The. Best. Weekend.

Mercifully, after one of the first non-death-related worst day in years, I had the best weekend I've had in years.

On Saturday I decided to take it easy.  See the blog just below this one to see how I woke up.  After breakfast, Marcus informed me that all of our towels were in the washing machine (and it didn't occur to me to use the in-reserve towels).  Since my shower was postponed, I was left with no choice but to take an old quilt into the back yard, change into an itsy-bitsy black bikini (that I would wear only in my back yard and never in public), and lay in the yard reading the rest of Cutting for Stone.   

I came inside when I got hungry for lunch.  I became increasingly aware of my desperate need for a shower, so I put string cheese in the microwave, melted it into delicious perfection (which, by the way, is the best snack in the known universe), quickly ate it, and hopped in the shower.  When I got out, I packed up all of the stuff I bought to make the Cinnamon Pull-Apart Bread from www.joythebaker.com, grabbed my husband, my most excellent dog, and high-tailed it to my folks' house.  

The thing I love most about baking (2nd only to eating the finished product) is the fact that I can sit and read between steps.  Yesterday's experiment had the dough "resting" for an hour, and then again for 30-45 minutes, and THEN baking in the oven for another 30-35.  That's a lot of sitting on my butt with my Kindle in hand.  I finished Cutting for Stone during those reading opportunities, and it was nothing short of fantastic!  

The Cinnamon Pull-Apart bread turned out perfectly, and we all ate way too much of it after eating lasagna leftovers, which were also magnificent!

Oohh... Ahh...

After we ate our fill of Cinnamon Pull-Apart bread and coffee, we all sat down and watched Eat Pray Love.  I liked the movie a lot better than I thought I would, and it made me want to do some serious travelling; even more than I did before watching the movie.  Marcus suggested we get flexible, mobile jobs and just do it.  Hmm.  Most places in the world are dog-friendly, right?

This morning, I slept late and went to church without a shower.  That's right.  On the way home, we decided to pack sandwiches to eat on the way, and drive down to the beach.  Need I say more?  

Well, I guess I sort of do, because after being thwarted by a no-pets sign and a man enforcing the sign at our first stop, we were forced to meander about Fort Morgan and hope we'd stumble upon a nice, dog-friendly beach.  Since we're not in Europe or Auburn or somewhere like that, I was a little discouraged and thought we'd driven all the way out there, only to have to drive home since we had Seamus with us.  

The next road we turned down, we were unsure of whether it had beach access.  We drove down and saw that there were little beach cottages all along the road.  When we reached the end, it looked like it was private.  There were no other cars parked suggesting that other people were there enjoying the beach, but we checked it out anyway.  

No sign forbade us from entering, much less from entering with dog or any other prohibited item.  We parked the Element (which, by the way, is the best beach-bound vehicle) along the road away from the no-parking signs, and we struck out.  When we got to the mouth of the entrance, we saw groups people scattered about 50-75 yards away from each other and we saw other dogs!  A secret, un-crowded even during Spring Break beach spot for people with dogs! 

We set up our spot, spreading the quilt out, removed our clothes, and went straight into the water.  It was relatively calm and cool but not freezing.  Perfectly perfect!  We waded in and Seamus swam against his will.  He follows us into the water, only to protect us.  He swims well, but prefers to play in the sand.

I made it extra big so you could see the sand on his face.  He was wet from swimming, and then proceeded to dig a hole and roll around in the sand.  So much fun!

Marcus and Seamus went on a couple of walks and allowed me to sunbathe.  I dozed off, but in-between noddings, plotted to convince Marcus to let us sleep there tonight.  He didn't go for it.  I must work on my persuasion skills.  

We left after a couple of hours and drove home.  I'm currently enjoying THE most spectacular beach-high!  When we got home, I got right in the shower and had one of those showers.  You know the kind.  The water temperature is just right, you're super dirty (at first, of course) and happy.  The feeling goes beyond the written word.  I almost reinacted one of those old Herbal Essences commercials, and I wasn't even using Herbal Essences!  

We just ate dinner and we're about to watch James and the Giant Peach on Netflix Instant, because I've never seen it and Marcus loves it.

I don't look forward to this weekend ending, but I bet I sleep GREAT tonight!

Morning thoughts

This morning, while I was sleeping, I dreamed that Marcus came running into the room, ran into the wall and fell down.  I heard the thud of his feet on the floor and the collision.  I opened my eyes and turned to see him dragging the clothes basket out of the bathroom.  I started laughing and told him what I thought I heard.  We both laughed.  I laughed until I wasn't sleepy anymore.  That may be the best way to wake up.

Let's design an alarm clock that makes us laugh.  I'd be a morning person everyday.

Seamus

We have a new habit.  This weekend, Marcus and I are going out of town to attend my cousin's baby shower in Memphis.  My mom agreed to take care of Seamus (and Neville, but Seamus is higher maintenance, being a dog) for us while we were gone.  Believe it or not, since we've had him. . . (August of '08 when he was just a tiny puppy.  Let's break for picture.)

Awww!  Look at how cute and tiny he was!

Anyway, I was saying, since we've had him, we've only left town once without him, when we went to Nashville for another cousin's wedding.  We boarded him, and thought that went really well.  However, when we went to pick him up, there was a dog crying somewhere in the back.  Marcus made a comment that that dog must be heartbroken, and the lady at the front informed us that that was OUR heartbroken dog, and that he had been crying like that all weekend.  Never again!  

Since then, we haven't left town except to go see Alex and Elizabeth in Auburn, and we took him with us those two or three times.  The first time went great because it was April and still relatively comfortable outside, and we were limited to all outdoor activities.  The second (and maybe third?  I don't remember) time, it was July or something and outdoor activities were miserable.  We considered then that it'd be a good idea to get someone to keep him at our house anytime we wanted to leave town instead of toting him with us.  This has been hard for me, because I love him and I'm happier when he's with me, and I miss him when we're apart.  Alas, some things have to be done.  

He's kennel trained, but is prone to barking and crying if life isn't completely perfect.  He eventually gets over it, but not without a lot of noise and stress on the other sleepers in the house.  I could be surprised, but I'd be willing to bet a great deal that whoever kept him, if his routine was followed, would not get much sleep.  

On to the new habit:  we're letting him sleep out in the living room.  He still seems to be kennel trained, because I open up the door and he goes right in and lays down.  I don't shut it behind him, and then I go in my room and go to bed myself.  He seems fine with this arrangement.  A minute or so after I've gone in my room, I hear his tenative footsteps on the hardwood floors, and listen as he gets settled.  I think he thinks he's getting away with something, which is fine with me as long as he knows to be sneaky, and therefore, behaves himself.  

We decided it was a good idea to go ahead and start this new habit this week, so that my mom has an easier time with him next weekend.

Last night, as I sat in bed and read with him at the foot of the bed, he looked at me knowingly and I thought, even if it isn't any good, that I ought to occasionally try and record his thoughts.  It's not going to be profound or meaningful (or at least I doubt it will be) like Don Miller's Lucy Blogs, but I thought I owe it to him to at least try to decipher his thoughts.  He looks at me with so much trust and with heavy thoughts behind his brown eyes.  His little tan eyebrows express such feeling that there has to be more than raw animal instinct going on in his head contrary to what many people believe.

Rombauer V. Crocker: Round One (and K.O., Rombauer wins!)

We won't talk about what just happened in my kitchen.  Okay, maybe we will a little bit.  I had a serious icing mishap.  Mishap is too kind a word, really.  I'm baring the shame in sharing this in hopes that someone who knows will stumble upon it and explain to me exactly what on earth I did wrong. (Sorry, Laura, this post will be boring since I just sent you the same story in an email! lol)

It all started when I decided homemade (Betty Crocker Cookbook recipe) caramel icing would be really fantastic on top of a Joy of Cooking recipe Fudge Sour Cream Cake.  I don't know if the two recipes got into a brawl while I was joining them . . . maybe Betty and Irma are bitter rivals, or what happened, but the outcome was disastrous!  (Irma said, "A CURSE ON THE CROCKER HOUSE!" and arranged for her recipes to reject any of Betty's. )

I made the icing exactly according to the instructions: I melted the butter, I added the brown sugar, I melted it into the butter and brought it to a boil, I let it boil for 2 minutes, I added the milk, I returned it to a boil, and then I removed it from the heat to cool.  After it cooled, I added the pound of confectioners sugar gradually, and beat the mixture while the saucepan sat in a bowl of cold water (what the heck?!) and made a huge, filmy mess of water and over spray of powdered sugar on the counters and stove top.  The finished product looked like icing, it tasted like icing, and for all intents and purposes, it was icing.

As I began to spread it onto the cake, I quickly realized that it had made a drastic and terrible transformation from lovely caramel icing into something very akin in texture to sugar cookie dough.  The "icing" would not stick to the cake.  It was like the cake had put on a protective icing-proof shield or something.  The "icing" rolled up, tore, crumbled, and certainly wouldn't think of spreading.  I picked up a few of the crumbles off the plate and put them back on top of the cake.  When I did this, I realized that the icing-dough responded a little better to my warm hands than the cold metal knife I was using before.  I washed my hands and slapped the rest of the icing onto the cake and manually formed the icing with my fingers to fit around the top layer of this two-layer cake, as the stuff wouldn't stretch any further than the top layer.

It looks truly ridiculous -- like I forced the top layer of my cake to wear a stretched-out wad of cookie dough as a tracksuit -- but it tastes incredible.  Oh well.  I won't be using that icing recipe again!

Check it out. . . this was the best I could do.

Hummingbird Cake - not as gruesome as it sounds.

This is the first Sunday I've stayed home from church since November when we started attending FUMC.  I have a good reasons, though:

1. I haven't had a very good night's sleep in about a week (loosely translated: I'm normally a narcoleptic as soon as I get in bed, and lately I've been more like a normal person), and I needed one morning to sleep as late as I wanted.  "As late as I want," evidently, means 8:20 am.

2. I'm filthy, and even if I wanted to sleep in and also go to church (thereby omitting the shower step), I couldn't because I'm in that awkward time where I took a shower on Friday night because I had to work on Saturday morning and didn't want to have to wake up too early to do that.  Saturday I was "clean" all day, but now it's Sunday and I'm back on track for my normal morning showers, but I technically haven't had a shower since Friday.  Anyway, omitting the shower for this morning would be totally unacceptable.

3. Today we are celebrating my wonderful Mama's birthday (which is actually on Tuesday), and I have the distinct honor of baking her cake for this party.  I want to do the best job I can, and also take my time and learn while doing.

This brings us to the purpose of today's blog entry.  Hummingbird Cake.  I'm not sure why it's called that, except maybe because it's so insanely sweet.  I've actually never been a huge fan of it, but that's why we don't eat it on my birthday.  It has crushed pineapple and bananas baked into the cake, and it's slathered with a serious overabundance of cream cheese icing.  I'm sure I'll eat it and scrutinize my skills (or lack thereof) when I normally would have passed on a serving.  However, until I get so confident in my cake-baking skills that I know without a shadow of a doubt that it's edible, I can't allow other people to be my blind guinea pigs.

I'm baking it in a stone 9x13 baking dish, which is a first for me, so we'll see how it turns out.

Here's the before picture:

There's a lot of Wal-Mart represented in this picture, as well as Pampered Chef.  Those lovely glass measuring cups in the background are actually Mom Diehl's, and don't have anything to do with the baking process of this particular cake.  I'll be giving those back today at the birthday party.  :-)

Anyway, I hope I can update this entry in a little while with successful during- and after-pictures.  In the mean time, have a lovely Sunday!

Shalom. :-)

P.S. Don't worry, I'm going to take a shower before I bake the cake!

Update: Sometime after Sunday's birthday party.

Here are pictures!  The cake was a total success.  It looked decent, and it tasted great!  Even I enjoyed it and had a second piece.  Here are the aforementioned during- and after-pictures:

Morning dreams are always so vivid.

I had an interesting dream this morning.  I'll try to remember as many bizarre little details as I can.

I was at some kind of house party and I think I was in Hopewell, though I didn't really know anyone at this party.  The person throwing the party was making pizza for everyone, but instead of making the pizza and baking it all at once, they were making the pizza, cutting it into slices, and serving it up uncooked, so that the guests had to heat up their own pizza.  Everyone seemed fine with this except for me.

I decided that I had better things to do, so I went into the laundry room of this house, pulled the door to, stripped off my clothes, and proceeded to shave my legs.  The shaving cream was avocado green.  While I was shaving, I realized I was hurting myself really badly.  I looked at the blade to see what was wrong, and there was no blade, but the absence of the blade was very sharp.  I put a new blade on and kept shaving.

While I was shaving, there was a woman talking to me through the laundry room door.  She asked for my credit card, and I started to look for it.  I finally asked her why she needed my credit card, and she told me that she wanted to sell me a bag of popcorn.  She showed me the bag of popcorn through the crack in the door, and the bag wasn't much bigger than a credit card.  It was TINY!  I pretended that I couldn't find my credit card and kept shaving.

I was having a hard time shaving my bikini area and I couldn't figure out why, so I moved onto the rest of my legs.  I had a hard time shaving them, too, but I realized that was because I was wearing multiple layers of pantyhose.  I removed a layer and tried to shave, and realized that there were still more pantyhose in the way.  I think I removed 3 or 4 layers of pantyhose before I got down to skin.  The reason I was having a hard time shaving my bikini area was because my razor was actually a bare-floor attachment to a canister vacuum cleaner, and the blade was about a foot long.

And then I woke up.

Thursday: in which I've started baking.

First of all, I'm in exploration mode.  This is okay.  I'm allowing myself to take the risk that this may be a phase, but I'm going to explore it as thoroughly as I can until the phase is gone.  If it doesn't go, or if I don't allow it to go,  excellent.  If it does, then on to the next and I hope I can find as much enjoyment in whatever may be next as I find in this endeavor so far.  I'm learning to bake.

I was speaking to my therapist (sounds so much nicer than shrink, don't you think?) and complaining about how unfulfilling my job is.  I complained about how it isn't me, and how I never would have wanted to be where I am now, career-wise, and I'm not pleased with how I've allowed it to go on this long in the name of a paycheck.

My therapist asked me to tell her what I enjoy doing.  I immediately tried to tell her that anything that I enjoy couldn't really be a job.  She told me not to tell her what I thought I could make into a career, but rather just tell her what I simply enjoy.  She prompted, "Do you enjoy photography?" and I told her that I like to take pictures, but not really as a focused hobby.  Then, she asked if I like to bake. Yes!  Yes, I do!  She reminded me that I'm still in my 20s, I don't have any children, and basically the world is my oyster.  I can allow myself to pursue hobbies without worrying about whether or not they are a phase.
And here we are.

Do you ever notice that when you hear of something for the first time, or you get an idea, or you want something to happen very much, that all you see are "signs" so-to-speak pointing to that idea?  Since I decided that I'd teach myself to bake, I've been bombarded.  It's probably just because it's a very pleasant, whimsical hobby with delicious rewards, and it's fairly popular, but that's okay.

The following is a list of the bombardment I've experienced in the past week:

- Publix has a bakery and I thought it'd be pretty neat to work there, but I'm in no way ready for that yet (skill wise) and since I haven't been to culinary school, I'd have to start out as a baker-trainee, and I'm willing to bet the hourly rate isn't what I need it to be.  Anyway, I saw a Publix baker deliver King Cakes to Belk at the mall the other day, and then at home that same night I saw a Publix bakery advertisement on TV.

- On Saturday when I was eating Lasagna with my family, my mom pointed out that Meme's Joy of Cooking cookbook was sitting on the shelf, unclaimed, and asked if I wanted it, to which I replied, "Uh, yeah!" I thumbed through the pastry section it this evening while waiting for my cake to bake, and it's very comprehensive and exciting and daunting and I could not be more thrilled to have it!

- Last night, we watched It's Complicated with Meryl Streep, Alec Baldwin, and Steve Martin.  (HILARIOUS movie, by the way.) In the movie, Meryl Streep's character Jane owns a bake shop somewhere in Northern California, which is two of mine and Marcus's dreams put together: Northern California in some form or other, and owning a bake shop!  Entrepreneurship has always been one of Marcus's goals, but not so much mine--however I could be convinced if it was a bake shop.  I swooned at her life (even if she is in her 50s experiencing it) and noted the added bombardment.

I've enjoyed baking since I've been married, but have only really realized that it could be something I'd like to explore deeper in the past year and a half or so, when we became involved in a small group at the church we were attending.  Each person (or couple) would bring a dish, and I always tried to sign up for desserts.  I looked for impressive recipes (except when I was lazy and made dump cake because it was easy and so popular), and felt satisfied and rewarded when people ate what I worked hard to make and enjoyed it.

Eureka! (I hope.)

So now, I'm sitting here wrapping this up.  I'm about to bust out the Kindle and read and wait for the cake to finish chilling in the fridge.  I'm making a Tres Leches cake, and after baking the cake, I poured three milks and rum (Where has the rum gone?  Why, it's in my cake!) into the cake after pricking it all over with a fork (seems so destructive, doesn't it?) and then put the cake in the fridge to chill before I ice it.  I have a good two hours to go for the cake's fridge time, and it's 9:15, but I couldn't be happier.  Cake, check.  Book, check.  Tea?  Not yet, but what a good idea!

Goodnight!