Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Fort Booth

This is what my kids do when the power goes out. No internet, video games, movies, or Wii to brain suck them into a stupor. I'm thinking the power should go out more often ;)

Monday, July 27, 2009

My First Cake

My neighbor called me last week and asked if I would make a cake for her daughter's 9th birthday. After taking a couple of classes my confidence is a bit better, I'm still no great cake decorator, but figured I need the practice so I told her yes. Now to me, if a cake isn't chocolate somewhere in there it just isn't worth the calories, but her daughter doesn't like chocolate (I know, strange child), so she wanted a strawberry cake with pink frosting. Talk about pink overload. And having never made a strawberry cake before, I wasn't sure where to begin. I've seen strawberry cake mixes, but I refuse to go that route. So I found a strawberry cake recipe from scratch, and made some cupcakes from it to test on some other friends. They liked it, so the cake part was figured out. I still needed a filling. I don't really like filling cake with just more frosting, too sugary, too much frosting, besides I wanted a strawberry filling. I was hesitant to use just fresh strawberries because they can mold once in the cake and they are very wet and and all that extra moisture leaches into the cake. I thought a curd filling might be nice, I love lemon curd, and wondered if I could do a strawberry curd. I couldn't find any recipes for strawberry curd, so I adapted a lemon curd recipe, but the results were not what I wanted. Unfortunately a waste of ingredients. But a learning lesson at least. I ended up finding a strawberry cream cake filling recipe and gave that a try. It uses fresh strawberries, sugar, water, gelatin and some cream, that's it. But the consistency is very jello like. I tried thinning it with some extra cream, and went ahead and used it in the final cake, I'll have to wait for some feedback. I asked my neighbor to pick out some flowers that she wanted used, she chose yellow mums, white daisies, and pink primroses. Mums are not my favorite to make, but at least I got some extra practice making them for the cake, and I think I greatly increased my mum making ability. So the final product is a strawberry cake with strawberry cream filling with pink butter cream frosting. Pink overload it is, but for a little girl, hopefully it will please.

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Blogger is Driving Me Crazy!!!!!

Ugh! I write a post, then download photos, and my formatting gets all jacked up. And I mean All Jacked Up.
I cannot move the photos around like I used to, scrolling down until I get to where I want to put them, because when I hit the bottom of the page it just stops. Won't let me scroll down to move a photo. It didn't used to do this, what is going on?

Therefore I can only upload one photo at a time, because if there is already a photo on the page, I can't move past it with another. Ugh! Can you tell I'm annoyed? Plus I keep telling the kids to leave me alone, and I'll get this done sooner. But there is no such thing as leaving me alone. Even the most mundane things are so important to them, that they must interrupt, so what should take me five minutes, takes me thirty. Then they complain about what is taking me so long.

So here is one photo to help counteract all my bitchiness. New PJ's from Grandma DeeDee.
***And it did it again, I added my photo, and had to go back and correct my formatting and could only move the photo one page at a time.