If y’all use a decent box mix and use melted butter instead of vegetable oil, an extra egg, and milk instead of water, no one can tell the difference. I sure as hell can’t.
Also, if you add a little almond extract to vanilla cake, or a little coffee to chocolate cake, it sends it through the roof.
This concludes me attempting to be helpful.
yo I can vouch for this I’ve done this for the last few cakes I’ve made and holy crap it makes suuuuch a difference the cake is still fluffy, but it also seems more dense, and it doesn’t dry out like at all you can leave it uncovered on the counter all day after being cut into, and it won’t get all crusty and dry this is an amazing way to take your cakes to the next level
I am a single adult human living in a house with two corgis. Got Girldog from a shelter when she was about a year, year and a half old maybe; got Boydog a few years later as an 8-week puppeh. And let me tell you something, from Day One, this has been a three-way psychological experiment. I no longer know who is manipulating who on a daily basis.
One of the first things I trained Girldog to do was not to bark at the dinner table; if she barked at me while I was eating, I put her in The Quiet Place (her crate) where she couldn’t see me. She learned almost immediately to subvocalize her barks, to let out a breath with just enough vocal cord vibration that I wouldn’t QUIIIITE consider it a bark and move her further away from the food. It’s a sound like this: “Hrrrr. Hrrrr. Hhhrahhh.” I didn’t realize how odd this was until my aunt came over and said, “That dog hissed at me.” “Yes,” I said, “she does that.”
Boydog learned to do tricks by watching Girldog. I never taught him to sit. He learned by watching Girldog get a treat for sitting. Once, I told both dogs to sit at the same time, while I held a treat in each hand. When Girldog didn’t sit quick enough, Boydog put his paw on her butt and pushed her down.
I hung a bell on the door and taught Boydog to ring it when he wants to go out. Girldog sees no reason she should ring the bell, as it is beneath her dignity, and she can get her way by barking instead. Boydog, however, will ring the bell for Girldog when she lurks around by the door, although he has no interest in going outside himself. Girldog has made Boydog her personal slave in this matter.
Boydog rings the bell when he doesn’t need to go out but thinks I have been at my computer too long. By the time I get to the kitchen, he’s nowhere near the door, but hey mom, as long as you’re up, let’s play! He obviously does not believe I can see through this extremely clever ploy.
Girldog once climbed onto a sofa, crossed the back of it, leapt from the sofa to my desk chair, leapt from the chair to the desk, and knocked all my stuff off the desk. (I wasn’t there, but it was obvious from the trail of destruction what route she had taken.) Then she got down and proceeded to ignore the bag of corn chips she’d encountered and focus her attention on biting my phone charger in half, chewing up a USB memory stick, and eating a pen. I still have no idea how she could be so smart and so dumb at the same time.
Boydog will chase a laser pointer (not uncommon for dogs introduced to them as puppies! Pro tip) but only when Girldog is not around, because she hates it for some reason and will tackle him for it. Girldog also likes to be outside while I want to be in, and Boydog prefers to have us both inside. Boydog will lead me to the laser pointer, pester me until I get it down, and then run around chasing the laser and barking madly. No matter how stubborn Girldog has been about staying outside, she wants to know what he’s barking at and immediately comes inside. (It is always the laser pointer he’s barking at, Girldog. Always.)
There is a chair in my bedroom that I cannot sit on. The dogs take turns sleeping on it, depending on who gets there first. The only hard and fast rule is that if the human sits on the chair, they will both lose their cool. The chair is for dogs only. I have not even tried to sit on the chair for about six months now.
I suspect I’ll be adding more of these as the three of us continue to train each other.
When my pet rat was young, I had to train her to not try to eat ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING, like my shirt while I’m wearing it and she’s sitting on my shoulder. Before I got to this point, I managed to train her to get into the cage when we got near it by giving her a piece of popcorn, which she would then take to a safe spot on the cage to eat it.
For the “don’t eat my shirt” training (and house-training too), whenever she tried to eat something she shouldn’t eat (or peed/pooped anywhere not in the cage), I would immediately pick her up, tell her “NO”, and take her back to the cage and not give her the popcorn like I normally would. She caught on within a week or two regarding what she shouldn’t chew on and where it was okay to go to the bathroom.
And then she started chewing on my shirt again. But it wasn’t really chewing, per se. She would grab my shirt with her teeth, pull like she would if she was trying to get a piece to eat, and then I’d take her right back to the cage like usual. Except sometimes I’d be lazy and not take her to the cage, I’d just say “no” and push her away a bit. And she’d do it again.
That’s right, MY PET RAT TRAINED ME to take her back to the cage when she tugged on my shirt, because she would get bored of sitting on my shoulder or running around on my bed and want to go home.
When my dog was a puppy, she used to play with her water bowel when it was empty, which would make a lot of noise, so I’d get up and fill it so she’s stop doing that. She very quickly taught herself to play with the water bowl when it needed refilling, and then to actually bring us her food or water bowl when it was mealtimes.
We have cats now, and we wait to feed them until they’re not meowing or bugging us so that they don’t harass us about food (at least until we’re actually doing the mealtime thing).
But my dog still does the food bowl thing, and as my dog has a much better handle on when meal times actually are this is a nice reminder to me. She’s an old lady now, though, so if she’s napping or comfortable she sometimes won’t bother to grab her bowl and get my attention until she’s actually ready to get up.
One of my cats figured out that bugging her makes her get up, and that when she gets up she sometimes gets her food bowl, and when she gets her food bowl I initiate ‘feed the pets’ time. So sometimes he’ll just start meowing insistently and wrapping himself around her and following her from room to room on the off chance it will make dinner happen sooner.
This is how my cat learned to beg my dog for food.
I can’t help but feel this is one of those things where we had actual documents saying “it was done with this and this”, and some old rich white guys looked at it and went “oh mirth, the ancients were so silly. They probably wrote this basic stuff down and the actual builders had Secret Techniques we need to Discover”
For a long time, archeologists didn’t know how greek women did their high-piled braids and hair. There was a word that translated to “needle” in the descriptions. They went, “seems like we’ll never know.” Then a hairdresser took a fucking needle (big needle) and did the fucking thing you do with needles, which is sew – and by sewing the braids into place, she replicated ancient styles.
The Egyptians had diagrams of construction steps for their pyramids. Archeologists went “oooh, ancient primitive people, how they do this?” LITERALLY MYTHBUSTERS OR THE OLD DISCOVERY CHANNEL or someone went “what if we did the thing the pictures said they did” AND GUESS FUCKING WHAT. GUESS FUCKING WHAT.
Also that thing with native Americans saying squirrels taught them how to get sap for maple syrup, and colonizers going “that’s a myth sweaty”
Sincerely, if the scientists had to do actual analysis like spectroscopy or whatever, kudos, and no flame. But swear to god, if all these years, we’ve had the recipes and there was just this fuckin institutional bias against just TRYING THE THING THEY SAID WOULD WORK, HELLFIRE AND DEMENTIA.
In this case, it was more they had roman writings saying what went into it but figured there was some secret because when they followed roman recipes it never turned out quite right.
Because the sources left by Romans always just said to mix with water. Because, if you were a Roman??? Obviously you knew that you used seawater for cement. Duh. That’s so obvious that they never really bothered specifying that you use seawater to mix it, because it wasn’t necessary, everyone knew that.
But then the empire fell, other empires rose and fell, time passed, and by the time we were trying to reconstruct the formula the ‘mix the dry ingredients with seawater’ trick had been forgotten, until chemical analysis finally figured it out again.
It’s sort of like the land of Punt, a ally of Egypt that’s mentioned all the time, but we don’t actually know where it was located. Because it isn’t written down anywhere. Why would they write it down? It’s Punt. Everyone knew where Punt was back then. It’d be ridiculous to waste the ink and space to specify where it was, every child knows about Punt.
3000 years later and we have no damned clue where it was, simply because at the time it was so blindingly obvious that it was never written down.
So moral of story is be specific
I was thinking it was stupid that they didn’t specify seawater but then I had the thought that we don’t specify to use chicken eggs in baking because DUH so we just write eggs
2000 years in the future people are going to be making scrambled fish eggs and crying bc the ancient recipes make no sense
Ok I would like to point put that, in recent times (I’m talking probably…80s to the present?) Archaeologists/are/ the ones figuring this shit out. This site loves bashing on archaeology so much but y’know what? Yeah, in a shocking twist, we don’t all ignore oral tradition, or ancient writings. The people who /do/ do that are widely despised in the field and considered, shockingly, ///bad archaeologists./// Before that, back in the 1800s all the way through even the 50s and 60s? Yeah, the field was dominated by rich white men who saw the world the way they wanted to see it. It’s tainted the field ever since, but what people on tumblr seem so bad at recognizing is that it has /changed!/ Archaeology nowadays (and anthropology, which, for us Americans at least, is an integral part of archaeology and vise versa) is quickly approaching a completely equal gender balance, and many people have begun studying it to learn about their native countries! Long story short: feel free to bash on the old guard of the profession: Wheeler, Schlieman, hell, even the famous ones like Carter and Canarvon, were all crochety racist old white men. But before you start spouting crap about how archaeology is universally terrible and accomplishes nothing, remember that these people are largely seen in the modern community as what they are- terrible people, and bad scientists to boot. Maybe do some reading on modern archaeological studies and digs- you might even learn something yourself.
