Care Package: Vol. 45

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The world is a rough place. Being a human can be exhausting. I can’t make the bad stuff go away, but I can share some cozy things that might help you feel a little better.

Watch: Coach Jackie

This is one of the few times I’ll recommend an “influencer” as part of your cozy experience. I first came across Coach Jackie on TikTok, with her general women’s sports coverage and in particular her recaps of the 2024 summer Olympics. I’m not a huge sports person, but I found that I really enjoyed the kind of coverage Coach Jackie does. She obviously knows her stuff about athletics and the industries in which female athletes function, but she also brings a lot of humor and heart to her reporting.

On the one hand, Coach Jackie has a regular series about “is she gay or does she just play X sport,” which is a fun look at sexuality and gender norms in contemporary society and in women’s sports. But she also routinely covers the stories behind the scores, from her recap about the recently and wildly successful WNBA labor negotiations to the first team championship for college women’s fencing to Oksana Masters winning all the Olympic medals. Coach Jackie explains the structures and rules in a way that’s easy to understand if you don’t follow basketball or rowing or hockey or ice dancing, but also emphasizes the real people behind the stories and why these moments matter to the athletes and to the fans.

You can watch Coach Jackie on TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube, and feel all that good love for women’s sports.

Play: Azul

I’d heard about Azul before playing it. People said it was a good group game and that it was fun and pretty, but I didn’t actually get to experience until recently, when a friend came over for a game night. One of the games he brought with him was Azul and it ended up being a great, casual game, even for people like me, whose brains routinely black out during the rules explanation phase.

The game is structured so the players are like masons creating a ceramic wall mural out of various tiles. The players take turns selecting different patterned and colored tiles to build their walls and get points from the designs they create, but they lose points from extra tiles they’ve acquired.

It’s a low pressure and fun game for a group, and the game design makes for an aesthetically pleasing experience. Highly recommended!

Eat: Coconut Bundt Cake

I love getting to pick out the bake the special treat for my birthday, but now that I have two kids who have winter birthdays right before mine, I get pickier about what I want for my treat while also keeping it to something everyone will enjoy. This coconut cake was the perfect choice! I’d made it before, but it had been a while, and I kept having a bite and thinking, “Wow, this is a good cake!” I added a chocolate glaze as well for extra deliciousness.

Coconut Bundt Cake
Adapted from Kiss My Bundt
Serves a bunch

Ingredients

2 1/2 cups flour
2 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
3/4 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 1/2 cup sugar
3 eggs, at room temperature
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
1 cup coconut milk
1/4 cup whole milk
3/4 tsp coconut extract, (optional)
1 cup mini chocolate chips (optional)
chocolate glaze like from this recipe (optional)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter or spray a large bundt pan with cooking spray. I find bundt pans hard to get cake out of so don’t go easy on this step.

Sift flour and baking powder and salt together in a medium bowl. Set aside.

Beat butter until soft, then add the sugar. Mix for about two minutes. Add the eggs to the batter one at a time, then beat all together for another couple of minutes.

Mix vanilla and the two milks together, plus the coconut extract if using.

Alternate adding the flour mixture and the milk mixture to the butter mixture, starting and ending with the flour. (So 1/3 flour, 1/2 milk, 1/3 flour, 1/2 milk, 1/3 flour.) The batter should be all mixed together at the end. Add mini chocolate chips if using.

Add the batter to the prepared pan. Bake cake until an inserted toothpick or cake tester comes out clean. Check around 40 minutes but it’ll probably take closer to an hour or an hour and ten minutes.

Take out of the oven and let cool. Once it’s cool, flip it out of the pan and add your ganache if using.

Do Good

There’s a lot on fire right now, so it’s a good time to call your representatives about:

Ending the deeply dangerous, expensive, and illegal war with Iran.
Defunding ICE, which is bringing nothing but fear and violence to our communities.
Stopping H.R. 7661, which is in effect a bill that would allow for widespread book banning.

Bodo Bulletin

This week in Bodo news:

It’s technically spring but we’re still suspicious of what the weather means for walkies.

Annie Cardi