Piiiick Up, Daddy's coming home...!!!

This is the way we get the house cleaned up before Daddy gets home from work. The trouble is, when he's been gone all week then there is a LOT more to clean up! :D We start out with saying "Roooooom RESCUE!!" and we have 15 minutes to pick up and put away all the toys and such. As we pick up we sing "Piiick up, Daddy's coming home, piiick up, Daddy's coming home...." It's so cute and it all gets done!! Today, however, I've sent the kids out of the way and I'm tearing around like a nut!! :D The kiddies decided this morning that they wanted to do some crafts. Apparently that means taking the containers of glitter and sprinkling the entire contents over everything and everyone! I'm not kidding. I wish I were. Soooo I have to get glitter out of the carpet, off the keyboards, off the furniture etc... you'd think it would be easy. It's not. I wish it were! ;D

Happily I'm just glad that hubster is on his way home, so I've kept my cool and actually been a very good AP Mama today! :D I've played cars with Jack, read books with him, played hide and seek with both kiddoes, looked at and remarked upon Jessie's drawings ( she's improving remarkably, it's amazing how that happens!! ) and now I'm picking up by doing 5 minutes in each room! It works so well that way! 5 minutes makes a great dent in the the mess and the whole house seems to get picked up by itself! :D Jack is in the basement "Yachking a woowie" ( "Watching a movie" for those of you who don't speak "Jack" ! ) as he is petrified of the vacuum cleaner. I may have mentioned before that the child is quite used to and undisturbed by the sound of me yelling, but is terrified of the vacuum..... a telling situation.

Anyway, I've procrastinated enough... still have the dishwasher to load, trash to take out, kitchen floor and windows to wash and the vacuuming to do... oh and I'll just BET the kiddoes will want dinner too....!! AGAIN!!?!?! LOL!!

Ok! OK!! The Vegan Cherry Sponge Cake Recipe! :D

I wsa checking through the blog and noticed someone all the way from Latvia found my blog looking for the Vegan Cherry Sponge Cake recipe!! Oh the guilt!! I'll post it right now!!!!

Basic Vegan Sponge Cake
I found this on the realfood.org.uk website and have modified it to make it U.S. friendly! :D

First mix until well incorporated......

1 1/2 cup of water
1 1/8 cup sugar ( I used half brown and half white... it makes it sort of chewy!) (in a good way!)
vanilla essence to taste
1/2 cup + 2 tbsp oil ( Canola)


Then add, a little at a time...

1 1/2 cups of self raising flour with
3 teaspoons of baking powder stirred in

beating as you go.

When the batter is nice and mixed, pour it into two greased and floured 8 inch cake tins. ( I also put parchment paper on the bottom of my pans.... !)
bake for about 25 minutes at 375 degrees until it is golden brown on top and a skewer inserted in the center comes out clean.

Variations
For the cherry cake simply drop a handful of pitted cherries randomly around the batter when it is in the pans. I also made one where I replaced half the water with cherry juice and added the cherries... oh so good!

The author of the recipe also suggests using coffee instead of water for a coffee cake or replacing and 8th of a cup of the flour with cocoa powder for a chocolate cake. For a toffee cake replace the plain sugar with muscovado or really sticky brown sugar.....use your imagination, it's a wonderful, quick and easy cake that tastes DEEE licious! : D

Enjoy!!

Painted Lady!

Well ! I did it! I painted the hallway and the entry way wall! I think it looks quite nice! :D I was going for a pale yellow..... then perhaps a Mocha.... then maybe a sand colour.... then I ended up with Green Tea !! :D I like it though! It looks very fancy! :D

Here are the "befores".... excuse the mess....

And here are the "afters" ! :D What do you think?!? :D

Brecon for President! :D

You have no doubt noticed all the pictures of our Pooch, Brecon. She is 12 years old and thinks she is 2!! I have entered her sweet face into a contest for our local phone company to get her on the cover of the phone book! She needs all the votes she can get as the competition is fierce!! :D Please click here if you would like to vote for her! You can vote once per day!

Thank YOU!! :D

Vegan Cherry Sponge Cake update!

I was just scrolling through my past posts and noticed I'd blithely mentioned I'd let you know how the cherry sponge cake worked out...!! It worked out WONDERFULLY!! ;D It's too late now for me to think straight, but tomorrow I'll post the recipe! Oh it was sooo good I've made it one more time since the last and it just gets yummier and yummier! :D

That's really it for me tonight! I'm worn OUT! :D

While the Cat's away....

The mouse will tear up the flooring in the bathroom and wish to God she hadn't..... aye aye aye. As with all home "improvement" projects this one looks like it will be a lot harder and cost a lot more than I expected....and it's a tad too late to do anything about it now. Ooops. .... LOL!!!! I'll keep you posted on the progress... OR I'll run away. Either way......!! :D

Is it just me?

Or is it going a little too far when a woman insists her husband and family turn the car around so she can run into the local sex shop and inform them that their scrolling sign is misspelled and that Novelties has an "L"....?!!?! Or is it just me?!? :}

Firework drama.

Well on the night of the 4th of July we were sleeping quietly in our beds and heard the fire trucks whine by. They do it a lot, we live on the main road so it's not usually a big deal. This time they seemed pretty insistent and were enough to wake me up. I sat up and as I did so I smelled smoke. A LOT of smoke. I called out "I smell SMOKE, Bud" to Rex and he jumped up as I did. I couldn't see anything out of my bedroom window so I tore downstairs, reassuring myself the whole way that it wasn't MY house that was on fire..?? Someone would have TOLD us, right?!?! We shot outside and the dark street was filled with smoke we could see it billowing up against the streetlights and smell the acrid stench of it. We could see lights of the fire trucks reflecting in the smoke and knew approximately where the fire was. Rex ran inside to put on shorts and went out to see what he could do, if anything. As I waited I got dressed too and paced around the house waiting for him to come back with news. It probably would have been ok to leave the house with the sleeping kiddoes in it but I was worried they'd wake up to the sirens and smell the smoke and think our house was on fire. I waited. Rex came back and told me where the fire was and I took a cell phone and ran out. I found the family standing alone on the sidewalk, watching as their house burned down. The volunteer fire department were doing a great job and water poured down the street like a river from the pumpers. Lights from the many fire trucks and police cars swirled around our heads.. the whole scene very surreal. The family were standing with their old German Shepherd dog. Apparently she had been the one to save the family. She had barged into the rooms with such force that she woke the sleeping occupants and they were able to snatch up the small children and hustle everyone out the front door. The family looked so lost as they huddled together so I talked with them and helped them out a little bit. They had a wedding the next day and all the clothes they were going to wear, all the gifts and so on, were lost to the fire. They weren't quite sure how they were going to swing it all. Poor folks. I offered our house as somewhere to stay but they had inlaws in the city so were able to have somewhere to go at least.

The next day I thought about them all morning. I knew the wedding was at 11 and I was sad to see it was raining at that time. I did notice that the sun broke out around noon and I hoped that the timing would be perfect for them to be leaving the church into the sun. I caught up with the family again that afternoon.. they were salvaging some things from the fire and had happily been able to save quite a few family photos. They said the wedding went off really smoothly and they had "pulled it off" !!! I'm so happy for them.

At the time of the fire they were unsure how it had started but we agreed that the odds of a house fire on the 4th of July NOT being caused by fireworks was probably pretty slim. The fire marshall determined that some fireworks had not been extinguished correctly and had burned a trash barrel which was next to the house. The family were sure they had doused the fireworks in water and made them safe. It's really too bad. We always are concerned on the night of the 4th. We have a wood shake roof and worry that a firework may land on top of it.....

This year we had 9 firework tents in town. NINE. How crazy is that. I wonder if there is a correlation between the number of tents and the number of injuries or house fires? Frankly I was surprised at how BIG some of the fireworks were that were being sold! I took the kids on the 4th and we spent all of $7 on little silly kid fireworks... ( our favorites were the colored smoke balls!! ) Some of the others were 100s of dollars!!! WHO spends that much money on explosives?!!? I guess quite a few people ....

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You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness. You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism. ~Erma Bombeck