The Hoddle of Coffee: Tottenham Hotspur news and links for Monday, May 13

Hi, all!

In case anyone was curious: it is the week leading up to Eurovision, but I won’t do another week-long session of Eurovision Hoddles. I may have something a week from now, though, once I’ve seen the whole show.

Ramble of the Day

Recently, I upped my average intake of coffee cake. I had it twice over the span of about 15 days, as opposed to my previous intake of once in a while. I’ll fully admit that I have not spent a lot of time thinking about it since high school, where it was available at the somewhat rare breakfasts hosted for students at special events, but I recently had some at a coffee shop that was very tasty. That led to me indulging again (this time from a different place), and also brought me to a question: Is coffee cake a hard thing to mess up?

It wasn’t these two experiences that led to me to this conclusion as much as it reminded me of another one. Several months ago, I ate some items out of a hospital cafeteria, something I would not encourage. On the few occasions I looked for snacks, I opted for something that was seemingly difficult to screw up, like pain au chocolat. I was shocked by how bad it was, but I have to imagine wrapping it in plastic to be shipped and then sold isn’t great for something like that. On a following day, I opted for the coffee cake, which was also wrapped in plastic, and green tea, which I had to go for because the coffee sucked there. The green tea was more than fine, but the coffee cake was surprisingly enjoyable. I made nothing of it at the time, but simply enjoyed it.

I don’t quite have more to add to my half-baked hypothesis. Though I’ve increased my thinking on coffee cake, I still haven’t thought a lot about it, and you can probably tell that I’ve never tried to make some of my own. I just took a look at a recipe and it seems pretty simple, and therefore somewhat difficult to mess up. It only adds to that hypothesis that coffee cake is the resident sweet treat that’s pretty easy to enjoy regardless of who’s making it.

tl;dr: Coffee cake might be the world’s easiest baked good to make.

Links of the Day

Agent Mino Raiola has been handed a three month ban by FIFA following his three month ban from the Italian FA.

The office of Azerbaijan’s foreign minister, Elmar Mammadyarov, has said Arsenal’s Henrikh Mkhitaryan will be able to play in the Europa League final despite tensions with Armenia.

Scott Parker has been appointed the Fulham manager on a full time basis three months after stepping in as a caretaker.

Neymar has been suspended for three matches by the French Football Federation for hitting a fan following Paris Saint-Germain’s Coupe de France loss to Rennes.

Today’s longer read: Tariq Panja on some of UEFA’s plans to restructure the Champions League, and possibly exclude a number of smaller teams in the process, for The New York Times