It’s awfully hard to carpe diem when the diem keeps zooming past your head with a loud crackling laugh and disappearing into the past behind you. How did it get to be nearly the end of the week so fast? It seems to me that if your week is filled with good things, it speeds up and jumps forward and springs ahead in lighthearted leaps and bounds. If your week is filled with sorrowful things, with sad and salty sensations or cold ones that make you huddle under covers, shivering compulsively and swearing, then time leans up against the wall, a slouching grouchy teenager, dragging its feet and alternately making you sad and irritating the heck out of you.
Frosting covers a multitude of sins
When you, with the help of your daughter, who is decked out in an apron twice as tall as she is (with the cheery imprint “Too Many Cooks Spoil The Broth” on the front, and a white pouffy chef’s hat), whip up a Strawberry Supreme cake in a leaky springform pan, it’s perhaps not surprising that the center of the cake fails to cook correctly; it’s busily dripping strawberry puddles on to the floor of the oven, where your husband will discover it by its charred and bitter smell the next day when he puts tortillas and taco shells in to warm.
I stuck a skewer into the center of the cake in several places when the allotted baking time was up and it came out clean, so I removed the cake and set it on a wire rack to cool. Half an hour went by and I flipped it over out of the pan on to the wire rack to continue cooling and came back 15 minutes later to find the entire middle of the cake drooling out onto the counter like it was BLEEDING…an image not helped by the fact that the cake was PINK INSIDE (Strawberry Supreme, remember?) AAAGH! I reflipped the cake and handed spatulas to the children with a very resigned expression on my face. They were delighted to scrape cake innards up and shovel them into their… er…cakeholes.
Karin and I had already made up a batch of vanilla buttercream frosting, so after I was sure the cake was completely cooled, I flipped it upside down again on to the cake stand and slathered it all over with a layer of half-inch thick icing. Then we sprinkled non-pareils on top and added chopped up strawberries for a crowning touch. You couldn’t even tell it was…hollow…in the center! And then we gave Karin all kinds of abuse for having a pink cake. Girly cake!
And our new living room furniture arrived! I shall have to take all new photos of our house, I suppose, since it’s changed so much in the past 5 years and the ones on our website are getting hopeless out of date. Anders and I wrestled the old sofa and “big chair” out onto the deck and then I vacuumed and lamented the sunbleaching beating our Turkish carpet has taken. When the in-laws arrived we softened them up with pink cake and then got them to help unpack and move furniture. Ta-dah!
I have a weakness for furniture with lots of pillows, obviously. SO many pillows! And so brown! The sofa looks lighter in that photo because of the flash but it is the same lovely chocolately color as the chair with even more pillows. I think I’ll have to find some accent pillows to lighten up the brownness. And we are still in the market for a new coffee table…the glass trunk with the marbles and fish was really cool IN THE 80’s. Here’s a photo of just the couch and here’s one from the other side of the room. *love love love*
Really Great Writing Out There Right Now: Blueberries for Nana
Summer Song of Sunshine and Starlight Belated Birthday Joy to sandykins!
A HUGE Birth Day Welcome to the World Dance to Little Thomas Kicky Feet, newborn son of my Darling Sam!