July 11 my Grandmother, sister, and I attended our second annual Garden Tour.
I was really looking forward to this trip, both to see the flowers and to take pictures with my new camera.
This is one of my favorites:
Such beautiful flowers invariably turn my thoughts to the true Master Gardener who designed every flower separately. Such color! Such beauty! Each flower gives witness to a small portion of God’s glory. Oh Lord, how great are thy works!
My quest to find the perfect cake recipe has ended. I shall never again feel that dreadful sinking feeling at the first bite of ill-textured cake. For after six years of trying out recipes that turned out dry and biscuit-like, I have discovered the two ingredients that make a cake perfect.
The first step in the right direction came from Alton Brown, who stressed the importance of using the right kind of flour when baking. Cake flour has a very soft texture, and really is necessary if you want a good textured cake.
The other ingredient essential to a moist, delicious cake is buttermilk. The discovery of how important buttermilk really is happened almost by accident. It was my birthday and I wanted a chocolate cake. We had a recipe for chocolate cake that was heavenly, but at the last minute we realized we didn’t have any buttermilk, which the recipe called for. We substituted regular milk instead, and what a disappointment we had when we tasted it!
So, on Joseph’s birthday I went hunting for a yellow cake recipe that included cake flour and buttermilk, and spent less than two minutes looking for one. It was incredible. The perfect balance of lightness and density, and very, very moist. It had a taste reminiscent of a Betty Crocker mix without the tell-tale boxed flavor. Here is the recipe:
4 cups plus 2 tablespoons (480 grams) cake flour (not self-rising)
2 teaspoons (10 grams) baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon (5 grams) table salt
2 sticks (1 cup, 1/2 pound or 225 grams) unsalted butter, softened
2 cups (400 grams) sugar
2 teaspoons (10 ml) pure vanilla extract
4 large eggs, at room temperature
2 cups buttermilk (475 ml), well-shaken
Preheat oven to 350°F. Butter two 9-inch round cake pans and line with circles of parchment paper, then butter parchment. (Alternately, you can use a cooking spray, either with just butter or butter and flour to speed this process up.)
Sift together flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a medium bowl. In a large mixing bowl, beat butter and sugar in a large bowl with an electric mixer at medium speed until pale and fluffy, then beat in vanilla. Add eggs 1 at a time, beating well and scraping down the bowl after each addition. At low speed, beat in buttermilk until just combined (mixture will look curdled). Add flour mixture in three batches, mixing until each addition is just incorporated.
Spread batter evenly in cake pan, then rap pan on counter several times to eliminate air bubbles. (I like to drop mine a few times from two inches up, making a great big noisy fuss.) Bake until golden and a wooden pick inserted in center of cake comes out clean, 35 to 40 minutes. Cool in pan on a rack 10 minutes, then run a knife around edge of pan. Invert onto rack and discard parchment, then cool completely, about 1 hour.
I used a 9×13 pan and adjusted the cook time accordingly, and it was just a little on the sweet side so I’ll probably cut the sugar back a little next time. Other than that, you couldn’t ask for a better cake. Here’s the recipe for the previously mentioned chocolate cake also:
5 ounces (115 grams) semi sweet chocolate, coarsely chopped
2 1/4 cups (270 grams) cake flour
3/4 cup (70 grams) unsweetened cocoa (preferably Dutch processed)
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup (240 ml) lukewarm coffee (or water)
1 cup (240 ml) buttermilk
1 1/4 cups (280 grams) unsalted butter, room temperature
2 cups (450 grams) granulated white sugar
5 large eggs, room temperature
1 1/2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (180 degrees C) and place oven racks in the upper and lower third of the oven. Lightly butter and flour (or spray with a nonstick vegetable/flour spray), and line the bottoms of three – 8 x 2 inch deep (20 x 5 cm) round baking pans with parchment or wax paper, .
In a heatproof bowl, placed over a saucepan of simmering water, melt the chopped chocolate. Remove from heat and let cool to room temperature.
In a separate bowl, sift the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, baking soda and salt.
In a small bowl, combine the coffee (or water) and buttermilk.
In the bowl of your electric mixer, or with a hand mixer, beat the butter until smooth and creamy. Add the sugar and continue beating until the mixture is fluffy (about three to five minutes). Scrape down the sides of the bowl as needed. Add the eggs, one at a time, mixing well after each addition. Add the vanilla extract and beat to combine. Then add the melted chocolate and beat until incorporated. Add the coffee/ buttermilk mixture and flour mixture in three additions, beginning and ending with the flour mixture. Beat only until the ingredients are mixed together.
Divide the batter evenly among the three prepared pans and smooth the tops. Bake for about 30 – 35 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean and the tops spring back when lightly pressed. (I like to rotate the pans about halfway through baking to ensure even baking.) Remove from oven and place on a wire rack to cool for about 15 minutes.
Enjoy! and try not to eat the entire pan at once. : )
On the farm on the fourth, we rode four-wheelers:
Landon has only had one driving lesson since he got his license, so he was excited to drive this.
Two cute brothers!
Sparklers!
For Mom and Dad’s eighteenth wedding anniversary last week, Landon, Maria, and I put together this family tree as a present. Maria cut the ribbon, Landon did the calligraphy, (Boy, did Landon improve his calligraphy skills. He ended up rewriting the first names at the end, he was so much better) and I drove to Hobby Lobby for the materials (oh, how I lu-uuuve my drivers license).
A big thank you to my Grandparents who went through thick photo albums to find all of the photographs!
With morning glories,
and watermelon,
cilantro blooms
and pumpkin vines
and corn plants all in a row.
Well, after Ballet Recital week and Drama Camp week, (and a week for recovery), There’s quite a few thing’s I have to post about. The first is a really cool partial eclipse of the sun my family watched on May 20. The moon crossed the surface of the sun, and though it wasn’t safe to look at directly, we saw it projected through a pinhole on a piece of paper. Someone took a bite out of the sun!
Dad also got out his welding helmet to look at it:
The next piece of excitement at our house was a little baby robin who seemed to have been blown out of his nest prematurely. His parents fed him on the ground, but none of his younger siblings survived. So he hopped around our yard for a week and a half, unable to fly. When the daddy robin wasn’t around, we fed him berries and worms.
Then it was time to start Drama Camp, which went for two weeks this year since we were doing a musical this year. I was the main girl character, and I loved my costume:
Landon was also in the musical, in the chorus:
The opening chorus
Dance Gallery has put together next year’s ballet schedule, and here is an excerpt:
This summer, a homeschooled friend from ballet and I are teaching three classes for young children together for six weeks. Then in the fall we both have our own ballet classes! I’m so excited!
The bird feeder has been adding vibrant splashes of color to my life, and bringing around birds I never knew even lived here. For all the ten years we’ve lived at this house, we haven’t had one cardinal in our yard, and now one visits about once or twice a week!
This is a yellow-headed blackbird, a new species no one in our family has ever seen before.
Goldfinches are always a delight with their bright color and cheerful song:
Johnathan has invented a very unique way to birdwatch. He surprised me with his patience, laying under the blanket for almost an entire hour! That is a very long stretch for a boy who barely stops moving!
I have been in our backyard many, many times in my life, and so it seems to would be a reasonable assumption that I have seen just about everything there is to see there. Yet when I took a walk through the yard carrying my camera, it was almost as if I was seeing everything for the first time. As I looked for opportunities for a photo, I saw details I usually miss, and beauty I usually overlook. For example, I have never thought chives had exceptionally pretty flowers until I got up close:
Strawberry blossoms are also very small and humble, but delicate and lovely when examined closer.
Dainty columbines:
Carrying my camera also helped to show me how much more there is for me to see, if I would look more carefully. I was standing within six inches of this lovely mourning cloak and could have had a perfect picture, but I wasn’t paying attention and scared it away by nearly stepping on it. So I was only able to take this picture against a fence at a rather awkward angle.
My camera also led me to a discovery I would not have otherwise made. Trying to take a picture of a male robin, I found it odd that the bird was allowing me to come so close to it. It was chirping at me angrily, so I immediately started to look for its nest, and sure enough there was a mother robin sitting on her eggs.
The monarchs returned in a gigantic wave on Tuesday, and they were scattered liberally all over the neighbors’ bushes, along with several other species of butterfly:
This picture gives a good idea of the concentration of the butterflies.
A mourning cloak butterfly was also enjoying the nectar from the bushes.
There is a cute little pair of house finches that like to visit the feeder, and they almost always come together.
Three at a time!
The grackles that love to come to the feeders are not so cute. They are also greedy and eat twice was much as the littler birds. They don’t let any other bird on the feeder while they are on it, so while they are eating a line of four or five finches and sparrows forms on the swing set, waiting for the grackle to finish.
Joseph helps me water some lilies I transplanted last fall.
John plays with one of the many snakes that like to sunbathe underneath the black plastic in the garden.
Daniel making mischief helping in the garden:
More crocuses:
To get a really good idea of how different this spring has been from past years, I went back and looked at pictures of this same group of tulips in full bloom. This year they started blooming on April 1, and last year thy were blooming on May 7, and the year before on May 15!
This bulb grouping has been a great success. I planted four tulips and two daffodils in the fall of 2007, and now there are over twenty tulips and nearly thirty daffodils!
Interesting mushrooms Joseph found in my garden.
