Birthday Cakes

We celebrated Ally's fifth birthday last weekend. Lately she's been talking about how her favorite color is "lavender blue with sprinkles." I just happened to find lavender and blue sugar sprinkles in the cake decorating aisle, along with some shiny pink sugar flakes, and that's how we wound up with this cake for birthday number five.



Yes, it was rather florescent and the frosting got a little crunchy, but Ally loved it. (FYI, seven minute frosting will turn into meringue if you beat it long enough. Who knew?)



I've made Ally a variety of cakes for her birthdays. Some were prettier than others, but all have been fun.



There was a ladybug cake for her first birthday in 2009. It was strawberry flavored with pink frosting. It was so warm that day that the frosting began to melt and I didn't dare remove the wax paper strips because I was afraid that it might take off the frosting.
 

Ally didn't care.

In 2009 I made a monkey cake. It was a banana cake with chocolate frosting. Design wise, I think this one was my best so far.

In 2010 I made a simple vanilla cake with chocolate frosting decorated with butter flies and a flower. 

That's the year Ally learned about licking frosting off the beaters.




Last year we were at the beach, so I made a beach birthday cake. The "sand" is crushed graham crackers over a marshmallow fluff frosting (yep, marshmallow fluff straight out of the jar).



The shells are real, but I did run them through the dishwasher before putting them on the cake.

Again, I'm not sure Ally would have cared.

Blackberry Summer

It's been a banner year for blackberries. When we bought the house during the winter of 2009 I was excited to see lots of wild canes growing on our property, all along the driveway and around the edge of the woods. However, we went to Las Vegas in July 2010 and when we got home I was disappointed by the quality and quantity of berries on the canes. There had been a hot dry spell while we were gone and most of the berries were either hard and sour or dried up to mummification.

Not so this year.



The berries have been abundant to say the least. Not all of them are very sweet and some of them are seedier than others, but they're wild plants that we don't maintain other than hacking them back when they threaten to block the driveway. I'm glad to get whatever fruit they offer me. Based on the number of thorns that have pierced my skin while picking berries, clearly all the plants want in return is a blood sacrifice from me.



But I'm not going to complain about a few thorns. Not when I've been able to pick a few handfuls like this from my car window while driving down the driveway. That sounds like the ultimate in pick-your-own, but my friend Kathy simply drives her golf cart into her blackberry patch and picks them that way. Now that's the way to do it.

We also have wineberries that have done well this summer, too.



I think the little nipples left when the fruits are picked look funny.



Ally likes the wineberries best. She prefers to hold the bowl while standing in the grass while I pick them for her in the middle of the patch. (I suppose having someone pick the berries for you is even better than getting to drive a golf cart into the patch.) Ally will help me pick blackberries from the driveway and she might eat a few of them, but mostly she'll put them in the bowl. The wineberries are sweeter, so she eats most of the ones I give her. However, she'll even leave some of the wineberries in the bowl if she knows I'm going to make a dessert with them. I don't know where Ally gets this self restraint as I would have gleefully eaten the whole bowl by myself at her age if my mother wasn't looking.

Last week we picked blackberries and wineberries for a birthday cake for my paternal grandmother, who turned 90 last Sunday. My parents came in on Friday and helped pick, too.





I made my favorite yellow cake recipe and added two heaping cups of blackberries to the batter. When it came out of the oven I spread melted blackberry jelly over the top, then frosted it with caramel icing when it cooled. When I make it again (and oh yes, this will be made many, many times as long as there are blackberries in the freezer), I'll skip the jelly and just use the icing. The jelly make the icing slide off and it's really just gilding the lily.

I should have taken a picture of the cake but you'll just have to take my word that it's good. Really good. And it's even better after a day in the fridge. At least try this yellow cake and that caramel icing even if you don't have any blackberries. I make the icing with buttermilk so it has more of a praline flavor. (FYI, I don't care for the chocolate frosting included with the yellow cake recipe and I haven't made the spice cake with the caramel icing recipe. No need to when you can have this yellow cake and that caramel icing together.)

So instead of a picture of a cake, I leave you with a picture of four generations of Dellingers together. My grandmother did like the cake, but not so much as the idea that her son, grand daughter, and great grand daughter all picked the berries together just for her cake.

Nearly Wordless Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Ally is four years old today!

November and the Post-Halloween Wrap Up

I'm having a hard time adjusting to November this year. October is my favorite month, full of warm days and crisp nights, pretty leaves and pumpkins all leading up to Halloween. Then BAM! November hits me upside the head. This happens every year so you'd think I'd be used to it by now, but this year seems different. It's cold. And dark. And I'm tired. And now there's the time change again.

I'm sure this November is really no different than previous years and my perceptions are merely a reflection of the fact that my fortieth birthday arrived last Saturday. Yep, hello middle age...and look, you brought midlife crisis with you! How sweet.

Actually I had a great birthday with a delicious chocolate cake with fudge icing and free access to far more Halloween candy than anyone should ever want. One benefit to having a cute toddler is that people truly want to give extra candy to her on Halloween night. I couldn't believe the weight of the candy in Ally's little black plastic treat bucket when we stopped trick or treating Sunday night. She was having a hard time holding it up but she wasn't exactly happy about handing it over to me, either. I don't think it's occurred to Ally that her parents are shamelessly raiding her candy stash when she's not looking. This will be much harder to pull off next year, but until then Ally is blissfully ignorant of any Twix bars or Reese's peanut butter cups that may be missing from her candy bucket.

Ally dressed up as a cowgirl princess for Halloween this year. Or rather I dressed her up as one.

She was very excited about the princess part, but not so much the cowgirl part. I told Ally that she didn't have to be a cowgirl princess, that she could be a princess of the wild west if she wanted to be that instead, and she seemed perfectly fine with this idea. Of course as soon as we started trick or treating people asked if she was a cowgirl princess, which she objected to, but then Ally wisely kept her tongue as soon as the candy started flowing into her treat bucket. By the end of the night you could have called Ally a three-headed vampire alien ghost clown and she would have nodded sweetly as long as you were dumping those little packages of Skittles into her bucket.

Normally we don't have a lot of candy in the house. Most of our sweets tend to be homemade baked goods. Ally gets those little Dumdum suckers at one of the local restaurants and sometimes a couple of marshmallows at home, but not candy bars or chocolate. (No, I hide the chocolate for myself, rotten mother that I am.) Her Halloween stash is the biggest pile of sugar, fat, and artificial flavors and colors that she's ever seen. Thankfully she doesn't seem obsessed with consuming it all at once. Ally may ask for a piece after school, but she's just as likely to ask for some fruit. And if we let her pick out the kind of candy that she wants, Ally is perfectly satisfied with one or two pieces of candy after dinner. This means we're going to have that candy in the house for an awfully long time, or at least until Steve and I eat it all after Ally's gone to bed at night. Oh wait, I hear a Nestle's Crunch bar calling my name right now.

"What was that?"