Two Desserts:

1. Grape Tart. I thought it would be easy to make, since the basic process was similar to making a pie, and I already had a successful experience of baking a berry pie, but I was immediately proved wrong. After I put my pie crust into the oven, and turned on the oven light to see how it goes after ten minutes or so, I found out that the beautiful edge of the pie crust had all fallen over like flowers over-burnt by the scorching sunlight. I had no idea this would happen, and it looked so ugly when I took it out of the oven. And my pastry cream also looked it: it had a creamy yellow color instead of white. I thought it was cause I used cane sugar instead of granulated white sugar, and the vanilla extract gave the filling a brown color. I also tended to have overcooked the pastry cream, so that it was not as fluffy as shown on the youtube video. I was so disappointed thaht I didn't even take a picture of my tart, which I always do after my culinary work is done. However, my mom was supportive enough to make me feel a little bit better, and we had the tart for lunch.

2. Vanilla Cheesecake. The failure in the grape tart didn't stop me from continuing on the baking road. In the evening, I dragged my mom to H.E.B and bought some other things I needed for making a vanilla cheesecake. I've always had a thing for cheesecake, and I believe it has something to do with the fact that it is so damn expensive in China. A 9-inch cheesecake could easily be sold at 100 yuan or even higher. I tried the cheesecake in Guangzhou once, and it was more of a lemon cake than a cheesecake. The only time I enjoyed a nice and rich cheesecake was in Shanghai, and it cost 60 yuan for a tiny piece. At first I thought it was simply because of the ludicrous high prices of foods in China, but after I learned about the recipes of cheesecake, I quickly understood why it was more expensive than the regular cakes. For the filling of a 9-inch classic vanilla cheesecake, you would need 32 oz cream cheeze, 4 onze sour cream, 3 eggs, 2 tablespoon of flour, 1 cup of sugar, and 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract. The filling only could easily cost as least 8 dollars, and no to mention the Graham Cracker Crumbs on the outside. The basic ingredients cost at least 10 dollars, and it was the most expensive thing I had ever cooked so far. 

   The process didn't go smoothly at all. I copied down the recipe on a baking cookbook I borrowed from the library, and it lied to me on the first step. I mixed Graham cracker crumbs with melted butter and sugar, and layered them on the bottom of the springform pan. The recipe told me to bake it in the 400F oven for ten minutes. Three minutes later I could smell the butter and the crumbs, and ten minutes later they were all burnt. It smelled terrible, and the crumbs turned into black ashes in the middle and on the edge. I had to clean up and do the crumbs all over again. Meanwhile, my filling was ready, and it was not perfect, either. It was my first time using an electric mixer, and I tended to mix things more thoroughly than they needed. In fact, a crucial part in making a cheesecake filling is not to overbeat, so as to not introduce too much air into the mixture. When the filling was ready, I could already see air bubbles on the surface, and that was not a good sign. 

   I poured the filling into the second crumbs that I made, and put the pan into the oven. I made a third mistake: I wanted to make sure that the crumbs did not burn as they did the first time, so I opened the oven door for couple of times when it was still baking. This introduced even more air into the oven, and the surface of the cheesecake was full of cracks when it was finished. 

   The cheesecake was let to cool to room temperature on the wire rack after it was baked, and early morning when I went to the bathroom, I took it out and put it into a fridge. When I took it out this morning for breakfast, I found out that it tasted more sour than the cheesecake I had in the restaurants, and although it was called a vanilla cheesecake, I couldn't taste the vanilla. My mom was as supportive as usual, and while I was complaining about how many things I should have done right but didn't, she gorged down a huge piece of cheesecake and said it was very delicious. 

Two Fives:

   College Board never managed to send any of my score reports to my home address, and that's why when all of my friends had received their AP scores at the end of May, I didn't know a thing. I forgot about this whole matter (I intended to, since I really did not want to pay 8 dollars to know that I failed two exams), and it wasn't until yesterday when Charlie, the teacher at Hotchkiss I wrote about in several articles before, emailed me and asked me about my SAT subject tests scores and AP tests scores that I finally decided to call College Board. 

   And I didn't even feel nervous when the automatic voice on the phone service was about to announce my scores, since it felt like a decades ago when I took the test. But they I learned that I got 5 in both AP Chemistry and AP Psychology. I was glad, for sure, but not too excited. The next school year I need to take four AP courses, and probably another one in the next semester. I had no idea if they could still turn out as good as the two I had already taken. 

Two Books:

1. Sing You Home by Jodi Picoult. I purchased this book right before Jodi's reading began in Dartmouth Bookstore. I finished it in two days (more than 400 pages long) as one of the three books I had to read in addition to the required reading for this summer. If I had known this earlier, I would have brought all the books I had read during the last semester along with me. I had read much more than 3, since I was really bored for the last several months I spent in China. The book was about a couple who split up because the wife wanted to try to have another baby after three miscarriages, and the husband did not. Then the wife remarried and wanted to have the three frozen embryos she had stored in a clinic when she was trying to get pregnant, and the husband sued her to get the sole right over those three embryos. This is an over-simplified version about the book, since there are much more details involved and some are really controversial, religion and gay marriage to be two of them. After all, it is a novel and I feel that way. In fact, I think this book is the most predictable book of all that I have read written by Jodi. The lines are more cheesy as well, and it is a good book to be adapted into a movie. 

2. Hiroshima. I read this book simply because it's a) written by a Hotchkiss alumni, and b) the thinnest book of all that I had in hand. It took less than four hours to finish the enough book (around 200 pages or so), and it was about the atomic bombing in Hiroshima at the end of World War 2. As a Chinese teenager, I had always been educated that the bombing marked the end of World War 2 and the final victory. The event was colored in justice, and no textbook bothered to talk about the inhumane side of the bombing. The civilians that died during the bombing, and many more who suffered from radiation after that. The book talked about six survivors of the event, their experiences during the bombing and their lives afterwards. These six people had some visible yet insignificant bonding between one another, so that the narrative was smooth in transition and clear in logic. I had no real knowledge or interest in Hiroshima before I read the book, so that during the reading I felt like reading a novel instead of a history fact. The agony of the civilians was depicted so vividly yet justly that for the first time, I began to question if it was right to end violence in violence. The book inspired me to look up more information about this specific event, and that was something a history textbook would never have achieved. 

Two days to go:

   I can't believe the day after tomorrow I will have to fly to Connecticut and start my new life at Hotchkiss. It used to feel so far away, and now it is so close that I don't even want it to start. The summer I spend in Austin is way too relaxed, and I have found my interests in so any things, cooking to be one of them. The start of school means the end of this laid-back life (which is very Austin indeed), but somehow this way of living cannot last for too long, and before I become too indulged in sleeping until eight in the morning and cooking and reading all day, I really need a disciplined and intense schedule that can keep me motivated. In the sense, I really can't wait for school to start, and let the last two days in Austin be even more Austin, which means more delicious foods and more laid-back time.