Hurry-Up Chocolate Cake

My dad loves the Hurry-Up Chocolate Cake. He makes it in 2 nine-inch rounds and it creates the perfect layer cake. The frosting is AMAZING!!

The rumor is that it's an old Mennonite recipe, but it was shared with us by our dear friend Marian from the Mile High City and, let me tell you, she's no Mennonite. It is simply the best chocolate cake you will ever put in your mouth. At least that's what I hear. You know dogs can't eat chocolate!

Did I tell you that lately I have a thing for raw carrots. Chomping on a raw carrot is kinda like chewing on sticks. ONLY BETTER!!

COLD IN CLEVELAND

Not too long ago we had the "opportunity" to visit Cleveland. And before you ask, YES it was for a dog show and NO the river was not on fire.

The best thing about our visit was the Ritz Carlton in downtown Cleveland. It was like an oasis in a big dirty desert. I must admit our after dusk and before dawn walks were a wee bit scary. But once we breezed through the doors of the Ritz it was like we were back in Oz again.

The staff treated us like doggy royalty. The gave us bags and bags of treats and a Ritz Carlton Cleveland water bowl (you wouldn't believe what that went for on ebay. KIDDING. It is on the floor in our kitchen and we love it. The blue matches our Limoges).

They even gave us a dog biscuit cookie cutter with the best recipe attached. We didn't have a stove in our suite (can you imagine!) so we had to wait until we returned home to bake up a batch. And, let me tell you, we love them.



We got a lot attention as dad, Rufus and I entered and sat down in the lobby bar. And even more attention as we were escorted out. SO...dad sat down in a chair smack in the middle of the reception area (where they do allow dogs) and ordered a Whiskey Sour his way. Well, he sent it back because he likes LOTS of fresh lemon juice. Here's how it returned. We weren't certain whether they were going for another Malcom Baldridge Award or if they were just being bitchy.

Lady GaGa for Dogs?

When I came across an ad for the OutFox Field Guard, I knew I no longer had to worry about what to wear to the Grammy's next year. I would out GaGa Lady GaGa.

And then I visited the OutFox website. Here's what I learned.

A foxtail is a spikelet or spikelet cluster of a grass, that serves to disperse its seeds as a unit. The spikelets or spikelet clusters of foxtails are adapted for animal dispersal and so can become a health hazard for dogs and other domestic animals. Grasses with this feature can be found all around the country, but are most common in the Western United States with the greatest foxtail problem occurring in California.

The OutFox™ Field Guard helps prevent barbed grasses from penetrating your dog's eyes, ears, and nose.

They even have an OutFox video.

Funeral For a Dog

We are running out to get this book.

A Love Triangle From Brazil to Brooklyn
By LELAND de la DURANTAYE

Thomas Pletzinger’s first novel, “Funeral for a Dog,” is about sex, love, Brazil, a form of ménage- à-trois, children’s books, Finland, dogs, Ping-Pong, New York — in short, the good things. But more than anything else, it is about what happens when a thing is lost: a Brazilian police dog loses a leg, a German- Finnish love triangle loses a member, a boy loses his friend, a woman loses her baby, an ethnologist loses his calling, a journalist loses his way.

It is relatively rare for contemporary German fiction to be translated into English, and unreservedly rare for a first novel by a young and largely unknown German writer to be published with such fanfare. “Funeral for a Dog” is full of strangeness, but it is not satirical strangeness or magical strangeness. It is, instead, realistic, and its main theme is the strangeness of loss. Given that the book centers on loss experienced as figurative and literal exile, it is bound to call to mind for readers of German fiction the haunting works of W. G. Sebald. What’s more, as in Sebald’s books, “Funeral for a Dog” is interspersed with illustrations that depict not central scenes but enigmatic details like a children’s drawing on a receipt. In contrast to Sebald’s writing, however, there is a great deal of beer-drinking and a great deal of blood. This extreme element (there is also a fair bit of vomiting) led some European readers to group it with a work at the opposite end of the German literary spectrum, one published the same year as “Funeral for a Dog” (2008): Charlotte Roche’s “Wetlands,” a phenomenally explicit (and phenomenally popular) book about sex, sexual fluids, sexual hygiene and the lack thereof. Though a ménage-à-trois is at the heart of Pletzinger’s novel, and though one narrator repeatedly mentions the dried menstrual blood he is unable to wash off, this is not done for shock value and does not feel gratuitous. In other words, the book has known such success not because it is in any clear literary lineage, nor because it discusses extreme states and epochal events, but simply because it is brilliantly constructed and finely written.

The novel’s greatest success is its intricacy of plot — an intricacy that is revealed only gradually. After a thoroughly confusing first few pages, the narrative settles into a story that is easy to follow and that slowly and artfully arrives at the point where those first confusing words make rich and moving sense. A journalist in a troubled marriage is sent to interview a reclusive children’s author, and learns secrets about the man’s romantic life that help him understand his own. The plot is complicated, but the things at its center are clear: a wildly successful children’s book called “The Story of Leo and the Notmuch” and a three-legged dog who will, as we can guess from Pletzinger’s title, die. In the interim the dog is several things. It is both a mascot and a symbol of the love triangle that occupies half the novel. It accompanies the three lovers from their first night onward; it is an ideal observer, present at all points of the story — at a magnificently described cockfight in Brazil, in New York on Sept. 11, in Finland for a momentous New Year and many other places besides. The dog also presents a paradigm for loss. It has lost something crucial, and yet continues (“Dogs get used to any loss”). Dogs do what the writer of the children’s book cannot — they “live in the moment.” The children’s author, on the other hand, lives in the past: he “collects fragments and assembles them into a world he can bear.” (Here and throughout, Ross Benjamin’s translation is stunningly fine, capturing as it does the wry wit, gentle despair and merry confusion of the original.)

The dog is indeed very much mascot, symbol and paradigm, but it is not much of a dog. It is kept supplied with beer and food, but the looks and leanings of a dog lovingly observed are nowhere to be found. It may seem petty to claim that the characterization of a dog is two- dimensional, but, well, it is.

The children’s book that sets the plot in motion, and brings it full circle, is unique within the novel in that it addresses loss directly. It is also the solution to a riddle: What happened to these people? One member of the love triangle, a Finn — touchingly described as “not beautiful in the strict sense, but nonetheless the most beautiful” — has arrived with a child of uncertain parentage. Another member of the triangle has died tragically. The path toward resolution is found in another book. Two narrators tell the tale. One is the journalist (who, in his heart, is an ethnologist). The other is the children’s author (who, in his heart, is in great pain). There is a mild doppelgänger effect between them — both are uncertain and inward, both bury their phones, both are confused by the women they love, both play Ping-Pong well. And there is another doppelgänger effect between the published children’s book and an unpublished novel — or memoir? — that the journalist discovers locked away in the guest bedroom he occupies. The journalist violates his host’s privacy, which may have been his host’s wish all along, and reads the mirror book to “The Story of Leo and the Notmuch.” Called “Astroland,” it charts the love triangle from Recife to Brooklyn, Helsinki to Lugano. It is incomplete. And it takes the journalist some time to realize that although he thinks there is no ending, he has in fact had the ending all along. It has been hiding in plain sight, between the lines of the children’s book.

As befits a book about loss, “Funeral for a Dog” does not end with the losing. There is a searing stage that is confusion, fury, despair, renunciation, flight — but it is not the final one. The novel’s lesson for child and man, man and beast, is that loving often entails losing, and that is horrible, sickening and frightening. But it is not the end. For just when you think there is nothing left to lose, you find something, someone, somehow — and it makes all the difference.

Spring Has Sprung

Right on our dining room table.

You see dad was out plowing up the front lawn yesterday to make way for a kitchen garden. So we had to find a home for the displaced hyacinths and daffodils and what not.

Yes we are going to have Black Prince tomatoes from Siberia, red and yellow Brandywine tomatoes, red and yellow Pear and Rosso Sicilian tomatoes right out our front door. So no more slogging off through the fields for our dinner salad. And arugula. And Genovese basil. And pumpkins. And carrots too. At least I hope carrots too. Angus and Roxie and I love to chomp on raw carrots. Did I tell you that already? Who can remember these days?

And in the meantime, we have a spring garden on our dining table.

My Dog, Myself

Is he talking about us?

My Dog, Myself
By BENOIT DENIZET-LEWIS

Every day, the pressure to create a Facebook page for my dog, Casey, intensifies.

“Everybody’s doing it,” one dog-obsessed friend told me recently. Another, who doesn’t have a dog but occasionally tries to kidnap mine, e-mails me every week or two demanding that I include a chapter about the canine social-media craze in a book I’m working on about dog people. “It’s the future of the Internet,” he insists, “and you and Casey are going to be left behind!”

I have bravely resisted. For one thing, dogs are not human beings (I know, I know, it’s easy to forget that sometimes). For another, I suspect — although I’m most likely just anthropomorphizing here — that my dog hates Facebook, seeing as that the time I waste on the site each day could be better spent (from my dog’s perspective, at least) walking him.

But then came the big news: Mark Zuckerberg and his girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, adopted a criminally adorable Hungarian sheepdog puppy, named him Beast and created a Facebook page for him.

Zuckerberg is late to the party, of course. Hundreds of thousands of dog-loving Americans have already created Facebook profiles for their four-legged terrors, and many others have joined animal social-networking sites (with names like Fuzzter). Then there are those who, instead of featuring a picture of themselves on their Facebook profile, choose to highlight their smiling pets, which has the unintended consequence of proving that many humans do, in fact, look like their dogs. I used to be skeptical of this (Winston Churchill may have looked like a bulldog, but he spent his life with poodles), but several studies appear to prove it.

Do I look like Casey? Why don’t you check out the Facebook profile I just created for him and let me know?

Dara Foster, Stylist for Clients With Four Legs

“What does a doggie stylist do?” Wendy Williams asked Dara Foster on a recent episode of her syndicated daytime talk show.

“Basically the same thing as a human stylist,” Ms. Foster replied. “I dress dogs, and I show people how to live together with their dogs in a stylish way.”

Moments later, a fashion show began; a longhaired Chihuahua named Mei Mei scampered down the studio’s AstroTurf runway. “Mei Mei is wearing the ’80s-inspired punk look,” Ms. Foster narrated, pointing out the tiny plaid kilt and rhinestone-skull tank top. The look, she added, is “giving way to a grunge movement in dog fashion — I swear to God.”

It was an average day in the life of Ms. Foster, who has lately become television’s go-to style expert for all things pet-related. She appears regularly on “Today” on NBC, E!, TV Land and ABC News, dispensing advice on everything from pet home furnishings to baking your own organic dog biscuits.

Not bad for a former fashion magazine editor, who started with a small line of dog collars and a Web site called PupStyle.com eight years ago.

“At some point I realized that there was no real face for the $47 billion pet market in this country,” she said the other day, while browsing at Trixie & Peanut, a pet boutique on East 20th Street in New York. Petite with sparkling blue eyes and a bright blond bob, Ms. Foster, 39, radiated a puppylike sense of optimism. “I figured I could curate the cool up-and-coming products and have an influence on what other pet designers were making.”

Some of these products were on display at Trixie & Peanut. Dressed in a flowing black V-neck, Paige jeans and knee-high Italian leather boots, Ms. Foster pointed out a synthetic mullet wig for dogs (“Can you believe it?” she said) and racks of dog apparel like bridal gowns, bathrobes and denim jumpsuits.

She admired a snowball-shaped chew toy from Planet Dog, an eco-friendly company in Maine. “Toy makers are finally seeing dog toys as aesthetic objects, as things that look good in your home,” she said.

But like a true style arbiter, she can also be frank. She recently declared the Fab Furcedes Pet Bed a “Doggie Don’t” on PupStyle. (Puns are rampant in this market segment — see the brands Bark Jacobs, Chewy Vuiton and Manolo Barknik.)

“It looks cheap, and the joke is over in about four seconds,” Ms. Foster said coolly, running her hand over the car-shaped bed’s plush red taillights.

She stays abreast of pet trends (precooked meals and fluorescent styling gel are hot now, she said) and keeps tabs on dog fashion capitals like Seoul and Tokyo, where fads can reach absurd heights.

“I’ve heard of owners and their dogs getting matching tattoos,” she said. “There’s an element of craziness in pet fashion, obviously, but that’s going way, way overboard. That’s abuse.”

It was the abuse of animals that led to her current career. After graduating from Hunter College in New York, Ms. Foster was a volunteer coordinator for the Animal Care and Control of New York City, a nonprofit pet rescue agency. Perky and camera-ready, she served as its spokeswoman, advocating for animal adoption and foster care on television.

But the center also euthanizes unwanted pets, which weighed heavily on her. She took an “emotional break” from the pet world in 1995 and went to Seventeen magazine, where she worked as a retail editor and organized fashion shows at Midwestern malls, before becoming a freelance fashion stylist for magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal and Marie Claire.

Her transition to pet stylist came in 2002, when she designed a white dog collar with red leather whip-stitching for her dying Jack Russell terrier, Tulip. It drew raves on the sidewalk. In response, she and her husband, Jonathan Spooner, the owner of a boutique Web agency, introduced a brand of dog collars called Dara Foster New York.

“The luxury dog market was in its infancy back then,” Ms. Foster said. “So we thought, Let’s just go crazy. You know — solid silver buckles, 24-karat gold-plated leash hooks.”

Around that time, she started PupStyle, a dog-fashion Web site. It gained national attention in 2003 for its “Free Tinkerbell” dog shirts, bearing a graphic of Paris Hilton and her newly acquired Chihuahua.

But it wasn’t until Ms. Foster covered the first New York Pet Fashion Week, a dog fashion trade show started in 2006, that news media outlets started to call. Clips of her chatty interviews went viral, showing up on Web sites like Coolhunting.com and JoshSpear.com. Soon, she hired a publicist, Alanna Zahn of the Azure Group, who represented Cesar Millan and introduced her to a producer at “Today.”

“At that point it was just on,” Ms. Foster said.

TV, print and Web media now call at least once a week. For a segment on E! titled “Insanely Pampered Hollywood Dogs,” Ms. Foster flew to Los Angeles to outfit the actress and singer Taryn Manning’s Maltese mix, Penguin. In March, on another episode of Wendy Williams’s show, she hosted a red-carpet-inspired runway show, in which an Italian greyhound modeled a dress based on Natalie Portman’s Victor & Rolf gown from the Golden Globes.

Ms. Foster also has a new children’s book, “Now You See It! PupStyle,” with photographs of styled and “naked” dogs, that is being released on Friday.

Ms. Foster is active with the Humane Society, using her semi-celebrity status to raise money. Her dream is to start a national pet food bank, for people who can’t afford to feed, let alone dress, their pets.

“If that could make a difference between hanging onto your pet and dropping them off at a shelter,” she said, “we could save a lot of lives.”