month ago, FV added ‘Ribbons’ to get for an array of things. They give you XP (experience, and you get it when you plant and plow on both games) for winning it, and a present. Today I did a few small things and they threw more than 350 XP at me, and I thought that was a bit unneccessary. I had also bought two things of farm equipment, which isn’t is exciting as it sounds because it never moves, but that also gave me 600 XP. Then again, I can make about 3,000 XP a day on FT if I have crops that are ready in a day.

As for animals, in FV they give you things after a few days (like milk and eggs), but they stay in the same place unless you move them (their legs must get tired). But for FT, the animals sort of run around willy-nilly unless you set it so they stay put, and they don’t give you anything. I wish they would give you things, or help at the farm, but in a way that wasn’t too much like FV. It would be nice if they would have actual weather, because it never changes and supposedly tornados go through sometimes before you go help at a friend’s farm, or leaves will be on the ground and you can rake them up for a few XP and a few coins.

I think I could write more, but that’s good for now. Which one do you think is better?

Update: Yesterday (Sept 6) Farm Town added real cash to their game (bad move – you should’ve seen their forum), and I looked at FarmVille to see how many items they have now that you really need to pay for. Sadly, there are a lot, and someone said that another game from the same company, once they added real cash, slowly made everything cost real money.

Yesterday, Emma and I were playing in Sarah’s old room with her nice new bed we had to take home because she moved into a smaller apartment. I went downstairs, since it was almost suppertime, and . . .

Emma: Meaghan, don’t leave me! Come back!

(half-joking)

Me: (now halfway down the stairs) No.

Emma: If you don’t, I’ll explode!

Me: No.

(a second later)

Emma: PSHEW (that exploding noise)