Windy Cupcake Weekend

I arrived home from work on Friday to Goose sitting next to a dead mouse in the garage, a dried-out  turd behind the mule and a gnawed-on deer shin/ankle/hoof in the front yard.  I thanked my lucky stars there were no chicken carcasses in the yard and carried on with my afternoon. 

I forgot to mention Maisie's been obsessed with online families.  Kacy and Jacy (or is it Lacy?), Our Family Nest, My Cupcake Addiction (which is actually a baking blog with hundreds of videos of out-of-this-world cakes).  I chalk it up to the fact that our lives are so uneventful, she's living vicariously through others. 

Aunt Heather and I grew up in the 80's and lived vicariously through the JC Penney Catalog as we manufactured fake lives through careful selection of which model was us, our spouse, children, babysitter, clothes, neighbors, wedding bands, rugs and bedspreads.  Aside from the internet, times haven't changed much.

Maisie begged me to let her bake the Nestle Chocolate Heart Bundt which was featured on mycupcakeaddiction.com in February.  I promised her we'd do it Saturday.  By mid-afternoon, she 'remembered' my promise. 

So the cake baking began. 

By the way, the cupcake-obsessed baker is apparently French, or Australian, or European... I don't know for sure but her recipes call for ingredients in 'grams'. 

That should have been my first clue.

We wound up weighing every ingredient with my Ben Franklin $5 scale.  Granulated sugar dumped over the floor, the vanilla bottle dropped into the batter (open), I couldn't reach the food coloring because my sciatica won't let me lift my arms above my head and my hormones were looking for a fight.  Let's just say my patience level had grown thinner than Nancy (for my 'For the Love of Nancy' fans) just as Mike walked in the house to me yelling about food colors, using the vacuum on the countertop and the a garbage disposal choking on egg shells. 

But look what we made! 

Thanks to a psycho cupcake lady, we'd completed step-1 of a 2-step cake process!

Sunday morning we began Step 2. 

Making a chocolate cake and pouring it around the hearts in the bundt. 

'It's a bundt' 

Name that movie.

Somehow, these excited smiles made the blood, sweat and tears worth it. 

One of these days I'll realize my kids aren't getting any younger. 

I want to be present.

The clock keeps ticking...