A Story About A Cat Who Has Magic Powers

Posted on September 10, 2015 by lillian

Hi, everyone! I chose this story because I wanted the story to be worthy of sharing. Take a deep breath and enter the magical cat story below.

Once upon a time, there was a cat named Maggie McRita who wanted to be different from every other cat. So she went to her cat books and read but couldn’t get any ideas.

After she finished reading, she decided to research on her cat laptop. She discovered so many ideas and she brainstormed to choose the best idea yet.

The best idea was to learn some magic and become famous. She set out for her kitten books again which were in the cat fun room.

This time she read magic cat books, so she looked at the beginner tricks. She assumed that all the magic was going to be slightly easier than her kitten chores.

She decided to do a coin trick as her first trick. She decided to do a card trick as her next magic trick at 6:00pm PDST or 9:00pm.

She practiced until bedtime and she got so good, she had a good idea. She had started to perform in front of her whole cat family.

She started performing for other cats who lived in the country and they started asking her to perform at a cat birthday party. She started getting famous during her magic tricks.

She wanted a lot of cats to help out too and she wanted a mate. Soon, she was traveling to places she had always dreamed of going.

She finally found a cat who wanted to mate with her and his name was Concertino. She fell in love but she kept on doing her magic tricks and they both had the same clever idea.

She got married to Concertino 3 months later. She and Concertino did magic tricks and traveled together to places they always dreamed of going.

They had two twin kittens named Water and Earth. As the kittens grew up, they helped with magic but they really wanted to be artists.

When they were old enough, they told the truth. Maggie wasn’t disappointed in them, she figured that was what they were up to.

So, off they went and they both found mates that were also twins. They offered to be in just one house.

So they lived in a cat mansion. The mates wanted to become artists also so Water and Earth set off to teach their mates as much as they knew.

Shortly afterward, they each had 4 babies. Meanwhile, Maggie had some health issues and she was unable to do magic during that time.

So the rest of the family helped her to do magic until she was healthy again. She went onward to doing challenging tricks.

One day while Maggie was practicing, she fell on her paw weirdly. The paw hurt so much that it was bleeding and she couldn’t get up.

So the rest of the family went to look for the cat doctor. They found her and the family told them that Maggie had hurt her ankle and come as fast as she can.

After a few seconds, the doctor arrived. The doctor told the family including Maggie that she had a broken ankle and she had to sit in a wheelchair for a few days.

Shortly afterward, she began to walk on crutches for a month. After the month had past, she walked with a rainbow walker that glittered for the rest of the year.

After the last of the year had past, she was able to walk again. She was advised not to do any advanced magic tricks that involved her paws.

She kept that warning for years to come and when her health fell for the last time, no one was able to help her at all. She slipped into a coma that lasted a few weeks and the coma kept coming back after a few weeks more.

Then the coma kept getting worse until she slept the whole time. Eventually, her breathing slowed down until it was nothing at all.

At that point, her death had struck her almost immediately and they thought that she was just holding her breath. Her whole family was completely devastated and that was only her 2nd life and they no longer did magic.

However, they remembered her for the rest of their lives. They put her in the cat Hall of Famous Cats and every cat who didn’t know her asked someone who knew her.

The End

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I got this photo at https://orig10.deviantart.net/5182/f/2013/182/9/e/magic_kingdom_by_ivany86-d6biz63.png but originally Google Images.

The History of Cupcakes

Posted on August 11, 2015 by lillian

Hi there! I decided to research about cupcakes because I was reading a fictional cupcake book. Hope you enjoy the cupcake facts!

The cupcake evolved in the United States in the 19th century, and it was revolutionary because of the amount of time it saved in the kitchen. There was a shift from weighing out ingredients when baking to measuring out ingredients. According to the Food Timeline Web, food historians have yet to pinpoint exactly where the name of the cupcake originated.

There are two theories: one, the cakes were originally cooked in cups and two, the ingredients used to make the cupcakes were measured out by the cup. In the beginning, cupcakes were sometimes called “number” cakes, because they were easy to remember by the measurements of ingredients it took to create them: One cup of butter, two cups of sugar, three cups of flour, four eggs, one cup of milk, and one spoonful of soda. Clearly, cupcakes today have expanded to a wide variety of ingredients, measurements, shapes, and decorations – but this was one of the first recipes for making what we know today as cupcakes.

Cupcakes were convenient because they cooked much quicker than larger cakes. When baking was down in hearth ovens, it would take a long time to bake a cake, and the final product would often be burned. Muffin tins, also called gem pans, were popular around the turn of the 20th century, so people started created cupcakes in tins.

Since their creation, cupcakes have become a pop culture trend in the culinary world. They have spawned dozens of bakeries devoted entirely to them. While chocolate and vanilla remain classic favorites, fancy flavors such as raspberry meringue and espresso fudge can be found on menus.

There are cookbooks, blogs, and magazines specifically dedicated to cupcakes. Icing, also called frosting in the United States, is a sweet often creamy glaze made of sugar with a liquid, such as water or milk, that is often enriched with ingredients such as butter, egg whites, cream cheese, or flavorings. It is used to cover or decorate baked goods.

Elizabeth Raffald documented the first recipe for icing in 1769 in the Experienced English Housekeeper, according to the Food Timeline. The simplest icing is a glace icing, containing powdered sugar and water. This can be flavored and colored as desired, for example, by using lemon juice in place of the water.

More complicated icings can be made by beating fat into powdered sugar (as in buttercream), by melting fat and sugar together, by using egg whites (as in royal icing), and by adding other ingredients such as glycerin (as in fondant). Some icings can be made from combinations of sugar and cream cheese or sour cream, or by using ground almonds (as in marzipan). The first mention of the cupcake can be traced as far back as 1796, when a recipe notation of “a cake to be baked in small cups” was written in American Cookery by Amelia Simmons.

The earliest documentation of the term cupcake was in ‘Seventy-five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes, and Sweetmeats’ in 1828 in Eliza Leslie’s Receipts cookbook. In the early 19th century, there were two different uses for the name cup cake or cupcake. In previous centuries, before muffin tins were widely available, the cakes were often baked in individual pottery cups, ramekins, or molds and took their name from the cups they were baked in.

This is the use of the name that has remained, and the name of “cupcake” is now given to any small cake that is about the size of a teacup. The name “fairy cake” is a fanciful description of its size, which would be appropriate for a party of diminutive fairies to share. While English fairy cakes vary in size more than American cupcakes, they are traditionally smaller and are rarely topped with elaborate icing.

The other kind of “cup cake” referred to a cake whose ingredients were measured by volume, using a standard-sized cup, instead of being weighed. Recipes whose ingredients were measured using a standard-sized cup could also be baked in cups; however, they were more commonly baked in tins as layers or loaves. In later years, when the use of volume measurements was firmly established in home kitchens, these recipes became known as 1234 cakes or quarter cakes, so called because they are made up of four ingredients: one cup of butter, two cups of sugar, three cups of flour, and four eggs.

They are plain yellow cakes, somewhat less rich and less expensive than pound cake, due to using about half as much butter and eggs compared to pound cake. The names of these two major classes of cakes were intended to signal the method to the baker; “cup cake” uses a volume measurement, and “pound cake” uses a weight measurement. Cupcakes have become more than a trend over the years, they’ve become an industry!

Paper baking cups first hit U.S. markets after the end of the World War II. An artillery manufacturer called the James River Corporation began manufacturing cupcake liners for U.S. markets when its military markets began to diminish. By 1969, they consolidated business as a paper company and left artillery manufacturing behind.

During the 1950s, the paper baking cup gained popularity as U.S. housewives purchased them for convenience. Their flexibility grew when bakers realized that they could bake muffins as well as cupcakes in the baking cups. The modern idea of the cupcake is probably different from the historical origin of the phrase.

Imagine what it would be like being a cook in 19th-century Britain or North America. When food historians approach the topic of cupcakes, they run into a gray area in which the practice of making individual cup-sized cakes can become confused with the convention of making cakes with cup-measured ingredients. The notion of baking small cakes in individual containers probably began with the use of clay or earthenware mugs.

It could have been a way to use up extra batter; to make the most efficient use of a hot oven by placing small ramekins, or little baking dishes, in unused spaces; or to create an evenly baked product fast when fuel was in short supply. Early in the 20th century, the advent of multi-cupcake molded tins brought modest mass production methods to cupcake making, and a modern baking tradition was born. Cakes in some form have been around since ancient times, and today’s familiar round cakes with frosting can be traced back to the 17th century, made possible by advances in food technology such as: better ovens, metal cake molds and pans, and the refinement of sugar.

I got it at storify.com but I originally got it at Google Images.