Making Sure My Hubby Is Fed

I cooked 5 casseroles and 3 pasta dishes in one day and packaged them up in all the containers I had, organized and labeled them for dinners and lunches for the next 3 weeks for Greg while I'm away in Baltimore selling fireworks. Here's what our freezer looks like. And there's still even more in the fridge.

The Official Barbie Cake Story

I started the cake and the frosting Thursday night. I worked really hard to make sure the frosting was perfect consistency. Not too runny and not to0 thick. I stored them overnight so I could finish after work the next day.
It was really hot and the apartment was even hotter. So I had the A/C and the fan running to keep the temp down. But the frosting still melted as I worked on the cake. I would refrigerated in between steps to keep it together. But once I added the Barbie the pieces stopped sliding off.
After the crumb coat I refrigerated before adding a second coat to hid the crumbs but that didn't work. So when I started to decorate the dress crumbs were showing through and and front was melting sooo bad. I fixed the crumb problem by adding small flowers all around the dress and to distract the attention I used white for the centers so that your eye is drawn to the flowers not the crumbs.


I added Wings to make the Barbie look more desirable for little girls. I made them out of foil and blue plastic wrap. It was a nice touch but the front was still really bad looking because of the heat and it was pretty cool in the apartment by this point. So with my ingenious mind I decided to turn the Barbie 180* at the hip so that the more beautifully looking back was now the front. (the picture below is before I turned it around)

So I was pretty proud at this point and it looked really good. UNTIL I HAD TO TRANSPORT IT!!!
The car was not fully air conditioned so in the 15 minutes it took to get to the church the bottom half of her dress had melted down an inch. I refused to take any pictures of the cake at this point I even refused to look at it. It was still the eye of every little girl in the room. Emma was so proud to say that it was HER cousin that made it. The night went on and the dress had still continued to digress. My cake was one of the last ones to go up and by the time they started the bidding her dress had melted down 2 inches. There were to bidders and both the fathers had families of ALL girls. 25... 35... 50... 100!... 101! SOLD! Sold for $101 to a very happy family of girls. It turns out it was a record for the cake auction.
Next year it will be in the winter time and I will make 2 cakes. And they will definitely not melt.

The Craziest Weekend So Far

So I was asked to work an extra day this week and it was a little hard to balance sine I had the Spaghetti Dinner/Cake Auction on that Friday. So I baked the cake pieces and made the frosting (perfect consistency by the way) on Thursday night while Greg worked overtime. I stored them until I could finish after work.
I did sewing repair stuff for my boss and then raced home because a guy was coming to bring guitars for Greg and I. So after a quick lunch with Greg, I started frosting the cake. And let me tell you, 90* weather is not when you want to frost a cake. I will tell you more about my cake experience later. But while I was working on the cake, Jamie came. And Greg and I spent an hour with him learning some basics of the guitar. For $200 Greg and I have found a hobby we are working on together. We couldn't start playing right away cause we still had work to do.
But afterwards we sat down for a little practice before the cousins came over.


As soon as they were all settled in Greg, Sarah, Emma and I left for the dinner. And it was tons of fun. We came home to a crazy home and I had to make dinner for the other half of the gang. And then in the morning Emma and I biked to Target to get breakfast and lunch stuff. And when we got home and the kids fed Aunt Heather cam to pick them up so they weren't here as long as I thought but it was just running running running all the time.
CRAZY. BUT SO MUCH FUN!!!

Shout Out To My Heather

I Love you Aunt Heather!
YOU ARE AMAZING!
I love reading your blog, it makes me feel like I'm still part of that crazy life.
You have raised some of the most amazing kids and I love them all to death.
And I just want to make sure you know you're loved.
Thank you for being my idol.
Hugs loves and kisses from Webster to Penfield.

My Pookey Is So Good To Me!

So Greg is my Pookey Bear and I truly love him. So a while back we were shopping at Wal-Mart for some much needed supplies and we passed but the cutlery. Greg had been listening to my complaints about not having a good Chef's knife for a long time, so even though it wasn't in the budget for the month he insisted on getting me a good quality Chef's knife. I love him.
This week has been really hot. I mean really. We live in a brick oven. It stays hot even after the world has cooled off. We just got an A/C unit but I dont keep it on all the time to conserve energy. So the other night we had dinner on the roof. It turned into a date. We talked, laughed and enjoyed the sunset.
My Pookey has done so much for me this week. I'm going to Baltimore again this year to help sell fireworks and babysit my favorite new cousin, Natali. Greg has insisted that I get a new laptop battery so that i could enjoy my Dell as a laptop instead of the desktop the dead battery has restricted me to. I also broke my 2GB SD USB and he said that I HAVE to get a 4GB SD USB to replace it. We really probably shouldn't be spending the money on the technology but Greg said I deserve it and that it's important since we use it all the time.
I'm going to be selling a lot of stuff on Craigslist this month to make up for it though to subside my guilty conscience.
Also this week Greg and I are planning on starting a new hobby. We are going to buy 2 acoustic guitars and learn to play them, its going to be fun.