My Thing 17

How to make a cupcake

Here’s a snappy idea which will lend a little whimsy to the next birthday party you throw for your child. Bake some cupcakes in ready-made ice cream cones. You can complete them ahead, and have the cupcakes ready for serving. Or you can bake and cool them in advance, leaving frosting and the decorating as an activity for that house full of energetic kids you are expecting.

Steps:

1.      Make the batter for your cupcakes. Use a cake mix or your favorite scratch cake recipe. Prepare the batter as per directions.

2.      Unwrap the ice cream cones slowly, being careful not to damage them as you remove any plastic coverings. Place each empty cone in a muffin tin, one per ungreased muffin cup.

3.      Pick up and fill each cone. Replace each cone in its muffin cup.

4.      Bake according to cake batter instructions. Bake for the same length of time you would bake regular cupcakes.

5.       Prepare your icing or open up your store-bought icing.

6.      Place sprinkles in a small bowl.

7.      Remove cupcakes from oven and allow them to cool.

8.      Frost the cupcakes using a knife or spatula. Try to let the frosting warm up a bit if you have been keeping it in the fridge, as some frostings are more difficult to manipulate when cold.

9.      Dip the top of the cupcake in sprinkles. Dip fully or dip just one side for an artsy effect.

10.  Place each cupcake back into muffin tin, or place in a serving dish with sides. Carry muffin tin or serving dish very carefully; these cupcakes will be top heavy and may tend to topple

11.  Serve and enjoy!

Tips

• The same technique can be used for a treat at a graduation party. Buy sprinkles in school colors or use frosting of one school color, with sprinkles of the other school color.

Warnings

·      Do not overfill the ice cream cones with batter. This image shows a cup which is overfilled. This will result in an unsightly overflow during baking.

• Don't use too much icing as this can weigh the cupcake down and cause it to tip over.
• These cupcakes should be eaten the same day they are made or else the moisture from the cake will take away the crispness of the cones.

Things You'll Need

• 24 flat-bottomed ice cream cones
• One recipe of cake mix, complete with eggs and oil and other ingredients required
• Icing (16 oz can will be more than enough)
• Muffin pan
• Ice cream scoop
• Sprinkles

My Thing 16

Why Does Music Make Us Feel?

A new study demonstrates the power of music to alter our emotional perceptions of other people

As a young man I enjoyed listening to a particular series of French instructional programs. I didn’t understand a word, but was nevertheless enthralled. Was it because the sounds of human speech are thrilling? Not really. Speech sounds alone, stripped of their meaning, don’t inspire. We don’t wake up to alarm clocks blaring German speech. We don’t drive to work listening to native spoken Eskimo, and then switch it to the Bushmen Click station during the commercials. Speech sounds don’t give us the chills, and they don’t make us cry – not even French.

But music does emanate from our alarm clocks in the morning, and fill our cars, and give us chills, and make us cry. According to a recent paper by Nidhya Logeswaran and Joydeep Bhattacharya from the University of London, music even affects how we see visual images. In the experiment, 30 subjects were presented with a series of happy or sad musical excerpts. After listening to the snippets, the subjects were shown a photograph of a face. Some people were shown a happy face – the person was smiling - while others were exposed to a sad or neutral facial expression. The participants were then asked to rate the emotional content of the face on a 7-point scale, where 1 mean extremely sad and 7 extremely happy. 

The researchers found that music powerfully influenced the emotional ratings of the faces. Happy music made happy faces seem even happier while sad music exaggerated the melancholy of a frown.  A similar effect was also observed with neutral faces. The simple moral is that the emotions of music are “cross-modal,” and can easily spread from sensory system to another. Now I never sit down to my wife’s meals without first putting on a jolly Sousa march.

Although it probably seems obvious that music can evoke emotions, it is to this day not clear why. Why doesn’t music feel like listening to speech sounds, or animal calls, or garbage disposals? Why is music nice to listen to? Why does music get blessed with a multi-billion dollar industry, whereas there is no market for “easy listening” speech sounds?

In an effort to answer, let’s first ask why I was listening to French instructional programs in the first place. The truth is, I wasn’t just listening. I was watching them on public television. What kept my attention was not the meaningless-to-me speech sounds (I was a slow learner), but the young French actress. Her hair, her smile, her mannerisms, her pout… I digress. The show was a pleasure to watch because of the humans it showed, especially the exhibited expressions and behaviors.

The lion share of emotionally evocative stimuli in the lives of our ancestors would have been from the faces and bodies of other people, and if one finds human artifacts that are highly evocative, it is a good hunch that it looks or sounds human in some way.

As evidence that humans are the principal source of emotionality among human artifacts, consider human visual signs. Visual signs, I have argued, have culturally evolved to look like natural objects, and have the kinds of contour combinations found in a three-dimensional world of opaque objects. Three-dimensional world of opaque objects? Nothing particularly human about that, and that’s why most linguistic signs – like the letters and words on this page – are not emotionally evocative to look at.

But visual signs do sometimes have emotional associations. For example, colors are notoriously emotionally evocative, and arguments about what color something should be painted are the source of an alarming number of marital arguments. And “V” stimuli, such as that yield sign on the street, have long been realized (within the human factors literature) to serve as the most evocative geometrical shape for warning symbols. But notice that color and “V” stimuli are plausibly about human expression. In particular, color has recently been argued to be “about” human skin and the exhibited emotions – which is why red grabs our attention, since it's associated with blushing and blood - and “V” stimuli have been suggested to be “about” angry faces (namely, angry eyebrows).  

Which brings us back to music and the Logeswaran paper. Music is exquisitely emotionally evocative, which is why a touch of happy music makes even unrelated pictures seem more pleasant. In light of the above, then, we are led to the conclusion that the artifact of music should contain some distinctly human elements.

My Thing 15

The Boy and The Apple Tree

 

 

 

is it a good story right ?