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It’s been a while! My site has fallen majorly by the wayside which both feels appropriate (see first point below) and makes me a bit sad. There’s a lot I’ve already forgotten. I want to analyze a bit more why I haven’t been posting… but that’s something I need to think a bit more about first.
A few notes to catch up on major points, and then hopefully back to posting semi-regularly.
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This is my Grandma Piper’s classic white frosting recipe that she always used on the family recipe for white layer cake. Her notes: “This frosting is super. It never hardens on the cake. BUT, it is only enough for sides and top. So must use a filling.” I just doubled it for B’s birthday cake and there was plenty left over.
I’d never heard of a frosting with a flour and milk base before so looked it up online. Apparently this is “ermine” frosting. I was sort of skeptical, but it is really, really nice. It’s not quite as sweet as a standard buttercream, and Grandma Piper is right. It stays so fluffy, it’s kind of crazy. It was super easy to spread even after it had been in the fridge (after it had come to room temp, of course).
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Double the quantities if using it for the top, sides, and inside of this white layer cake recipe.
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It’s such a stereotype. But there really is a moment when suddenly they’re not a baby anymore.
You open up your phone to look for particular photo and notice it’s automatically made a memories album of your kid. So you click and watch, and realize you missed the moment, whenever that was. It’s a weird shock that seems so obvious, it’s like you didn’t get to say goodbye to a friend you always knew had to leave.
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This recipe was in the cookbook that my Grandma Piper customized for me. This is apparently the cake that the Piper family always made for weddings (so my great-grandma’s recipe on my Grandpa’s side, I think), and my Grandma made it for birthday parties. I made this for the first time last week for B’s birthday party on the weekend.
It results in an exceptionally smooth batter, it almost feels a bit too fancy for a kid’s party. But it’s a lovely cake! It also stored well double-wrapped in the fridge for a few days before I iced it. I haven’t tried freezing this cake, but I think it would probably work nicely.
Grandma would have always used her KitchenAid, but it was no problem making this with handheld electric beaters. Her recipe didn’t specify salted or unsalted butter. I used salted and quite liked it. Likewise it didn’t specify the sugar. I’m almost certain she would have used granulated, but I used caster which worked fabulously. If you use caster, just make sure to go with the weight measurement, not cups.
Apparently this recipe makes 3 dozen cupcakes and you have to bake those for 25 minutes. But I’ve never tried it, and there is no more instruction from her on that.
Goes well with this classic white frosting recipe.
* This cake is sort of hard to tell when it’s done. When done, it will have picked up a little bit of color on top and should pull away from the sides of the pan slightly. If you listen to it you shouldn’t hear much crackling, and if you very lightly press the top, it shouldn’t feel like you pop too many bubbles.
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So apparently you can’t set your iPhone to show AM and PM alongside the 12-hour time. This may not seem like a big deal, but I think it’s a pretty significant accessibility issue.
My grandpa is 100 years old, we just celebrated his birthday in March. He’s doing pretty darn well for his age. The only thing he’s having trouble with is short-term memory. This usually isn’t a big enough problem to cause any major concern at the moment. Although he lives on his own, it’s in an apartment that is equipped for his needs within an assisted living building, and my parents aren’t too far from him.
The thing that is causing problems, pretty major problems, is when he takes a nap and then wakes up and thinks it’s the wrong time of day. This causes him to miss meals because he doesn’t go down to the dining room in time. And when older folks start to regularly miss meals, they get pretty weak pretty fast.
He doesn’t want to cause a fuss, so we don’t know exactly how often this happens. I imagine with other folks, it also might be a bit embarrassing (maybe it is for him as well, I’m not sure). He naps a lot, which is fair enough considering his age, so I suspect it might be more often than we think.
I was talking about this with my mom, asking him if he has a big digital clock in his apartment or something. He does have a clock, but he usually looks at his watch or his phone for the time. I don’t want to suggest that he wear a digital watch, because his watch came from my grandma. So we were looking at our phones, and she pointed out that there’s no AM/PM.
There’s no way of changing it! That seems ludicrous.
I know he could change it to 24-hr time. But I doubt he would do that, because he would probably convince himself that it’s fine and he doesn’t need it. It would be a heck of a lot easier if you could just show AM/PM via the iOS Date & Time settings, as one would expect.
If any Apple folks happen to read this, I’d love if you could take this feedback onboard in some way. Or if you happen to know anyone at Apple, I’d really appreciate if you shared this with them.
In the meantime… I guess we get him a bigger digital clock for his apartment? I’m really not sure.
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We made it up to the northernmost stanza stone with B. He wasn’t thrilled about the whole walk, but he did love squishing his boots in the mud and chowing down on a vegan Greggs sausage roll.
During lunch one day, we heard an insane screeching in front of my sister-in-law’s house. A sparrowhawk had caught a bird not much smaller than itself and was squeezing its talons around it, with its wings fanned out on guard and its head darting around to spot competitors. We wanted to intervene, but it would have been pointless. The sparrowhawk needed to eat (and well done for catching such big prey!), and the other bird seemed likely too injured to survive. It took a long time though.
Photo taken by Sam on his dad’s RICOH GR1v.
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EL and KT came over for dinner last weekend and brought cake. WHAT A CAKE.
It was a chocolate coffee crunch cake. I asked EL, basically it’s this chocolate cake with coffee whipped cream and honeycomb as per this Serious Eats recipe.
It was insanely good. Super decadent, but also somehow very light. Just the perfect texture.
The cake itself kind of reminded me of a cake from a long time ago, so I dug out my grandma’s recipe book again. Turns out my great-aunt’s Texas Sheet Cake recipe (jump to recipe, though I recommend reading the critical notes first) is pretty similar in a lot of ways. Most of the measurements are the same, and both are pretty much one-bowl recipes that call for boiling water.
I haven’t made it recently, but it seems to me that it might be a bit denser / richer than the cake recipe linked above since it has more fat and less milk (1 c butter and ½ c buttermilk in the sheet cake versus ½ c oil and 1 c buttermilk/milk in the layer cake). A denser texture would make sense I suppose for a single-layer cake.
I think the recipe above makes more sense for a layer cake, but I’ll write my great-aunt’s recipe out below since the many-times-Xeroxed version in my grandma’s cookbook is almost unreadable and since it might be worth trying this out with the coffee whipped cream + honeycomb topping.
A few critical notes about the sheet cake recipe:
Marie Longman
* To make ½ c buttermilk, pour ½ T of lemon juice, distilled white vinegar, or cider vinegar in to a ½ c measurement and then top it up the rest of the way with the milk of your choice. Actual dairy products will curdle when they hit the acid, which is what you want.
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Thanksgiving this year was verrrrry small. We had a few options to celebrate with friends / family, but ended up just sticking to the three of us at home. I’ve been sick for almost two weeks now and was not about to give this to someone else. 💀 Plus that meant we could move it to Friday, which was helpful since I was at least feeling a little better at that point.
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B is like a cat. He wants up, then immediately wants down. Hands me something, like my clog, and then immediately wants it back. Then he’ll run around with two sets of tongs for a while. (To be fair, I don’t think cats can do that.)
He’s started learning animal noises.
“What does a snake say?”
“What does a horse say?”
And he’s finding his voice. I shouldn’t laugh. I think I’m supposed to stay serious when he gets so loud (we have lovely neighbors we would like to keep), but I can’t help it. Extended vocal techniques. Meredith Monk has nothing on him.