Hey Kids!

Tags

Animals, Baking, Crafts, Family, Fun, Home, Just Because, Pictures

Just popping in for a sec to say “Hi!”

I’m still working on getting things reorganized at home and with all the online business stuff (I’ve now added a Twitter account on top of the blog and 3 websites to update/maintain) and we just had a major scramble over trying to get the taxes done. Long story short, our tax guy (that we’ve used for the last 15 years or so) wound up in the hospital and we didn’t find out until April 4th that he’d not gotten to our returns yet. Yeah, not real happy about that … especially with this being the first return for the new business! At least we managed to find a guy who seems really good and he was willing to take us on last minute. Got it all signed and submitted today. Crisis averted … Whew!

Amongst all the chaos here, we’ve managed to squeeze a few more things in. First, I finally found some time to tweak a recipe for a Lavender Pound Cake. I got the recipe from the Mt Shasta Lavender Farm and tried it out but it was a little too dense for me. After a few small tweaks, I came up with a combination that is really yummy. And yes, I’ll share. 🙂

Lavender Pound Cake

 1/4 Cup Milk
 4 Eggs
 2 Cups sifted Cake or Pastry Flour
 1 Cup Sugar
 1 teaspoon baking powder
 2 Sticks (half pound) Butter
 1 1/2 teaspoons Vanilla
 2 teaspoons crushed Lavender buds

Heat oven to 350° F. Grease and flour a loaf pan (8 x 4 x 2 1/2) and 
line the bottom with parchment paper.

Mix the flour, sugar, baking powder and lavender in a large mixing 
bowl. In a separate bowl, whisk the eggs, milk and vanilla until 
well blended.

Slice the butter into tablespoon sized chunks and add to dry mixture. 
Add about 1/2 the egg mixture and mix with a hand mixer on low speed 
until all the dry ingredients are moist. Mix on high speed for one 
minute.

Scrape the bowl and add half the remaining egg mixture. Mix on high 
for 30 seconds. Scrape the bowl again, add the rest of the egg 
mixture, and mix on high for an additional 30 seconds.

Pour into prepared loaf pan. Bake at 350° F for about an hour. Cake 
is done when a toothpick inserted in the middle of the cake comes 
out clean.

We also put together a window seat for our kitty Samira. She kept standing on hubby’s dresser trying to see out the bedroom window so we took some plywood, 2 inch foam bedding, an old pillow case, and a couple shelf brackets and built her a padded seat so she can watch the birds in our Magnolia tree out front. I think she likes it.

That’s pretty much it for the moment. I’m still trying to get to reading blogs but really want to get the house finished before summer vacation so that’s taking priority right now. If we have cell service this year (we switched carriers in January so we’ll see if it’s any better this year) maybe I can use the phone to create my own little network and read them while I’m in Shasta.

One last thing … I promised Kathy that I’d post pics of the ornaments I made for the holidays this past December (I used her instructions/pattern) and I’m late getting to that. I do have pictures of all those that I made and will post more (all?) of them later, but for now here are a few of them.