Eggware.XYZ Blog - Page 2

Dunkin’ Donuts’ Valentines donuts: a banal donut

By Eggware.XYZ

It’s Valentine’s Day, and you know what that means! That’s right, it’s time for all the chain coffee shops to release their seasonal weird pink sludge!

This time of year, Dunkin’ Donuts has released the “Cupid’s Choice Donut” (Bavarian ‘Kreme’ filling, strawberry frosting, and sprinkles) and the “Brownie Batter Donut” (brownie batter filling, chocolate frosting, and sprinkles), both heart-shaped for the season.

Yeah, not very creative. Dunkin’ Donuts (it will never be ‘Dunkin’ to us) is not exactly the place where you get fine cuisine. It’s joked that Taco Bell’s menu is the same five ingredients shuffled around, but at Dunkin’ Donuts things are even worse. Only a fool would order anything except a donut here, and the only real variety is if you want a yeast donut or a cake donut. Frostings, flavors, fillings – it all blends to be one beige blur of ring-shaped pastry.

That doesn’t stop them from trying every holiday season, though. Back in 2020 they had their Spicy Ghost Pepper Donut, which seriously tested us. Last year, they had a Cookie Butter Cold Brew, which we weren’t around to review, but it was Just Fine. They also had a cookie butter-topped (filled? something like that) donut, which we did not get to try, because we currently live in an area where any seasonal fast food product is at least a dollar more than advertised and most of the time doesn’t even exist.

But hey, we managed to get the heart donuts this year. Let’s make the most of it, alright?

How to make Toy for Cat

By brilokuloj

Or, how can we set and achieve realistic goals?

In 2011 I decided to get into sewing, with the express and singular goal of sewing my girlfriend a life-sized plushie of Slowpoke, her favorite Pokemon. Nothing gave me this idea except my weird, strange little brain, that when she said Slowpoke was her favorite Pokemon I thought “I’ll make you one!”

I started practicing sewing, literally just the basic stitches, on scraps of old underwear I wasn’t wearing anymore. Then I eventually got that pink and cream fleece, and I started teaching myself how to draft my own patterns, with the help of many many online tutorials by the likes of much more accomplished people (Abby Glassenberg, I owe you my life).

My girlfriend didn’t just put up with my piles of unfinished projects, she encouraged me through all of it. I knew she was ‘The One’ because she believed in me no matter how often my hobbies shifted. I felt supported. We moved in together. We got married. We adopted a cat.

And, as it turns out, sewing is just a great basic life skill for me. Even as I stopped making plushies as frequently (after finding out most people are not willing to pay for the amount of labor that goes into a project), I could mend my clothes in a snap so I wasted less money on new shirts, I was much more dexterous with my fingers, I built up better pain tolerance, and – most thrillingly – I discovered that 3D art is just… my favorite thing ever. As I got better at sewing, I got more into 3D modeling, because 3D models helped me visualize sewing patterns. All of my disconnected hobbies constructed me, a fully-realized person.

I did not ever make that Slowpoke. I still don’t know if I could; the ears were always the thing that stumped me the most. Now I don’t even know if I should; she is no longer into Pokemon.

But that Slowpoke taught me a lot. And, as sort of a sappy thanks to my wife and all of the people who supported me (even unknowingly, like Abby Glassenberg), I am going to walk you through the internal process of me designing my latest sewing project: a toy for my cat. It’s about as much of a tutorial as my disordered brain will let me make!

Can I offer you an egg substitute in these trying times?

By Eggware.XYZ

As you surely may have heard, a dozen eggs is currently worth $5 (five big ones) in many places in America. This may be the very thing tearing the fabric of our nation apart, as eggs form the basis of most breakfast foods, the most important meal of the day. It’s also testing our patience, since we have Egg in our goddamn name, for God’s sake.

But, since we have Egg in our goddamn name, you can trust us when we say that we’re Egg experts (eggsperts? huh that’s unfortunate – ed). We’ve assembled a top five list of quick, easy and fun substitutes for eggs in your day-to-day cooking, whether you’re baking, frying, or eating five dozen of them raw.

The Laundromat and the Single Red Die

By brilokuloj

There are a few known universal pains of being an adult: going to work, washing the dishes, and doing the laundry.

I am nearly 30 and yet, to this day, I have still managed to somehow avoid ever stepping foot inside a laundromat. I have always had access to a washing machine, whether it was in the basement or in a nearby room in the complex. Well, I guess people might consider that last thing a laundromat (especially because you have to pay for it) but at least I don’t need a car to get to it.

But recently, our apartment complex’s laundry room has been shut down, on account of the Big Plumbing Project that has been ruining my sleep recently. So, no washing machine. I have to go to… THE LAUNDROMAT.

WE ARE BACK!

By Eggware.XYZ

The year is 2023. You haven’t heard from our humble little blog in (double-checks) a year and a half (looks again) or uh, two years if you weren’t subscribed to us on Patreon. You can probably guess why, since you’ve been through it too: our world caught on fire, and just as unceremoniously decided it was no longer on fire, which was somehow even harder to deal with than the first half.

Times have been hard. Masks were worn, coughs were coughed. We experienced one glorious month of living-wage YouTube revenue and then watched it evaporate into dust. Chicken sandwiches are no longer funny. Eggs are $4.89. But we’re still here.

I (Will) am still in the progress of dusting the shelves. I think all the Patreon posts are no longer Patreon-locked, so you can go through those if you haven’t seen them yet.

At some point the nice-looking blog theme I worked so hard on suddenly turned out to be automatically generating a robots.txt file (blocking it from Google searches), and I couldn’t figure out how the hell to get it to stop doing that, so I panicked and swapped it out for some godawful unreadable theme with flowers in the header. Today I’ve swapped it out for… this one — which is honestly pretty sucky for my tastes, I don’t like how much it looks like Modern Blogs, and I realized mid-post that you can’t even see the author, which is a big problem for this blog. So I’m gonna have to swap it out again soon and pray that EggwareXYZ gets a coherent theme one day.

But now you can read the posts. That’s good enough for me.

From the Archives: Wobbledogs 2021

By Eggware.XYZ

Aldi’s ginger beer actually tastes like ginger

By Eggware.XYZ

Ginger ale is a good drink. Everybody likes it. It has a place in everybody’s hearts as a perfect cocktail mixer, a medicinal remedy, and a good drink in its own right. But did you know that there are multiple kinds of ginger ale? Not many people do and content themselves drinking dry ginger ale all the time. Yes, your normal Schweppes or Canada Dry is only the entry level of ginger ale! I bet you haven’t even tried a real, old-style golden ginger ale, have you? Go get yourself a can of Vernor’s and try it. We’ll wait.

Okay, now that you’re back from that ginger-induced blackout period, it’s good, right? It’s really good, and it tastes much more gingery than the Pepsi and Coke owned swill you’re used to. So imagine being someone who ACTUALLY likes the taste of ginger sodas and having to deal with only that junk on the shelves. Yeah, it’s hard. I know, it’s so, so hard. You can stop crying for us now.

But there might be hope on the horizon. Aldi has started selling their own brand of ginger beer, and since we’re dedicated Aldi shoppers, we couldn’t be more excited. Will it be the gingery kick we’ve been missing from our lives?

Burger King’s Ch’King is just exhausting

By Eggware.XYZ

More chicken sandwiches. This time it’s Burger King.

What else can we say? When’s the last time we reviewed a fast food item that wasn’t a chicken sandwich? We think we’re done and they pull us back in. We really, really are starting to hate this. We are tired of chicken. We are tired of sandwiches. We are tired of chicken sandwiches.

But Burger King did one and we have to review it, because literally nobody is doing anything else. This shit sucks and we hate it. But maybe Burger King did it pretty good this time, which is a moot point, because Popeyes already did it perfect. But what the hell, we might as well try it.

The BTS meal is better than their music, probably

By Eggware.XYZ

K-Pop! It’s everywhere! You cannot go by a single damn day without some K-Pop related trend on Twitter ruining your life. It isn’t news by any means that K-Pop is conquering the music world in a way not seen since the British Invasion, but what is news is the BTS meal at McDonald’s. The Beatles sure didn’t get a McDonald’s tie in, did they?

McDonald’s has been doing tie-in meals as a “thing” for a while now, starting with the wildly popular Travis Scott meal and following up with the somewhat less popular J Balvin meal. Now McDonald’s has teamed up with the most popular band in the world, the K-Pop boy group BTS to make an all new meal. What could go wrong with the biggest fast food restaurant teaming up with the biggest pop group? Well, a lot, probably, but we’re going to have to find that out ourselves.

McDonald’s doesn’t need their Crispy Chicken Sandwich

By Eggware.XYZ

The chicken sandwich wars rage on. Everybody and their mother has a decent chicken sandwich now. It’s basically money in the bank, right? Just slap a patty on some buns with mayo and pickles, and you’re set. Why wouldn’t you do it? You’ve gotta keep up with the Joneses, right?

What do you do when you are the Joneses?

McDonald’s has never been much for a “follower” in the fast food industry. They aren’t even really trendsetters – McDonald’s just does whatever it wants to and enjoys its comfortable space as the leader of the Big Three, as the biggest fast food restaurant franchise in the world, and lets the rest of them scramble for scraps.

But some trends are just too big to ignore. Even Coca-Cola had to bend to the rise of diet soda in the 60s, with the introduction of Tab and eventually Diet Coke. Chick-fil-A is slowly rising to make the Big Three a Big Four, and the Chicken Sandwich Wars are fundamentally a response to that. If you don’t have a good chicken sandwich, you’re being left in the dust. Everybody is getting on board the train. So what took McDonalds so long?

And you know what – should they have taken even longer with their Crispy Chicken Sandwich?