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The Dinosaur and the Easter Carnival
Home again, home again. Poor Toby, he’s been eating leftovers for a week. I’ve spoiled him over the years and even though he’s a perfectly good cook, he never cooks for himself anymore. Even when he’s starving. You could say I have job security. He missed his girls. So we’re back and I’m up to my ears in household chores. Which is fine. Them’s the breaks.
When we got home yesterday I wasted all day doing I have no idea what. Probably forgetting that I have a job and that job is to run the household or something like that. So suddenly when it was time for dinner, I was nowhere near ready and we had a fun Flashlight Easter Egg Hunt Carnival to go to in about five minutes.
I stressed about it for two minutes, tried to call Toby for the other three and then just jumped in the car leaving him a scrawled note about a frozen pot pie in the freezer. I knew he would be bummed but you only get to go to a few flashlight Easter egg hunts in your life before the fun of it wears off.
Bug wore her hand-me-down dinosaur costume with some bunny ears stuck on her head. I know it’s not very Easter-y but I thought she looked adorable. She seemed to be into it too. I thought it was a great outfit until we were at the carnival and some little girl screwed up her face into a scowl and said, “You don’t look like a bunny.”
Bug took the insult in stride, like kids will do when they don’t quite understand the cattiness that we adults layer onto a sentence like that. The little girl was only stating the obvious. But I have to admit that a small part of me wanted to smack the little girl into next Tuesday and the other part of me wanted to run home and dress Bug in something more “normal.” What was I thinking dressing her up as a dinosaur for Easter?!!
Oh yeah. I was thinking of the cute photos I would take. Or NOT take because we got to the carnival so late because I got lost. We completely missed the flashlight Easter egg hunt because I couldn’t find the park. I have been looking at the sign for the carnival all month but never actually got around to googling the park address. I thought I knew where it was but after a half an hour of driving down the street that had the same name as the park and not finding said park, I finally had to call up my mom in tears. It turned out the park was in Irvine which is the kiss of death when you are trying to get anywhere on time.
I swear stoplights in Irvine are timed to be five minutes longer than normal stoplights. You will sit at an intersection for what seems like forever, strumming your fingers madly on your steering wheel, while nothing but space and birds fly by. No cars. Just space. Then finally when a car comes from the opposite direction, then the stoplight will stop them and let you go. I think the city engineers are down in some basement lab playing video games with my life. They jump and shout for joy when they can keep me from going across town in less than ten minutes. I hate Irvine.
Sorry. Rant over.
So anyway the Easter picture! Ha ha. This photo cost me five bucks. It also shortened my life by five years. I wasn’t going to pay for a silly Easter Bunny photo but after we missed the flashlight hunt I felt really bad for Bug. All the other kids were carrying their baskets filled with eggs and she had nothing. The goodie bag station was shut down and all the rides were either for big kids or had lines a mile long. She really wanted to hug the Easter Bunny so I caved.
While most kids would be afraid of such an evil looking rabbit, Bug loved her. She marched up and happily sat on her lap. I took the photo you see and the carnival photographer took another. Then we waited around for our photo. It wasn’t done so we found something else to do. We made bunny masks and tried some blue cotton candy (which I’m happy to say Bug did not like…it tasted like stale bubble gum).
When we came back, the photo was still not ready. We wasted another half an hour milling around. Still not ready. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Nine-o-clock rolled around and the photo was still not ready. By that time my poor Dinosaur Bunny was starting to nod, my arms were tired from holding her, my feet were frozen and my eyeballs were giving away my inner rage by bulging out of my head.
I knew that the photo was NOT worth waiting around that long for but I had spent FIVE dollars on it. FIVE DOLLARS! I was so mad at myself. Why am I so dumb about things like this? I should have walked away but every time I asked them how much longer it would be, they promised me that my photo was only five minutes away.
I should have asked for my money back but the girls operating the ink jets were only high school volunteers and they couldn’t help the fact that earlier in the night someone had tripped over the electrical cord running the printers. Part of me just felt bad for them. I remember being that age and having customers irate with me.
Finally the photo spit itself out and it looked like crap. Of course! All I can say is that next year we will get there early, park closer and leave before it gets dark. Also, I’ll make dinner plans. Like maybe a pizza and a cocktail.
*first photo is my final photo for 7days. Farewell 7days! See you in the summer!
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I fought the cake and I won…sort of
You know that list you have in your head of things you want to do before you die? I have one of those lists. It has silly things on it like “work at Starbucks and learn all their evil secrets” and “make a patchwork quilt by hand” and big ones like “have an art gallery opening with wine and cheese” and “illustrate a children’s book from start to finish.” Things like that. I’m working on my list. I’ve crossed off a few. There was the time I made a pie crust from scratch and I did have an art gallery opening that one summer that went to the dogs.
Yesterday, I decided to finally cross off the “make a cake from scratch” item. I’ve had enough of the taunting from my foodie friends who say cake mixes are for weenies. I don’t love baking but I do cook dinner every night. It’s not like I’m a stranger in the kitchen. Sheesh! It’s the only room I can call my own anymore! Which does not please me, believe me. I HATE cooking.
But how hard can a cake be, right? How dumb can I be?
Apparently very dumb. I cracked open a few cookbooks and was immediately stumbled by things like this:
Cake flour.
What is cake flour? I have wheat flour and regular flour but where am I supposed to get cake flour? And then after I’m done making this cake, what am I supposed to do with the leftover cake flour? It’s probably just going to take up valuable space in my pantry and get bugs. Phooey!
Double-acting Baking Powder.
What?!!! There is more than one kind of baking powder? The half empty can in my cupboard that has been there for the last five years won’t work?
Extra-fine sugar.
Huh? I have sugar in the raw, powdered sugar, brown sugar, sugar cubes and regular old white sugar but I don’t have anything called extra-fine. Am I going to have to mill my sugar with my make-shift mortar and pestle (which is really just a bowl and a glass cup)?!!!
These are the kinds of things that intimidate me and send me off to my laptop with my tail between my legs. I know all you bakers are shaking your heads because you know this stuff by heart but to me it’s as crippling as learning another language! Good thing I have cake-baking friends standing by on instant messenger.
To be honest it wasn’t all the foreign ingredients that were crippling me. I was having a bad day to start with. It was a day that can only be summed up by saying that I have a three-year-old underfoot who rambles on at the mouth incessantly. I couldn’t even read a recipe from start to finish without an interruption every five seconds. I was on edge to say the least.
But I’m stubborn. I really wanted to cross that cake off my list and I’ve also determined that the only way my three-year-old is ever going to learn to play by herself and leave me alone is if I ignore her. This is a battle I must fight for both our sakes.
I tried to involve Bug in the cake-making process as much as I could and I’m sure she was having fun “helping” but it was an uphill battle. I’m not even sure I won the battle. I snapped at her. I got frustrated. I slunk into the other room to have a mini-cry fest. Baking a cake should not be this hard! Yet I wasn’t about to use up her precious 1.25-hour naptime on baking. That time is for ME AND MY LAPTOP!!!
Things got a lot better after I melted some butter and added the cocoa powder. I was beginning to think that maybe I can do this after all. It smelled divine. Chooooocklate…….buuuuutttter…….mmmmmmm… The batter went together smoothly enough and everything looked great as I poured it into my cake pans.
Isn’t it cool that I actually have cake pans? I decided to skip the jelly roll pan that the recipe called for and use my fancy-dancy cake pans instead. I’m living dangerously! I didn’t grease the pans because the recipe didn’t say to. I figured there must be enough butter in the mix. Truthfully, I didn’t really even think about it. Greasing pans isn’t top of mind for me.
It wasn’t until I tried to flip the cakes out of their pans and they didn’t budge that I suddenly remembered that there is some rule about this. Maybe I should have consulted with someone before I switched up the pans. Lesson LEARNED. Cakes in pan 1: Brenda 0. Stupid baking.
Thankfully by some miracle (and perhaps the heart-attack inducing amounts of butter in the recipe), I was able to knife around the edges of the pan and wiggle the cakes out with only tiny little mini-cracks around the edges. The cakes stayed intact. Hallelujah!
The only thing left to do was ice the cakes and stack them! I didn’t care about making homemade icing because that is not one of the items on my list. I’ve made homemade icing before and it was nothing to write home about. I had some tub icing in my pantry fromfouryearsagobutit’stotallyokay and that was fine with me. I slopped it on, put the cakes together and just as I was spreading around the top layer of icing suddenly…
The cake cracked open and swallowed me up!!!! Seriously! LOOK AT THAT CRACK! It’s like the Grand Canyon! If you look closely you can see tiny little people in rubber rafts floating down the Colorado. I hope they’re enjoying themselves because I’M NOT! SchmickenSchmackenStupidCake!
So I twittered it and took comfort in the fact that at least a few people might have some fun laughing at me. Ugh. I also remembered that even real bakers have cracks like this and they just cover them up with icing.
So I did and it looked fine. Pretty, in fact, if I do say so myself. Never mind that the cake is trying to creep off the plate and hide behind the microwave. I have WON the cake battle. Take that you stupid cake. You better taste good.
And it did. I think. I don’t know. I guess I was expecting Toby to fall all over himself telling me how delicious it was. I daydreamed that it would be so good that he would rush out and buy me a complete new set of pans and a red KitchenAid mixer because I deserve them. Or something.
But Toby didn’t really care. He’s just not that into cakes. I think he tried to go through the motions of spending time with us and appreciating that we did all this for his birthday (that was SEVEN days ago) but truthfully he hates birthdays. I for some reason cannot get it through my head that it would all just be fine if we did nothing for his birthday. We could do laundry on his birthday and he’d be just as happy.
Poor guy. I don’t mean to make him out to be the bad guy. This is just a lesson to me (and maybe every other wife out there who has high hopes) that husbands do not change. You can’t force them to be excited about things that they aren’t. He tried, he really did. But I have truth goggles and I went to bed sad that I had put out so much effort and snapped so many times at Bug. Was it worth it? Did it taste better than a $1.98 cake mix? I don’t know.
I have some satisfaction that I did it and I can cross it off my list. I think if everyone raved about it, I could see myself baking this recipe over and over until I knew it by heart. Maybe it would be one of those things that I would pass on to Bug and she would remember fondly of us cooking together…maybe.
Or maybe I’m just over it.
