Jinxy Cat

I’ve got a cat named Jinxy Cat. This cat has somehow completely wrapped me around his squishy little pink paw, and I am completely and utterly in love with this 3 year old feline. He will be featured in the occasional post because besides my cooking/boyfriend/family…he’s one of my very favorite things. So, without further adieu, say hello to Jinxy Cat.

Lettuce and World Peace

I’ve got an obsession… with homegrown vegetables. I think that if everyone in the world just grew their own vegetables, all our problems would magically be solved, and we would finally achieve world peace.

No, I’m kidding. That would never happen. But homegrown produce really is outstanding and I decided to jump on the ‘natural/organic/green’ bandwagon all them folks are raving about, and grow some of my own stuff this year…

I live in a VERY tiny flat. Have I mentioned that before? I don’t think so. But I do. So, its not like I can have window boxes full of fruits and veggies, and since we rent said flat, I can’t exactly go and dig up some 20X20 garden. So I have to settle for growing stuff in containers on my front porch. I swear it doesn’t look that tacky, really. I decided to start small this year, because I have NEVER grown my own produce/herbs before…and I was nervous. (And my parents grow just about every vegetable under the sun, as does my next door neighbor, so really, who needs ANOTHER tomato plant???) So, I just have one container…and some small pots…but still. That container and those pots are my babies and I treat them as such. I’ve got 3 different varieties of lettuce, chives, banana peppers, parsley and basil. They’ve been going for a few months now, and I just have to say that I’ve got myself quite a green thumb… Check out my before and after pictures of my lettuce…its quite scary/my pride and joy.

The herbs are all doing great except for the parsley I was growing in my window…that duded out. Oh, and my banana peppers. And I had to buy another basil plant and the chives sort of shriveled up. But, who’s judging, right? My lettuce turned out so therefore, I have a green … pinky, I suppose...

Before:

After...

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Birthday....Cupcakes.

Figured it was time for a new blog entry….I mean, its only been, what, 3 months???? I’ve never been very good at sticking to things, sorry about that. Call me a commitment-phobe.

My mom’s birthday was a few weeks ago, and I decided to take on the task of making her a homemade. birthday. cake. Don’t really know what I was thinking, but I definitely got in over my head with that one. I had been browsing through blogs and kept oohing and ahhing over pictures of fondant covered cakes and thought to myself, “I can do this!!.… it can’t be that hard…” So, I set out to make my lovely mother a two-tiered chocolate cake w/ raspberry filling, homemade butter cream frosting and tiffany blue fondant to cover the cake, with some very chic brown fondant cut-outs to top it off. Sounds easy, eh?

Anyways. 2 and a half days later, close to $50.00 spent on decorating supplies, pounds of wasted too-thin fondant, a whole entire cake in a garbage, and many, many tears and swear words later …. I had no cake. To make a long story short, I wrecked it. Ever heard of the blog “Cake Wrecks”? Mine could’ve taken ‘the cake’ on that site. I seriously did everything wrong. Then deeply blamed myself for doing everything wrong and moped around the house for hours and hours. But, I didn’t completely give up…I had a brilliant idea to salvage what fondant I had leftover, and throw it over some cupcakes I whipped up from a mix, top it with some fondant designs….and honestly…they didn’t look too bad. Nowhere near the masterpiece I had planned, but we don’t always get what we want, do we? My Mom absolutely loved them and that’s what matters. And after I told her all the trouble I went through to make those things…I think I got lots of ‘good daughter’ bonus points, which was great because my birthday was a week later and there was a great bedspread that I was deeply coveting….