I Got A New Toy.

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Remember that Fly Fishing and Wine Festival my better half was working last month, that Edie & I at the last minute decided to swing by and visit him?  The one that resulted in us going to the dinner being held at the Country Club, where I was thanked for being such a supportive wife while being fed a dinner of prime rib and chocolate cake that someone else cooked and cleaned up?  Well, I had entered a raffle while I was there and last week recieved an email telling me I had won.

A new fishing pole.
Okay, not a pole.  A rod and reel combo, from the nice fellows at Angler’s Lane down in Lynchburg.  It’s a TFO NXT combo that came with a nice carrying case.  It breaks down into 4 pieces, which means it fits nicely in a suitcase. Pat was down there for meetings yesterday and swung by and picked it up for me, to save them from having to ship it.
Edie, who had also entered the raffle, is slightly beside herself about this.
“You don’t fish.”
“Well, I haven’t had a new fishing pole since I was about your age.”
“It’s not a pole, it’s a rod.  You don’t fish.”
“Well, maybe I’ll start.  You know, try to share one of Daddy’s interests with him.”
“You don’t fish.”
And she storms off.
Not that she fishes all that much.  I guess maybe if she had a rod that wasn’t the pink Barbie one her father bought her when she was a toddler, she might fish more.  Although there is an older neighborhood boy who loves using the Barbie rod, because he always catches a slew of fish with it.  But she does not care about this fact, she think she deserves the new rod because she has never seen me fish.
I told her I’m sure she’ll get to use it, but she’s still pouting about the whole thing.  Pat of course, is thrilled that I’m expressing an interest in his favorite hobby.  I think he also thinks he’ll get some use out of the new rod too.  He brought it home, put it together and tried it out.

 It is apparently the nicest rod and reel in the entire family now, which has definitely not helped with a certain someone pouting that they did not win.  Never mind it’s a 9′ rod that she had a hard time maneuvering in the yard last night.  It’s the principle of the matter. 

The Best Wedding Ever.

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Fourteen years ago today, what many people agree was quite possibly the most beautiful wedding they ever attended was held.  It wasn’t a huge wedding, so perhaps that’s why you haven’t heard about it.
It was held in my mother’s back yard.  We had a small budget to work with, which encouraged creativity.  The groomsmen insisted I was not going to make the groom (or them) wear any sort of ridiculous rented garment and I didn’t.  I did make him wear a tie though.  And he wore new pants, fancy ones even,  he’d picked up at Salvation Army with the tags still attached. 
I still love that about him.
We did most of the planning in a day.  My mother had set up meetings with different caterers and florists for one day – we met with exactly one of each, realized we could work with them and that was that.  We had very specific ideas about what we wanted and most of them were not very traditional.  In fact, when I sat down with the florist, I refused to look at her standard wedding flower pictures.  I asked if she was up for something different.  She practically hugged me in response and answered with a very emphatic YES.  We talked about what would be blooming when we got married and she worked with what was local.   My Granny let me have at her peony patch (which was absolutely glorious) for the flowers for the tables.  Rather than wear a veil, I had a crown of lilies of the valley and lenten roses.  My bouquet was purple snapdragons and lilies of valley and a few other purple wildflowers that were blooming at the time.  The boutonnieres were leaves and seeds.
A friend of Pat’s had found a copy of this awesome 1974 wedding planning book entitled “Celebration: The Wild Flower Write Your Own Ceremony Picnic Reception Wedding Book”.  Pat had a huge amount of imput into our wedding. These were back in the days when he had most of the month of January off and he happened to discover that Martha Stewart was doing a week long series on weddings on her show that he not only watched, but taped for me, so we could talk about what he thought our wedding should be like.  Needless to say, our wedding was a Martha Stewart version of that most delightful book.  The wording for our invitation came from that book.  A good bit of the inspiration for the ceremony we wrote came out of that book.  My dress, which was the first dress I tried on and was absolutely perfect although not at all what I thought I wanted when I walked in the bridal shop that day,  came with a train that got chopped off, so that the hem was right at my ankles.  I wanted to get married barefoot, but compromised by wearing a pair of sweet white leather sandals that matched my dress perfectly.  I had seen a picture in one of Martha’s wedding issues of an antique plant stand that was put into use as a cake stand, in lieu of a tiered cake.  I sent the picture to my brother-in-law, who likes to build things and had him build me a similar one.  The florist draped it in flowers and each one of the four ‘layers’ had a different cake on it.  Each cake had white icing, so it looked traditional, but Pat didn’t want ‘traditional’ cake.  I agreed.  So, under white cream cheese frosting was a carrot cake.  Under a white buttercream was a strawberry shortcake type cake, with layers of fresh strawberries.  Under a white chocolate buttercream was chocolate cake. 
It rained daily for a good two weeks prior to our wedding.  We didn’t have a back up rain plan.  My mother got nervous and kept talking about one, but Pat & I knew we didn’t need one.  (To this day, we still don’t come up with solid back up in case of rain plans and it has never failed us.).  Exactly two days before our wedding, the rains stopped and everything dried up just enough for us to hold the wedding outside.  The weather on the day itself was perfect. We pressed all our friends in helping us set up the day before and clean up the day after.  My mother, my Aunt Jenny & myself made all the bridesmaid’s dresses – they were a lovely green linen.  It was a very much do-it-yourself wedding, which is really how we still live.
I recently read Mindy Kaling’s book “Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)”,  It was funny, but I mention it here because she wrote the most spot on chapter I’ve ever read about marriage, mostly based on her parent’s marriage. How marriage is about committing to things like houses and neighborhoods.  About how a happy marriage is really based on being great pals with the person you marry and having fun with them, that marriage is work, but it’s work you choose and you should choose work you love.   About weddings she said, “In real life, shouldn’t a wedding be an awesome party you throw with your great pal, in the presence of a bunch of your other friends?  A great day, for sure, but not the beginning and certainly not the end of your friendship with a person you can’t wait to talk about gardening with for the next forty years.”  That so perfectly sums up my wedding and my marriage that when I read it out loud to Pat in bed one night, I got choked up.  I think he did too.
Fourteen years after the fact, people still tell me how our wedding was the best wedding they’ve ever been to.  They talk about how it was so perfectly us, it couldn’t help but be beautiful.  We’ve been to a few weddings that had some copy cat touches, we’ve even lent the now plant stand out for service as a cake stand again.  It was an awesome party to celebrate our friendship so that we can spend the rest of our days talking about gardening and music and everything else in life we babble on about.  Fourteen years into this being married thing, I am still madly in love with my husband. And we still throw really great parties.

Currently…

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I finally finished getting the garden in this weekend, although I still have some raspberry bushes in a bucket (Pat & I are debating their placement) and the landscaping plan in the backyard has changed somewhat (Pat wants to add a pond or some sort of water feature.  I think he’s realized I need a new digging project.) and weeding is never-ending.  All this rain the last week or so has brought back weeds I thought I’d dug up already.  I just walk around with a shovel in my hand these days, attacking weeds and vines.  Which is how I got poison on my hands again.  I hate when I get it on the palms, really makes it hard to do stuff.  One of these days I’ll learn to wear gloves, but that won’t happen until I find gloves that fit just right.  I have been looking and tried some on the other day when I was picking up netting for the blueberry bushes, but the ones I really liked they didn’t have in my size.  All I ever seem to find these days are the type of gloves with the rubber on the fingers and palms – I don’t like these gloves at all, what happened to the good old fashioned canvas ones and why are they so hard to find?

The Planting Seeds Music Festival is tomorrow at Buford.  It’s a music festival celebrating all the Charlottesville elementary schools gardens.  I’m the food chair for the whole shebang, so today I’m wrapping up loose ends, dotting my i’s and crossing my t’s.  I got the rough draft for the flyer for the class picnic out today too.  I’ve put Edie’s class picnic together since kindergarten.  It’s really quite easy – I can pretty much tell you who’s going to bring what, who’s going to help and who’s going to call me the morning of in a panic. When you do the same thing 5 years in a row, you learn these things.  There’s also prep for the upcoming swap going on.  I’m really excited about some of the responses and what people are bringing. 

Last weekend’s bug seems to have faded into just another huge allergy flare-up.  I woke up feeling crummy yesterday, with that lovely racking allergy cough I get that just hurts.  I don’t like the stuff the doctor gives me for the cough – honestly, I can’t take anything stronger than a tylenol without some horrible reaction.  But, at least Pat was home so that I could lounge all I wanted to.  Also, it was Mother’s Day, so I had full cart blanche to lounge.  I got myself caught up on the NYTimes Book Review section. I had like 3 months worth of Sunday’s piled up.  It was heavenly.  We went to Mono Loco for dinner, where I realized the tequila in my margarita made the cough stop, at least for a while.  I think I’m going to need more medicinal tequila.

We officially have the fattest squirrel you have ever seen in our yard.  I’m going to see if I can’t get a picture to show you.  Seriously, it’s huge.  When Pat got a good look at it on the back porch today, he wondered if maybe it wasn’t a small groundhog with a bushy tail.  It is that fat.

We are hosting one of Pat’s coworkers this evening.  I had totally forgotten about it.  Honestly, since I came home from the gym this morning (which totally kicked my butt.  I definitely was aiming too high after taking most of the last week off with the ick), I have been lounging in my bathrobe coughing and answering emails about the festival.  I have exactly two hours to get the first floor of this house in presentable condition.   I want to make a better impression than I did the  last time we hosted his coworkers.  At least I have no where to go but up, right?  

Mom Friends.

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Mother’s Day is this weekend and we are being bombarded with reminders to do something nice for our mothers.  When you go to Hallmark, there are no cards for the other mothers in our lives, not a mention of the fact that it takes a village to raise a child.

I often say I don’t have a good blue print for this mothering thing.  It’s not that my mother did everything wrong, she did a good bit right, she really did.  It’s just that I’ve never been able to call her for advice on how to handle certain situations.  I get by on my instinct a good bit, but there are times when you need to lean on others who have gone through similar experiences. 

I have been blessed with a great many what I call “Mom Friends”.   I have several different groups of them – first and foremost, my neighborhood mom friends, whom I sometimes refer to as my “mom mentors”.  Their kids are older and I often look to their experiences for how to navigate the same with my daughter.   I’ve made mom friends every step of the way, from tumbling classes as the mother of a toddler, in preschool and in elementary school.  There are definitely some that I can’t imagine myself being friends with if it wasn’t for our kids bringing us together.  Some of them, all we share is this common experience of motherhood.

But that’s enough.

Mom friends have gotten me through when my husband’s been gone and I just want adult conversation (okay, and someone to drink with).  Mom friends have explained to me that my two year old wouldn’t throw up in the bowl because she thought that’s what was making her throw up, that’s why she had to push it aside and throw up on whatever available clean surface was around her, like my new rug.  Mom friends are how you know what bugs are going around and how long they last.  Mom friends taught me that I don’t have to make every day spectacular and memorable, I just have to be there everyday.  Mom friends taught me it’s a good thing to spend the entire day at the park on the swings while the kids dig a mud puddle.  Mom friends taught me how to get the mud puddle stains out of her pants.  Mom friends help me figure out what’s a stage and how we’re all in it, and that we will all get through it.  Mom friends have tooth fairy fail too.  Mom friends help you get through the hitting and biting stages as well as the tween stages.  Mom friends let you admit to locking the kids outside for a few minutes alone with your husband, inside.  Mom friends help you realize that none of us ever really get a day off when we’re sick.  Mom friends have taught me that you let your child follow their passion, even if it’s not yours.  Mom friends have taught me that there are many moments of waiting patiently for while they have various lessons and practices, that at a certain point, motherhood is close to being just a taxi, meal and laundry service. Mom friends have taught me that sometimes your kid is just average and you know what?  That’s okay, not every kid can do everything in the most extraordinary way.  Just treasure what your child can do.  Mom friends have taught me none of us are perfect all the time, we all have moments that we are not particularly proud of and that’s part of motherhood too.  Most importantly, I have learned from my Mom friends that we are all in this together, that we are all working mothers and that what fits one woman and her family best is not necessarily what suits any of the rest us, but we still need to support each other.  Because really, without Mom friends, I’m not sure I’d be the Mom I am today.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers in my life. 

New Swap Date Set!

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Mark your calendars gang.   Cville Swaps is back and we are planning our next event on Sunday, June 3.
RSVP to cvilleswaps@gmail.com for details.  You can swap your homemade goodies like jams and pickles and granolas and soaps, as well as fresh homegrown items from your garden.  You can swap some of those plants you need to thin from your garden, you can swap eggs from your chickens.  Think homegrown, homemade.  Hope to see you there!

A Gentleman Buries the Cat.

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The fifth of May came and went without a party at our house this year.  While there were a few Friday afternoon threats of popping over tomorrow from neighbors, no one actually showed on the day itself.  It probably didn’t hurt that at party time, it was pouring down rain.  As I sat in my bathrobe watching the rain come down, talking on the phone to Betty, cancelling our plans to drink margaritas that afternoon due to a very sore throat and under the weather feeling on my part,  she remarked that the party would have been a disaster this year had we gone through with it and that the sore throat and rain were just a message from the universe confirming this.
I thought so too.
All my productive weekend plans were thrown aside by the weather and whatever bug I happen to have.  Instead of gardening and working on the chicken house, I curled up in bed, watching movies with the mini-me when she wasn’t building a LEGO garden in the den.  It’s incredibly easy when not feeling 100%, the weather outside being crummy and being a single parent, to give in to the digital boxes like computers and television for entertainment.  Heck, being home all day, even with my husband working from home, draws me in at the prospect of a conversation of sorts, even if it’s virtual.  It’s even worse when he’s gone, as he was this weekend.
Last week, both online and in person, I’ve seen and heard others talking about various aspects of this.  Jenny over Frecklewonder wrote this really inspiring and thoughtful post this past week that got me thinking about the long list of blogs I have either bookmarked under a folder in my favorites (I’m old school that way) or that I follow in my reader.  I went through and started cleaning out the ones that I realize don’t do it for me.  Thank you for the inspiration Jenny.  I had been thinking maybe it was time to purge, but you got me to do it. 
As I’ve pondered Jenny’s post all week, I had a moment Friday, where I realized my entire morning, while being spent off-line, was being spent with friends I had either made or gotten to know better on-line.   I went for a walk with Jen.  As I came home, I saw Vikki heading into the park, so I ran over and had a visit with her.   I came home to find a package from my Send Something Good secret pal.   I realized that I had yet to go through the entire list of blogs participating in the swap – there are something like 160 of them and while I’ve made it through part of the list and I do intend to sit down and make it through all of them at some point, that’s alot of time in front of a screen.  And I’m having trouble committing to that.  I think if it were the dregs of winter and I didn’t have a neglected garden calling my name it would be easier.
Like everything in life, online life is about balance.  Knowing when enough is enough.  Sitting here, home alone in my jammies, it’s easy to lose track of time as I surf the web, seeing the latest and greatest things I could be doing.  I also realize that if the internet weren’t here to distract me, something else would.  Something else always seems to distract me.  There are pluses and minuses to the internet and putting yourself out there on it. Mostly, I’m grateful for the relationships I’ve gotten out of it.  I love comments and emails, love hearing how I’ve inspired someone, love hearing how my babble here has touched them in some way, but most of all, I love when someone is moved enough by what I have written here to call me, or to say, let’s get together.  Because no matter how much time you spend staring at a screen,  real time spent with real people can’t be replaced or replicated.

Which brings me to the title of this post.  It’s a quote from a friend, a reminder of a good time, as well as a reminder of what’s important. You can make new friends, get inspiration, ideas and how-to’s from the internet, but what’s most important are the real things you do.  Like spending time with friends, your family and yes, burying the cat.

Weird.

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For the last 10 years, we have had a Cinqo de Mayo party.  What started out as drinks with friends on a sunny Saturday afternoon has grown into a fest.   A family friendly one at that.  We just refer to it as The Party.
A pitcher of watermelon margaritas became 5 gallon containers of them mixed in a cooler, served in my granny’s punchbowl.

We just kept inviting everyone we know.  It started out word of mouth and at some point, became actual issued invitations.  People who ‘made the list’ always told us how excited they were to finally be invited.  Apparently it was quite the bash.  I’m a little modest about it, since you know, I’m the hostess and you always think your parties are legendary and fabulous.  But people were always surprised at who all was here.  Worlds collided in our front yard on a Saturday in May.    We invited all the neighbors around us who might be disturbed by the loudness of the party.  We invited all the neighbors from a block up who would walk by and chat us up about the garden, about school, about whatever.  Anyone that might walk by and be offended we were having a party and didn’t invite them.  We invited our friends and coworkers.  Edie invited her school friends, first her preschool friends, then her elementary school friends.  Every year the party got just a little bit bigger.  Once you showed up and made the list, you were on it.  We did a purge a few years ago, but added just as many on as we had taken off, plus some.   We’ve been told our party is the one of the most eclectic mixes in town.
And the crashers. There were always crashers.  Some of whom are now dear friends were crashers the first time they came, invited by mutual friends.  It’s the kind of party you bring a carload along.
I don’t remember how old Edie was when she asked when our ‘disco’ party was going to be held this year. 
 What disco party?
You know the one you guys always throw. 
We do not throw disco parties.  We are not disco party people.
Uh-huh, your disco de mayo party.
That was when the party started having a disco theme.  Then, one year, a certain someone suggested a pinata might be fun for the kids.  So we did that.  After all, what’s more fun that adults standing around drinking tequila while watching children bash a pinata and battle it out for sugar? 

Last year our friend Eddie made this glorious disco ball pinata.  I think there are still shiny bits of it’s outer layer in my front yard. The last two years running, a very sweet now 6 year old girl has taken the pinata out.  She has two older brothers and is fierce.  I don’t think it hurt that last year, the stick given to the children to bash the pinata was actually a stake from my garden that had a pointed end.  She just stabbed that sucker. Clearly, there was drinking involved and no one was paying close attention to the stick we had just handed over to 50 kids to hit a pinata with.  Tequila + pinata= fun.

The Party was always held on a Saturday, since you know, we’re responsible grown ups who can only throw huge parties on weekends.  But the theme was always Cinqo de Mayo, no matter the calendar date.  Without fail a few folkswould be confused by invitation and would call or show up on the 5th, but hey, that was just part of the fun.  The party officially started in the afternoon, with the pinata being the high point a few hours in (generally right before or right after the Kentucky Derby, which also happened to also run the same Saturday we’d have the party).  After the pinata, there was a shift in the party, with families clearing out, more kidless folks showing up.  As it got dark, the party would wind down to just those who could stumble home, a bonfire would be built in the urban bonfire, there would be smores for the kiddos and some years, the party would linger until the wee hours of the morning.  One year our last guest arrived at 11 pm. 
It was a party that took months of yard work to prep for.  The week of, we’d start putting tents up on Thursday.  A friend lent us his huge tent with big metal poles that had to be picked up in the pick up truck it was so big, that was 10′ x 20′ or something insanely huge like that, that was dubbed ‘the funeral tent’ because it was so big and indeed, looked like a tent you see over a grave site.  There would be several dining tents set up throughout the yard in addition to this.  For shade or in case of rain, whatever the weather demanded.
The day of the party was a marathon.  From the time we got up, there was a long to-do list.  A grocery store run was needed for ice.  We’d run around the neighborhood and borrow most of the picnic tables in a three block radius.  The lawn needed to be mowed, the last of the tents needed to go up, prepwork for making 15 gallons of margaritas and 10 gallons of lemonade needed to happen.  Did I mention the party would go on until the wee hours of the morning?
We served watermelon margaritas for the grown-ups, lemonade for the kids.  I learned to label the punchbowls because teenage boys will try to sneak the loaded punch.  We asked our guests to ‘Please bring something to nibble on and anything else you’d like to drink’.  We usually ended up with a case of beer left in the coolers, some years more.  We had some phenomenal food, although everyone was always surprised to find out who brought the Velveeta sausage dip. People would show up with bbq, with chips and dip, with enchiladas, with brownies, with goat cheese they made from their goat’s milk.  Last year someone showed up with sangria and I had to break out a third punchbowl.
Yes, I have three punchbowls.  I keep them on hand for occasions such as this.
We’re not having the party this year.  Pat left for a Waterkeepers Alliance Conference in Portland this morning.  It feels weird to not be having the party this year, but it’s a relief in some ways.  I realized the other day it was May 1 and I’d yet to get my front porch plants out and lined up, I hadn’t planted my hanging baskets, all things that had to be done by the party every year.  Without the party deadline hanging over my head, I have spent the last month digging up the back yard and neglecting other parts that normally are planted and weeded by this time of year.  There were no house projects, no major house cleaning that I felt needed to be done on a deadline of a Saturday in May.  Truth be told, the last few years the party has gotten to be more than alot of work. It’s not just the marathon day, the hardest part is hosting it.  Last year there were people here neither one of us were able to greet.  Making margaritas and lemonade from scratch, by hand in 5 gallon batches is helpful, but when you go through one of those guys in a hour, you’re back there in the kitchen making another one.  (Thankfully, I learned to do all the prep ahead of time, so all I have to do is mix them up.).  The party needs to change somehow, but we’re not sure how.  Do we hire staff to help out? Do we cut the guest list?  How do we cut the guest list?  So we are sitting this year out, using Pat being out of town as an excuse really, to see how life goes on without The Party.   Today is the Thursday before the party, and I should be getting ready to watch a tent go up in my front yard for Saturday.  There were watermelons at the grocery store that I didn’t buy to start juicing for Saturday.  I may even be low on tequila in the liquor cabinet.
This is not the end of The Party.  We’re talking about holding it next year.  Maybe make it an semi-annual event, to give us time in between to recover.  I joke that we host 300 of our closest friends, but really, our third of an acre is wall to wall people at the height of the party – it really is several hundred people. We’ve been telling people since New Year’s Eve we’re not having it this year.  It hasn’t always gone over well.  I’m curious to see if people actually show up as threatened on Saturday.    We’ll see, won’t we?

May Is.

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May is a month in which possibilities seem almost endless.    Spring has fully sprung and summer lies just beyond, with it’s warm weather and long lazy days.  I still think there’s time to plant all sorts of things in the yard, to start new projects that will carry us through the summer.  May is when we got married, it’s when we discovered we were having a baby. 

May is a month in which the fleetingness of life comes home.  We find ourselves trying to help baby robins that have fallen out of the nest too early.  We start realizing we have overbooked parts of our summer.  I lost my father and my best friend in the month of May, both way too early. 

May is the month where I have had the most life changing events of my life happen to me.  I get anxious about what the month has in store every year.  I think it’s gotten worse as I’ve gotten older and gotten closer to the age my father was when he passed away.  My father’s passing caused my family to implode, which Mother’s Day, also in May, helps to send that message home.  Becoming a mother myself has done much for me to realize that my mother treated me the way she did not because I was a bad person, but because she’s not in her right mind.  You simply cannot wrap a rational mind around behavior that isn’t rational.   Becoming a mother myself brought about the definite end of my relationship with my mother, as well as bringing healing to some of the wounds she inflicted.

May is an emotional roller coaster for me every year.  And it’s here again. 

Sunday Funday.

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 Despite the fact that the annual Dogwood Festival Carnival has been going on for over two weeks within walking distance of our house, we’ve yet to take advantage of it.  Sunday was the last day of the carnival, it was armband day (meaning for a flat rate the kids could ride all the rides to their heart’s content all day long), the weather was cooperating and we finally had to time to head over there.

Edie went with her bff Sophia.  Sophia’s sister and her bff tagged along as well.  The four girls walked arm in arm, chatting about very important things the whole way over.
As soon as I got the girls their armbands, I made a bee line for the funnel cake stand.  I love funnel cake.  I have been known to walk over to the Dogwood Carnival JUST to get funnel cake.  So when I saw this sign:

I was absolutely crushed and bitterly disappointed. 
Seriously.  NO FUNNEL CAKE?!?!?!?
At least there were corn dogs.

And Edie made due with a caramel apple, but I felt that was way too healthy.  I know I complained to absolutely everyone I saw.  I complained the entire walk home.  I came home and complained on Facebook about the lack of funnel cake.  I am still bummed about this.
Their fryers were busted.  It had been that way all weekend.  I found this out when I complained to the people working the corn dog stand.  They didn’t understand why it wasn’t fixed either.  I heard plenty of other people walking past the closed funnel cake stand complaining, so I was in good company.
As we walked home and I complained about the lack of funnel cake for the 90th time to my daughter, she thanked me for taking her & her friends anyway.  I assured her, their happy faces as they rode every ride multiple times came very close to making up for the lack of funnel cake. 

Really, they did.

I knew better. I did.

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The recipe said to use one cake pan.  I wondered about that.  As I poured the batter into the pan and saw how full the pan was, I wondered again.  I went ahead and followed the recipe, and not my instincts.
I should have followed my instincts.
Had my pan had taller sides, it probably would have been okay.  Instead, it spilled out over the top of the pan and onto my oven.  Nothing like the smell of burning cake wafting through the house late at night.

When I dumped it out of the pan, it started falling apart.  I was upset, but decided to sleep on it and see in the morning if I could salvage it or if I should start all over.
I’m comfortable improvising in the kitchen, but not when it comes to baking.  Baking is chemistry.  And chemistry? Not my bag.  I ended up getting exempted from chemistry lab in high school because of my ability to set things on fire and blow things up without being able to explain how I just did that.  My love of profanities didn’t help the situation either.  When you come close to setting your chemistry lab partner on fire, it’s best to not say “oh shit” and then burst into uncontrolled giggles apparently.  (The same can be said for cutting your family’s hair.  Whoops is also not a good word to use in these situations.)
My instinct told me to use two pans and I should have listened.  From here on out, I will be better about listening to that voice.  I even noted in the cookbook to use two pans next time.  Chemistry and altering recipes might not be my thing, but I can tell when to use a different pan than called for.  I have successfully made cupcakes from a cake recipe before, so I really should have known better.
I decided to try putting the cake together with filling and frosting.  This was the first layer cake I’d attempted since the cake class I’d assisted with in February and I felt confident enough in the skills I’d picked up there to try it. 
The recipe I was following was Chocolate Blackout Cake from Wayne Harley Brachman’s Retro Desserts cookbook.  I love this cookbook.  The lemon square recipe in this is my go-to.  The cream filled chocolate cupcake recipe?  One of my standards.  So I trust this cookbook.  I think I just forgot that pastry chefs tend to have better equipment than us home chefs and their cake pans are taller. It made a difference here.

I learned in my cake class a good way to keep the filling contained between your cake layers is to pipe a row of frosting around the edge.  This cake was being frosted in a ganache frosting.  I wasn’t sure how this would work as my edging, so after some brainstorming, I made a chocolate whipped cream and used that to keep the pudding filling in place.  It also gave me a good chance to practice using my pastry bag.  I still need practice.
Turns out the whipped cream came in handy.  After I got the cake together and frosted, it was most definitely what you would call ‘wonky’.  One side had a huge divot where the cake had fallen apart and I wasn’t able to patch it with frosting.  Buttercream is much more forgiving than ganache when you have a cake that has structural issues.  The recipe called for toasting cake crumbs and using them to coat the cake.  I have tried toasting the cake crumbs in making this cake before and didn’t care for it.  I just let the cake crumbs sit out over night and after a skim coat of whipped cream, I coated it in crumbs.
The birthday boy’s request was for ‘chocolate, chocolate, chocolate and maybe some fruit’.  With that in mind, I cut some strawberries in half and used the very last of the chocolate whipped cream to ‘glue’ them to the sides of the cake.  A little time in the refrigerator to firm everything up and voila, chocolate chocolate chocolate cake with some fruit.

The finished product was tasty.  I doubled the ganache frosting and used a full batch of the pudding.  Next time I might try a double batch of pudding, as I like a nice thick filling between my cake layers.  (The recipe in the cookbook calls for 1/2 batch.  Definitely not enough.) Despite the structural issues, the cake itself was just right – not too dry, not too moist.  It could have used more pudding as filling  but everyone seemed to like it just fine the way it was.  Thankfully, thirteen year old boys are much easier to please than forty-something amateur pastry chefs.  Although I do get a kick out of hearing them talk about how I’m going to make the next birthday boy an even better cake than this one.  That’s my kind of trash talk.