my secret garden under the clothesline...

this weekend was about movies, gardens, bike rides, new shoes, trying to pollinate my own veggies, dog park, books and what the...?...trying to pollinate my own veggies? for real. i am in dire need of some bees but bad. i need to add some special flora love for my little wing-ed friends. also, yes those are pink knickers hanging on the clothes line.
oh and growing in garden we have....
basil(sweet and purple)
thyme
watercress
french sorrel
dill
lemon balm
spearmint
german chamomile
rosemary
chocolate pepper
runner beans x 2
(one is a painted lady variety that was named after the 1st queen elizabeth...it's been around that long)
tomatoes x 3
lemon cukes x 2
patty pan squash x 2
and two lovely lavenders(french and spanish red) that i can hopefully manage to not destroy
oh, and last but not least...
a single woad plant(i am a dyer after all)
fingers crossed and i wants to plant more please!

a birthday and a cake debaucle...

yay for greg's birthday! yay for cake! yay for three count 'em three different cakes that i made until finally with the third(from good ol dunken hines mix) it was actually edible. about a week
ago i had greg flip through my favorite cookbook "Baked." so...he ended up choosing something that i had been really wanting to try out...their red hot velvet cake. this recipe calls for a cinnamon buttercream instead of the tradional and ahem...nasty cream cheese icing( i hate the cream cheese) so i was all set except that i could not find the necessary "cake flour." so, for cake numero uno i just went for it with regular all purpose flour. not good. it was all wrong. a brick if you will. a note here, i was trying to get the cake prepped a day early. second note, i was off by one day on the date of greg's birthday. he was too. we both had the day of the week mixed up and in my defense, i was still looking at an april calendar at work. i have since torn off april's showers and am ready for some may flowers.
ok, so, since i ended up having an extra day, i decided to redo the cake. so i tracked down cake flour and more red gel food colouring and was good to go. right? nope.
cake number two went together much better, it could have baked maybe a minute or two less, but was looking pretty awesome. then came the damn buttercream. i have no clue what happened. maybe my butter was too soft and my tiny kitchen too small. the recipe is so simple, and i am a competent enough basic baker(i worked as a baker in a cafe in tallahassee for about a year). i should not have even bothered icing the cake with that beast in a bowl, but i did thinking that it would "mellow." mellow it did not and gross it was. after greg's birthday sushi dinner when we were settling down to watch The Money Pit with a hunk o' cake there was a deafening silence as we chewed and pondered what exactly was weird about that cake. the wind was out of my sails as i chucked it into what my 3rd grade teacher Mrs. Bartel used to call "File 13."
that would be the trash to those of you who did not have Mrs. Bartel in the third grade.
the third cake was a hit. a delicious treasure in a sea of dyed red blech. thank you duncan hines for helpin' a gal out who just wanted to let her fella eat cake.