Betty Knows Best

Welcome to the non-cooking blog! Rose’s birthday cake deserves its own post.

Are you impressed? Well, I wish I could make a cake that pretty…

…or that mouthwatering.

But alas. This poor thing was all I managed. Sigh, I’m not very good at making things look pretty. I do cute, funky, goofy, weird, functional, and sometimes even clever, but rarely do I make something that’s pretty. I’m ok with it most of the time, really.

As if you need this statement after seeing the above picture, let me just say that I am no baker at all. I do not enjoy it. I love making (and eating) bread, but beyond that and a few easy-but-not-cute dessert standbys, I prefer to put my efforts into cooking REAL food. Baking is just too precise an art for someone who’s as…ramshackle in the kitchen as me.

I’m not sure what exactly I don’t like about baking, because I definitely do enjoy a tasty dessert! Maybe it’s the many excesses necessary for baking— the only treats worth eating have WAY more butter and sugar all in one place than I want to think about (or pay for). The thing that probably gets me the most, though is, as Anne Shirley said, “There is no scope for the imagination in cookery. You simply have to follow the rules.” I balk at the strict unwritten rules of baking that few recipes spell out clearly enough to be followed successfully.

When it comes to baking, I’m kind of a mix between Anne of Green Gables and Jo March from Little Women—full steam ahead without really pausing to think till it’s too late, or pausing only to daydream at the wrong times. Often both. Even when I tell myself to FOCUS and take it slow, I somehow manage to destroy most things sugary. The last time I tried baking a new desserty recipe, this is what happened:

These mint brownies were drowned in puddles of too-sugary frosting and the melted chocolate glaze seized up instead of pouring gracefully. Frosting defeats me every time. I must mention the positive side: once they were refrigerated, these blobs did end up tasting ok, even if there was a bit too much searing sugary green stuff on them.

Ok, back to the cake at hand: Rose’s birthday. As you can tell, I used my fine cake pedestal to display the work of art. HA, I don’t own a pretty cake stand so this baby was slapped on a dinner plate with a Pyrex bowl on top. Functional, yes. Pretty? Nope! Because I wanted to enjoy Rose’s actual birthday, I made her cake the day before. I completely forgot to get a cake mix on our last trip to Winco, so I pulled down my America’s Test Kitchen and Better Homes & Gardens cookbooks and browsed for a doable recipe.

In spite of my bad history with experimental baking, for some reason I still decided to combine 2 or 3 recipes to make an “ideal” chocolate cake. HA. Did I mention my lack of cake pans? Let me add another HA. I used 3 pie pans instead, and the batter baked into thin, dry, dark wafers. “Any frosting of mine should be goopy enough to fix that!” I thought.

For the first time in my life, I managed to follow a buttercream frosting recipe line by line, and it actually worked! I stacked and spread those black wafer-cakes all together—I was dying to add “like a pro” here, but that would be embellishing to the extreme. So I’ll reign in my desire for delicious, flattering similes in the name of TRUTH! Um, CAKE. The frosting was a tad sparse. The cake was quite lopsided. There was no way I was about to inflict further damage on that poor mound more by trying to write “Happy Birthday, Rose” on it! So I shook a bunch of happy sprinkles on top and called it DONE.

Can you see the leftward tilt? I still don’t know what I did to make that happen, because all the cakes seemed evenly pancake-flat to me.

Check out that SWIRL detail! It was my finest moment.

Two candles.

When we tasted it last night, it was indeed rather dry and pretty puny, as expected.

But hey, Rose liked it!

The next birthday cake I do will definitely need a Betty Crocker intervention.

POOF! Rose is 2

WE LOVE OUR SWEET ROSE MERI! Pardon my motherly nostalgia…

Burrito:

Kiss:

Shoes:

Big brother:

Pretties:

Funnies:

The trademark grin:

Family:

Happy happy happy. That’s what she makes us.

Kids in action

We have church at 1pm this year. Long Sunday mornings are long. Today I was admiring all of the memorable moments I managed to record in January. Normally I don’t have the patience to upload more than one 30-second video at a time, but today I just let these puppies upload while we were at church. Obviously this post will appeal most to loving family members who don’t get to see Jay and Rose often, but I think it’s safe to say that the first one will entertain more than the relations.

Jeff does the BEST voices! He should’ve been a muppetteer or cartoon voice. I’m pretty sure his high school students benefit from his vocal prowess, though, along with his kids. I wish we had a recording of the day he read Beowulf to his mythology class.

Jay often reads the books he has memorized to Rose. In this video, he’s reading Bathtime for Biscuit. I LOVE when Rose rests her head on his shoulder and listens so attentively.

I try to take videos of normal times, to preserve their little voices and expressions, so here are two of those:

By the way…

I have a new little neph named Chase. I snooped and snatched these pictures off of Facebook (hope that’s ok, Em). I wish wish wish I could be there in person.

Chase Randall Broadbent: born January 31, 2013 in Washington, Missouri. He was 6 lbs 1 oz. He came THREE weeks early, lucky duck sister of mine.

Slam dunk, dude. This my sister’s 3rd boy in a row! Now Jay and Rose have three boy cousins and zero girl cousins on the Brown side of our family.

Thank goodness for Layne! She’s the one and only cousin on the White side of the family, and she lives right down the street from us.

All of this babyliciousness in my family is HAPPY. I’m so glad that my sisters have such darling, brand-new sweetfaces. I LOVE BABIES! Why can’t they stay little for longer? It gives me a pang to see how BIG my two kids seem compared to these tiny babies. How do they grow so fast? I’d say the only thing that doesn’t seem to go fast with kids is the diaper stage. It lasts forever. If it wasn’t so agonizingly tough for my feeble body to bear children, I think I’d have a hundred of them, diapers and all! Well, ok. You know what I mean.

For now, I’ll do as much auntie-snuggling as a I can.

Love.

Saturday Morning “Selfies”

[kiss]

When this almost-two-year-old girl is sad, she’s devastated.
When she’s happy, she’s delighted.
Every day she reminds me to completely embrace each moment and then move on to the next one with just as much intense zeal.