The Hall of Thoughts

Recipe: Almond Joy Cake

For Mother’s Day, I offered to bake my wife any­thing she want­ed and she picked this. It’s a mon­strous beast of a cake and one we fond­ly remem­ber from Rosine’s Restau­rant in Mon­terey, CA.

I high­ly rec­om­mend cut­ting small­er slices than your eyes desire, for it’s very rich.

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Almond Joy Cake

This recipe is for the cake my wife and I order most often when we eat at Rosine’s in Mon­terey, CA. It’s light, but decep­tive­ly rich.

Course Dessert
Serv­ings 12 slices
Author Rosine’s Restau­rant

Ingredients

Frosting

  • 1 quart heavy cream
  • 2 tsp vanil­la
  • 1/2 cup sug­ar
  • 2 pack­ages instant choco­late pud­ding (3.5 to 3.9 oz box­es)

Cake Layers

  • 1 box choco­late cake mix
  • 1 cup may­on­naise
  • 1 cup water
  • 3 eggs

Goodies

  • 1 cup coconut toast­ed
  • 1 cup almonds toast­ed
  • 16 Almond Joy can­dies chopped rough

Instructions

Frosting

  1. Beat frost­ing ingre­di­ents until thick, stiff, set, and expand­ed.

  2. Set aside in cool place or fridge.

Cake Layers

  1. Mix cake lay­er ingre­di­ents and divide into two 8-inch or 9-inch cake pans that you’ve lined with parch­ment. Bake accord­ing to instruc­tions on the box, being care­ful not to over­bake.

  2. Once cool, cut each cake lay­er into two even slices, mak­ing a total of 4 lay­ers.

Assembly

  1. Place a cake lay­er on your serv­ing tray — there’s no way you’re mov­ing this after. Top with a thick lay­er of frost­ing, 1/4 the coconut, 1/4 the almonds, and 1/4 the Almond Joy pieces. Repeat until you have a beau­ti­ful 4-lay­er cake!

Recipe Notes

Source: Rosine’s Cui­sine

Venture Capitalist Says Creativity Instead of Coding

Tom Hulme is a ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist who says schools should focus on cre­ativ­i­ty and empa­thy instead of sim­ple tasks soon to be dom­i­nat­ed by com­put­ers. He wrote in a recent Wired UK opin­ion piece:

Any job that involves rep­e­ti­tion, and no cre­ativ­i­ty, is at risk of dis­rup­tion – from per­form­ing cal­cu­la­tions to review­ing forms to sort­ing machine parts, and even­tu­al­ly dri­ving. Such roles are the eas­i­est for machines to do far more effi­cient­ly than us. We should pre­pare kids for roles that are tougher to auto­mate – roles like artists, care­givers, entre­pre­neurs or the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cists at the edge of sci­ence.

He even sug­gests the trendy teach­ing of cod­ing skills may be the wrong approach:

Deep machine learn­ing will like­ly auto­mate the writ­ing of code rel­a­tive­ly quick­ly. While it’s use­ful to know what com­pris­es lan­guages or algo­rithms, I sus­pect most of the lat­ter will be writ­ten by machine against a spe­cif­ic human (or even­tu­al­ly machine) query. Cre­ativ­i­ty is going to be far more impor­tant in a future where soft­ware can code bet­ter than we can.

I think Tom is unfor­tu­nate­ly cor­rect with his assess­ment. While there will always be a need for com­put­er pro­gram­mers, even that field is vul­ner­a­ble to the impe­r­i­al march of automa­tion. The fast progress of tech­nol­o­gy will destroy so many jobs that we must change how our soci­eties and economies func­tion in the future.

“There is noth­ing like look­ing, if you want to find some­thing. You cer­tain­ly usu­al­ly find some­thing, if you look, but it is not always quite the some­thing you were after.”

―J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hob­bit