Rainbow White Chocolate Brownies

This Saturday marks the second time that there will be a Pride event held in Prague. To celebrate diversity and a little extravagance I've decided to prepare a batch of rainbow coloured brownies since I had to do it before the weekend and brownies are so easy to make, they were perfect for a last minute baking project.

I wasn't nervous about using the food colouring as it wasn't my first time working with it (that would be the cute heart muffins) but I hoped the colours wouldn't mix and spoil the result. Eventually, that didn't happen and the colours stayed separated, layered and the brownies looked great when cut.

There's 6 colours to the LBGT flag and colouring 6 batches of dough turned out to be quite lengthy. I suggest you start preheating the oven halfway.

Boardgames on Kickstarter: They Need You!

Recently I've learned about the Kickstarter site/project. In case you haven't heard about it yet, here's a quick summary: Kickstarter lets you advertise the project of your dreams to the internet public, asking them to fund it. You set a funding goal (let's say $10,000) and if enough people chip in and your project reaches the goal in 30 days, you get the the full amount of funds that might be well over your goal. In case the amount of money doesn't reach your goal, you get nothing, the money goes back to the people who chipped in.

You, however, don't need to have a project to participate in Kickstarter. You can browse hundreds of ongoing funding requests and if any catches your eye, you're invited to help by spending any amount you think is right. Projects usually have several levels and spending certain amount of money usually gets you something from the project owner. For $1 you might get a mention in the credits, for $10 you might get the mention and a promo poster mailed to you, for $20 you might get the product itself. There is anything from Fashion, Computer games, Music, Comics, Film to, what is the focus of this post, Board Games.

I've watched several projects for some time and here is a selection of several Board Games that deserve your attention.

(I am in no way related to Kickstarter or any of the projects. This is merely an enthusiastic post about something really really cool.)

Dungeon Petz

I always wonder why Vlaada Chvatil, perhaps the best known Czech board game designer, chose to spell the name of his successor game to his earlier Dungeon Lords with 'z' in the word Pets. In my opinion, using 'z' instead of a 's' is a cheap way to convey craziness and zaniness, and to target child audience. The original name – Příšerky z podzemí (literally Little monsters from the underground) strays from the cheap area of misspelled words and still carries the message of cuteness and being set in the same universe as Dungeon Lords – Vládci podzemí.

And yes, Dungeon Petz IS a cute game. The illustrations are very well made, the little monsters themselves are adorable and the game manual is written with so much wit and humour that the whole package makes you want to hug the box and squee in delight. However, the stark contrast between the light-hearted facade and the deep, complex (complex but not complicated) gameplay is what makes the game unsuitable for kids. Or kidz.

Banana Chocolate Cake with Ricotta

As my brother's birthday happened when he was still in Ghana, I grabbed the opportunity to bake him a birthday cake during his brief stay in Prague. I've missed baking cakes from my days in Barcelona too so I took this as a reason to go to IKEA and get their round cake form and also look for the perfect recipe for a grand cake. I came across a promotional leaflet from a supermarket that contained a recipe for a cake which looked appetizing, however, could be improved. How? Well, I decided to substitute the original fruit with bananas.

Eventually, there was a lot of cake. I split the work into two days - baking and filling the cake took a large chunk of a day 1, so I left the frosting for the other day and let the cake set in a fridge overnight. That allowed the filling to enter the corpus but the sliced bananas turned slightly unsightly brownish and the filling turned a bit yellow. But I haven't noticed anything wrong with the taste so I guess it was just a cosmetic change. In the end I had to come up with a way to transport half of it to my brother but some clever adjusting of a large shoebox took care of that.

Saboteur

I've mentioned before that I'm not a big fan of card games. I was pleasantly surprised that Saboteur, a 3+ player card game, is actually a neat little fun game you can play with easily with a group of people who are relatively new to gaming. Saboteur puts each player in a role of a member of a group of gnomes that are trying to dig a tunnel to a gold nugget. The catch is that one player (or with more players even two players) is secretly a saboteur, who is trying to thwart the party's plan and get the nugget only to himself.

At the beginning, each player is dealt a hand of cards (depends on the number of players) and a loyalty card which he secretly checks to see if they are a saboteur or not (like in BSG). Then the basic card are placed on the table. On one side, there is a ladder, which is a starting point for the party, and on the other side there are three cards symbolizing the goal, two of which are worthless coal and one which is gold. These goal cards are shuffled and placed face down so that the gold is always in a random place and no one knows where.