Eating

Cake blogging on demand!

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i’m demanding a new blog entry…. it’s been 3 days. =)

That was the email I received from my sister-in-law this morning. Since she’s agreed to watch the kids overnight this weekend, I’ll comply. Also, the kids are upstairs playing “Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle,” so I have a spare moment. (Even though said spare moment should be dedicated to folding laundry. Oh well.)

Earlier this week, I made a carrot cake for a friend’s birthday. I love carrot cake, and so does she. It’s the foundation of our friendship. There’s a place in town that claims to have the best carrot cake on earth, so we briefly thought about ordering one from them. Until we found out it would cost fifty dollars. And here’s one of my life rules: Do not pay $50 for a cake.

I’ve never made a carrot cake before, so I searched high and low for a great carrot cake recipe, finally deciding on the highly lauded “Sam’s Famous Carrot Cake” with whipped cream cheese frosting. The cake had a good flavor, but it was so dense that I don’t think it qualified as “cake.” I’m 98% certain that had more to do with my equipment than with the recipe, though. I’ve been using silicon cake pans, and I think they’re causing heightened baked-good density. It may also be that the oven’s temperature isn’t what it should be. Someday, I’ll pick up an oven thermometer to keep in there. Until then, I’ll use a different cake pan next time and see whether that makes a difference.

So the cake itself was disappointing — it has, nevertheless, been consumed already — but the frosting? Oh, the frosting! It was terrific. It would make a great fruit dip. Even though that would pretty much negate any nutritional value in the fruit.

Flotsam / Jetsam

Time to fill out a new bracket

We never actually did our date night this weekend, because I was worn out on Saturday night. I went to bed at 9, which left very little room between the kids going to sleep and me calling it a day. We did, however, have lots of fun on Friday night debating the merits of candies. Tomato Nation is currently holding the N Candy AA, and the polls for the first round opened today. I will be following this closely, although I probably won’t be buying all of the candies, nailing them to the wall bracket-style and eating the losers, as my friend Carrie suggested. Awesome though it would be to have a candy wall.

Bandwagons, Mighty List

I almost made a blister on my thumb

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My Mighty List has been lurking over there on the sidebar for more than a year now. Until this weekend, I’d only managed to cross off one item. And that was “make cream soda.” Which required just north of zero effort, and I still didn’t do it until Rockford said, “Let’s do this!”

Anyway, the list had been sitting over there for a long time, and nothing had been getting crossed off, and I finally realized that no one was going to do this stuff for me. Jimmy Carter wasn’t going to call me, that short story wasn’t going to write itself, and to be perfectly honest? I’ve gained 10 pounds rather than losing 30 over the last year. Yikes. If I wanted to get any of this list stuff done, I decided, I’d need to take some initiative.

Habitat buildSo a month or so ago, I signed up to work on a Habitat house. On Saturday, 10 other women and I framed walls and put them in place. We finished two sides of a house, and it was awesome. This particular house is our area’s Women Build project for this year. As the name suggests, it’s built entirely by women. I’m so glad that I finally did it, even though I am still crazy sore. I’ll definitely do it again.

I’ve also been taking peeks at other people’s Mighty Lists, and they’re inspired me to take on a couple more items. Amber at The Amber Show suggested that someone add “Bust out of a paper wall” to their list, and I thought, “That looks like fun!” So I’m adding it. Now I just have to figure out how to make a giant paper wall.

The other one, I’ve been considering since I first saw it on Karen’s list. She’s committed to taking 1,000 portraits, which I think is a really lovely idea. But it also sounds like something that would, at some point, require talking to strangers. Which, well, I don’t love so much. But I’m pretty sure that the one of the major points of the Mighty List is Stretching Your Limits and Getting Out of Your Comfort Zone and all that. So I’m going to go for it. I started on Saturday evening, by taking pictures of some dogs. Which in my project totally counts.