Of Mice and Snakes

Yesterday was a super lazy snake day. Barbossa ate his two live mice without too much hassle. The first one did bite him on the nose and as soon as I saw Barbossa pull his head back and try to hide it underneath his coils, I thought "here we go..." fully preparing myself for feeding failure. But, surprisingly, my shy baby pulled himself together and went back out in search of the ferocious mouse. He is a good 15 times larger than the mouse, so really I wasn't chewing my nails in anticipation. He ate both and wanted more.
The only one that didn't eat this week was Coral. She's about to shed. Snakes shed periodically, depending on their size, age, health level. My Fearsome Seven eat pretty much every week so they shed regularly, every couple of months. The process takes about a week and a half, sometimes two weeks for the older snakes. First you see their scales get darker, opaque, their bellies might get pink. Barbossa's stomach gets a bright pink, as if he had a rash, but Topkapi's, for example, doesn't get pink until much much later. Then their eyes get kind of hazy and a few days later they are completely sky blue. At this point they can't see well. They usually don't have great eye sight, but when they're shedding it's even worse. Some of them will get a bit aggressive, in my case CocoRosie starts acting like a mamba. Most of them won't take any food, and will not want to move at all.
When snakes are about to shed, their humidity requirements go up, they need to be at 65-70% humidity, which in an air-conditioned house is not as simple as it sounds. The babies I have in the garage are fine because of the wonderful Miami swamp heat, but the ones upstairs give me a ton of work. I have to mist their cages much more often than I usually do. And on top of it all, they HATE the mister, so they contort their bodies so not a singly droplet of water touches them.

I was so bored yesterday, and what better way to cure that than baking! (or reading, or singing, or swimming, or...)
So I made a chocolate cake with a Cinnamon frosting. I followed the recipe of a Coffee flavored frosting, but it sucked so I changed it a bit, or more like a lot. Here are the recipes:

Chocolate Cake:

2 cups sugar
1 3/4 cups flour
3/4 cup cocoa powder
3 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
2 eggs
1 cup milk
1/2 cup oil
2 tsp. vanilla extract
1 cup hot coffee

Preheat oven to 350 F.
Mix sugar, flour, cocoa, baking powder, salt. Add eggs, milk, oil, vanilla. Beat on high. Add hot coffee. Pour into prepared pan, bake 30-35 minutes.

Frosting:

2 tbsp. butter, softened
1 1/4 cup powdered sugar
3 tbsp. hot coffee
1 tbsp. cocoa powder
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 tsp. ground cinnamon

Mix it all together. Allow cake to cool completely, then frost to your liking.