Vakkotaur

Almost a week ago I made a couple simple layer cakes from mixes. No big deal there, use the mix, follow the directions, and it's hard to go wrong. Somehow I started to consider the colors of the cakes and what more could be done. There is white cake (no egg yolk), yellow cake (include the egg yolk), chocolate cakes, red velvet, orange, strawberry and a good many others. I don't recall seeing any blue or green cakes, but a bit of food coloring could take care of that.

My first thought was, perhaps curiously, not a red and green thing for Christmas, but a red, yellow, and green triple layer thing inspired by the traffic light. That would need green, but either green coloring of a white cake or a bit of blue color in a yellow cake ought to take care of that. It was then that I began considering the spectrum. Could ROY G. BIV be done easily? Red velvet, Orange, Yellow, Green (coloring), Blue (coloring) and I suppose Indigo and Violet could also be done by food coloring. A bit of some flavoring might help things as well, but the flavors could so easily clash. A mint cake? Blueberry? And then there's the matter of a layer cake with many layers. Could it support itself? Could it be transported (no way Jay and I would be eating the whole thing ourselves) reasonably easily? How big a plate would be needed to deal a piece, since a piece would flop over on its side?

It was then that I went back to the red and green Christmas cake idea. And I realized there is something similar though not at all the same. It's a two-in-one cake: marble cake.

I won't be making any polychromatic cakes, at least not any time soon. I have a few (more) batches of cookies to bake for Christmas.

There is a web site I visit from time to time. One of the graphics on the site is a U.S. flag, which is just fine as the site is run by a fellow who has served in the military and is for him to express his opinions.

What gets me is that that the graphic is not a simple red, white, and blue rendition of the flag. It only almost is. The blue field is indeed blue. The stars, which are just dots at the small size of the graphic, are indeed white. The red stripes are indeed red. All good so far. But where there should be white stripes there are not white stripes. Instead there is the background color. I see black stripes, or gray stripes depending upon which browser and which computer I'm using.

"But, Vakko, you override things normal people don't." you might point out. Ah, but even if I turn off my overrides and forego my choice of background color it still doesn't work. The site itself uses a cream or parchment background! So even if looked at it "as the designer intended" it's wrong. Red, white, blue, and cream? The web designer overlooked the choice of the graphic maker to use transparent rather than white stripes. Really, the graphic maker goofed by assuming a white background when he could have made the stripes the same white as the stars.

It's odd that someone made a flag graphic with transparent stripes. It's also odd that it's been up on that web site for some time with that problem. It wouldn't be difficult to fix - it's not a fancy PhotoShop effect or anything.

The lesson: Don't count on a white background if you want white in the image. That goes for any color, not just white.