Attempting to be Domestic

Jon’s been in town for over a week so far, hooray! On Saturday we went to a barbeque/potluck that my company put on, which actually ended up being pretty fun. I brought deviled eggs (paprika and all). Look at me go.

They took a lot longer to make than I thought they would. Then, on Sunday I made hot pudding (my mom’s recipe), which was a lot easier to make than I ever dreamed it could be. It turned out EXACTLY how it was supposed to, too. What a surprise; I’m pretty sure that’s never happened to me yet in my short history of baking. Is making pudding even considered baking? Anyway, hot vanilla pudding just isn’t hot vanilla pudding without the sprinkles.




If you give it a couple of swirls, the sprinkles make pretty, colorful designs.



But if you swirl it too much, the pudding just takes on all the colors and turns kind of grey. I don’t have a picture of that, because I was careful not to overmix. I didn’t want to ruin a good thing. Jon might have overmixed his, though.

On Monday night I made a cake from scratch. I used actual cake flour and everything. It turned out okay. Here it is in stages.

Here you can see that I wasn’t successful in dividing the batter equally. One layer is significantly smaller than the other so it got all dark in the oven. That’s the one that kind of stuck to the pan when I tried to extract it. Nothing that a little icing used as glue couldn’t fix.

And here’s the finished product:



Never mind the marks on the wall. And never mind all the frosting splatters and smears on the pan. And never mind that I don’t own a cake plate so I put it on a round baking sheet instead. The important thing is that it TASTED kind of good when we ate it. Not the best cake I’ve ever had…but a success nonetheless.



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In other, non baking related news, some form of insect may or may not have laid eggs in my kneepit. I’d been wearing the same pair of jeans for almost the entire day on Sunday, then at night when I sat down on the floor to play with the dog, something bit me. Does that mean it was crawling around in my jeans ALL DAY?? I never found what it was, but I got a lump behind my knee that really hurt. When I walked on it, it ached. How weird?! Yesterday I noticed that the initial lump had shrunk down a bit, but it had turned bright red.



This picture was taken at work two days after I got bit. Stupid Blogger keeps trying to reorient the image because originally, it looked like it was upside-down. That's because I took it myself by twisting around backwards and angling the camera. Then Blogger puts its stupid oar in and tries to put it the "right" way, and it just confuses everyone even more. Just forget about the camera strap hanging into the shot, and my bare feet. Anyway, I noticed that there’s definitely something black INSIDE of the bite, so I had Jon thoroughly inspect it when I got home from work yesterday, and he said it’s a broken blood vessel.

That’s about all the news. Sorry for the boring post. You were wondering why it’s been so long since I’ve written anything, and now you know.