July 15, 2010 @ 06:25

Vanilla cake with cookies & cream filling swirled with chocolate ganach and buttercream frosting.  For my nephew’s baseball team.  Three of the things I had to write on this cake pained me.  1)  Dirty Birds . . . *sigh*  Really?  2) J-Wad, yes I get the A-Rod similarity and it is just a straightforward break down of his actual name.  But oh, man.  3) I’ll let you guess the third . . .   

June 30, 2010 @ 22:29

Strawberry cake, fresh strawberry buttercream and fresh strawberry filling.  I love summer. 

And is it just me?  Or is Ariel a little bit . . .  tarty? 

June 28, 2010 @ 07:02

Last night Puppy was standing by the dining room window, softly rocking from left foot to right, talking to himself quietly.  Every now and then he would punctuate a point he was making to himself by lifting on tiny finger towards the ceiling, his fist curled into a gentle “O”.  Then slowly lower his hand back to his side.  Straight arms.  Softly closed fists.  Occasionally I would call out to him from the kitchen or living room.  Ask him a question.  Engage him for the sake of engaging.  He would respond, then turn his head back to the window.  And there he would continue his murmuring speech to himself.  These days he never stops talking.  Talking talking talking.  It is a constant hum in the background of our lives.  Sometimes rushing into the foreground as he becomes excited over something and chooses to share it with me.  It reminds me of the hum of an oscillating fan that’s out of whack.  The drone of the fan as it sits staring to the right is steady, soft, not something of which you are truly aware unless you consciously tune into it.  Then there will be a little tick or pop and the fan will swing your way.  You’ll get a rush of air as it swings by you.  A moment of relief as it lifts your hair from the back of your neck.  And then it makes a soft little thud as it settles into its position staring to the left for awhile.  Do you remember those days when you were a kid, when it was so hot you couldn’t sleep?  That heavy sticky feeling where your arms are made of lead, the sheets were too weighty to stand them lying over your legs and not even the cool side of the pillow can soothe you to sleep.  When all you can do is find that spot, the coolest spot you can, and wait for relief.  That is how I’ve been feeling lately.  Strung out and exhausted, the way you do on a day so hot that the air conditioner cannot keep up.  Not unhappy.  Just exhausted.  Exactly like a night after a long summer day when you were ten. 

Puppy hasn’t been sleeping almost at all lately.  Some nights he is awake until 5 a.m.  I tuck him into bed at eight.  And when I go back at ten to check, he’s still wide eyed.  So I settle him in with me, to keep my eye on him and make sure his wide eyed alertness doesn’t turn into wandering full out.  He lays in the bed beside me talking in whispers to himself.  He is planning.  Some immense new wonder of the world is being crafted inside there.  I wonder what it is that he is constantly building.  If you watch carefully, you can see him stop, reverse, and change a part of his plan.  And no amount of pleading, or redirecting or scolding can pull him out of his plans and force him into sleep.  He will sometimes pull me from my half sleep to ask me cryptic questions.  Like, “Mommy, how much is 123, 455 plus 12.”  Is this some quantity of concrete he will need for his colosseum’s columns?  The number of bricks he will need for a section of his great wall?  Or is he simply stringing together numbers in some endless equation in his mind?  My tiny little Sheldon?  Sometimes I think he is designing some sort of game in his head.  Yesterday afternoon he asked me from the back seat as we drove home, suddenly popping out of his private conversation with himself, “Mommy, which option will you choose:  Story time, Activities, Picture Place, or Taking Care of Me?” 

“I will always choose taking care of you.”  I told him. 

“Mommy, you don’t always have to choose Taking Care of Me.”  He said. 

“But if I don’t take care of you, who will?”  I said. 

“We can have a multi-player function!”  He grinned at his own brilliance with this solution. 

Maybe that’s it.  Maybe inside his mind, he’s building that mythical Village.  A place where it’s safe for a Mommy to sleep while her wunderkind is too busy working out all the great big world’s mysteries to find sleep for himself. 

June 27, 2010 @ 22:28

This cake looks a little dry in the photo, but it matches the bedding chosen for the baby’s room.  It was pretty and sleek in person.  And dark chocolate cake filled with white chocolate mousse with a dark chocolate swirl in the middle.  That’s not boring, right? 

June 18, 2010 @ 06:19

So this chocolate ganache may be the world’s most perfect food.  Sorry Chiquita banana, but really?  It’s fabulous, it makes the peanutbuttercream experience amazing.  People take the first bite and then look up at me with surprise on their faces.  It’s that good.  But . . .  it photographs like crap.  Maybe it’s just that I’m no photographer.  This glossy gorgeous chocolate makes the flash crazy.  I may need to take a digital photography class.  So for now, I’ll just tell you, this is a fairly big, 20″ round, Ubercake, peanutbuttercream, chocolate cake with chocolate sauce and chocolate ganache.  And in real life, it looks awesome. 

May 24, 2010 @ 20:12

I’m not sure of the entire theme of this wedding.  Some Viking, some Roman, and last I heard the bridesmaids were going to dance down the aisle to The Time Warp, yes from Rocky Horror Picture Show.  Colorful . . . 

And why is it that the cakes always look lumpier in the pictures than they did in person? 

May 12, 2010 @ 06:54

So this weekend the boy’s are off to their daddys for the weekend.  And I?  Well, I am going to cook lunch and dinner for about a hundred and fifty of my friends.  With the help of about a half dozen of my best friends.  Because I’ve lost my ever lovin’ mind.  Plus I think it will be fun.  Then next weekend is the wedding of a couple of friends for which I’m catering the dinner and making the cakes.  Last weekend I did some precooking.  Baked cookies and tart shells and brownies, all recipes that freeze nicely, to get a bit ahead of the game.  And for the next week, I’m going to mentally try to figure out how to make the Colosseum in Rome out of sugar . . . 

May 10, 2010 @ 06:06

Cake catch up . . . 

May 05, 2010 @ 03:12

Live music and a slight head injury! 

Tonight we went to see Bear’s orchestra concert at the high school auditorium.  While talking to another parent outside on the steps, Puppy decided to see if he could do a hand stand.  Classic parenting moment.  Can’t move fast enough to stop it.  He landed forehead down on the edge of a concrete step.  But he’s tough as nails, and hardly cried at all.  Very much like the shovel incident . . .  It looked like a fairly simple scrape. 

So we went in for the concert.  Which was incredible.  It amazes me every time I see Bear play.  He’s gotten this strange shyness about practicing at home.  He won’t practice in front of anyone.  When he’s practicing in his room with the door shut I’ll mute the television or hover in the hallway to listen, but haven’t gotten to really listen to him much at home in the last year.  So seeing him play is huge treat. 

By the time we came out of the auditorium, however, the scrape had become a lump.  Like this . . . 

By the time we were almost home it had almost doubled in size and was turning a pretty ominous blue around the edges.  Well, ominous to me anyway. So off to the ER we went.  Which was surprisingly full of angry people for a non-full moon night.  Including one person who alternated between yelling across the room at the intake staff and walking into the hall to call her bail bondsman.  No . . .  really . . .  Little man mostly just thought he was having an adventure. We made our own Wheel of Fortune wheel drawn on a notebook and made a spinner out of an ink pen and a hair barrette from the bottom of my purse. Amazing how good at the game he is. Cheaty McCheaterson. We played the rhyme game for which Puppy has declared me the ultimate champion for thinking of a rhyme to Bankrupt.  I’m telling you he’s totally into Wheel of Fortune right now.  

Three hours later we saw the doctor.  Pretty good turn around for an ER visit, I gotta say.  No signs of concussion.  I’m now staying awake for the night to make sure he doesn’t begin to vomit and to wake him every three hours.  Which, thankfully, now feels just like a precaution.  The lump is now back to the size it is in the picture here.  And all is well.  He’s gonna have an exciting story to tell at school tomorrow.  Lord help, I don’t want anymore exciting stories this month.  Pretty please . . . 

April 29, 2010 @ 06:57

Let me explain… no, there is too much, lemme sum up.  This past week’s stats: 

1. Number of lawn mowers purchased: 3
2. Number of lawn mowers returned to Walmart: 2
3. Number of loose dogs chased by and chased around my neighborhood:  2
4. Number of small kitchen fires set:  1
5. Number of field trips attended:  1
6. Number of seven year olds at the Museum while we were:  ALL of them 
7. Number of cake requests completely blanked on because I’m so overscheduled I don’t know what month it is:  1
8. Number of trips to the gym:  0
9. Number of pints of ice cream consumed for comforts sake:  3, Oh, hey, there’s why I’m not thin… 
10. Number of loads of laundry done:  I lost count at 14

On Saturday, I went to my local Walmart.  I spoke with a young man in the garden center about a particular lawn mower, he was very nice and helpful.  He answered all my questions and told me that when my shopping was done I could pull up to the garden center to purchase the lawn mower and someone would help me load the purchase.  But before I had finished buying my groceries, the bottom fell out of the sky.  Since there was no way I’d be mowing that day and it would just make all of us end up soaked to the skin to load up a mower into a Honda in that downpour, I decided to come back the next morning.  The woman working in the garden center on Sunday morning was very different than the guy on Saturday.  When I asked if someone could help me load up a lawn mower she told me that it wasn’t that heavy and that I shouldn’t have any trouble with it myself.  She lifted them all the time.  She’d get me a cart. 

Uh, yeah. 

Are you kidding me?  You don’t know me.  I could have just had my spleen removed.  I could be a secret shopper from corporate head quarters.  I could be your boss’ wife.  Instead I went and got my own cart and wrestled it out to my car alone.  That afternoon, Bear and I assembled the few loose parts to the mower, followed the instructions for the oil and gas and then attempted to mow the lawn.  The mower worked for about 45 seconds before the engine made a terrible wracking noise and the engine locked up.  I took apart the push handle, loaded it all back into my car and returned to the store.  I am told that the “lawn mower guy” will not be in until Tuesday, but if I’d like I can exchange it.  In hopes that this was just a fluke I made the exchange for another model of the exact same mower.  I returned home.  We go through every step again.  With the exact same results.  Right down to the mower functioning for approximately 45 seconds and then locking up.  I return to the store.  As I arrive a young man is collecting carts in the parking lot.  I ask if I may have a cart for a large return and he offers to help me load the item.  Imagine my surprise.  My surprise however quickly turns to disgust (not with the helpful kid but with Walmart) when the young man informs me that this is the seventh or eighth time he’s seen someone returning this brand of lawn mower in recent days.  I give up on hoping to make this purchase work and get my money back.  (These were Weed Eater brand mowers, by the way, if you are in the market for one, I’d skip this brand.) So, I go to Lowe’s.  I buy a mower.  I buy a service plan with it, too.  I return home with it and Bear begins to put together the loose parts.  It’s getting closer to dusk so I go into the house to start dinner.  I am just getting ready to pan sear a mess of fish (enough for leftovers, so I’ve got two skillets heating up olive oil to about face of the sun hot) when Bear calls in the back door that he can’t figure out something.  I walk out the back door to see.  Unfortunately, I get so engrossed I don’t realize how long I’ve been away from the stove.  It does occur to me, though, so I send Bear into the house to turn off the burners until I can figure out why the mower’s pull cord won’t pull.  About three seconds later I hear Bear yelling from the house, “FIRE!”  I run in to see a pretty healthy column of flames, about ceiling high rising up from the back burner of the stove, thankfully the front burner pan’s contents have not yet ignited.  There is a heavy layer of smoke in the room.  I make Bear leave the house immediately.  Puppy has been on the back patio during this whole process, so thankfully he missed it all.  I get the fire put out.  Then look around.  That heavy layer of smoke is throughout the entire house.  There are swirling streaks of smokey soot up the side of the cabinet that sits above the vent-a-hood and up the wall beside the stove all the way to the ceiling.  The sink, where I managed to get rid of the fire, (it was probably entirely stupid to carry that flaming pan to the sink and I’m probably lucky to not have been burned) is covered in a layer of soot that looks like black greasy cornmeal.  I felt like an exhausted idiot. 

I get Charlie tucked away in the back bedroom and prop open the front and back doors with every fan I can to clear out the house.  I know that cooking dinner now is a lost cause.  I make sure all is well on the back patio with Bear, take his drive thru dinner order, and Puppy and I head over a few blocks to the nearest fast food.  As I pull up to our drive way, I realize that Bear is standing in the front yard, feet spread wide, arms out like an airplane, facing off two sturdy (I’d guess about 40 pounds each) Bassett Hounds.  They are circling back and forth from the street to our front yard, barking furiously.  I park in our driveway and put Bear in the car with his brother and go across the street to see if they know the dogs.  I learn that the happy hippy love your neighbor community center across the street couldn’t care less about their neighbors as they slam the door in my face and leave me to deal with the loose dogs alone.  The next hour is filled with a combination of chasing and being chased.  Nearly getting hit by a car and nearly seeing the loose dogs get hit more than once.  Sitting on the front steps after the local police department cruisers took over circle the neighborhood with spotlights searching for the escapees with no luck.  Monday I took a vacation day and continued airing out the house, laundered all the comforters and curtains and every scrap of fabric that I could, washed down the walls of the kitchen and dining room, learned to love the Magic Eraser, and got the house back to working order.  Tuesday I played catch up at work.  Wednesday I attended a field trip to the Discovery Museum with Puppy and about 120 other first graders.  And today?  I just want a nap . . .  Maybe I’ll get one on Saturday.