Homegrown Thoughts

Wednesday, July 23, 2008 - Raspberry Buckle (with photos)

As promised, here is the recipe I used to make my Raspberry Buckle. For those who aren’t familiar with the term ‘buckle’, think coffee cake with fruit. I’m happy to report that it did turn out nicely. I find red raspberries a bit too tart for me to LOVE them and I’m wondering if I could soak them in sugar like strawberries. Most people probably wouldn’t have this opinion, though. I just happen to have a huge sweet tooth. The cake as a whole is very good. :-)

This is perfect to have with some whipped cream or vanilla ice cream!

$Slice o\' Berry Cake$

The original recipe is from Martha Stewart. I made minor adjustments like using an 11 x 7 baking dish, using frozen berries (from my back yard), and adding about a teaspoon of vanilla extract. Here is the original recipe so you can follow it exactly or make changes like I did.

Raspberry Buckle

1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature, plus more for baking dish
1 cup granulated sugar
3 large eggs
1 cup all-purpose flour (spooned and leveled)
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
2 containers (1/2 pint each) raspberries (2 3/4 cups)
Confectioners’ sugar, for dusting (optional)
Whipped cream (optional)

Directions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter a 2-quart oval or square baking dish. In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar with an electric mixer until fluffy. Add eggs, one at a time, beating after each addition to combine. In a large bowl, whisk together flour, salt, and baking powder; with mixer on low speed, gradually add flour mixture until incorporated.
Spread batter in baking dish. Scatter raspberries on top. Bake until a toothpick inserted in center of cake comes out clean and top is golden brown, 45 to 50 minutes. Let cool 20 minutes; dust with confectioners’ sugar, if desired. With a large spoon, scoop out onto serving plates; serve with a dollop of whipped cream, if desired.

Technorati Tags: recipe, buckle, fruit, baking, dessert

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Monday, July 21, 2008 - My Week in Photos

Posted in General

THIS is not good:

Gazebo damage

In fact, it’s quite sad…

Poor Gazebo!

Added insult to injury:

What is this??

Yeah, so that was quite a storm we had last night. Fortunately we had already decided this was the last year we’d be using this gazebo as it was getting worn out. Between the damage from another big storm and this new stuff from last night, the thing is pretty much pathetic. Now I have to hold out for the new deck and hopefully some kind of shade-giving roof being built next summer.

Hopefully THIS will be good:

Raspberry Buckle just put in the oven

My first attempt at using some of the raspberries I picked from our yard. It smells awesome. If it tastes good, I’ll post the recipe. :-)

THIS child is growing up way too fast:

My baby!!!

If that cake looks a little…flat…it is. B doesn’t like cake, so he got birthday brownies instead. He also insisted on decorating it himself because, “Explaining how I want it will be too hard, it’ll be easier if I just do it myself.” Talk about having your own words thrown back at you! A little control freak in training. Here is his creation, which he said was not really how he pictured it in his head but is good enough (whew, not as much of a perfectionist as mom…yet!):

Birthday Brownies

Notice the “10″ in candles. TEN! This was a traumatic birthday for Mom here. 9…ok, halfway to 18 but barely an adult. But TEN. That’s halfway to the age I was when I got married. I’m not halfway done with him yet! Somebody slow this life stuff down a little, would ya? It’s all going way too fast for me.

By the way, if anybody wants to wish B a happy birthday, please visit his blog and leave him a comment. He loves comments!

THIS animal is way too fat!!

No, my head isn’t tiny - the rest of me is just huge!

That’s it for this week’s photo gallery. I’m still nursing my pinched nerve so typing a lot is not fun. I’m glad I had some pics to share instead!

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Monday, July 7, 2008 - Random thoughts on the weekend

Posted in General

So…holiday weekend. Due to a pinched nerve in my shoulder I couldn’t go to our local parade, so my husband took the boys on his own. He didn’t even want to go, so it was very nice of him to take them - they were really looking forward to it. I think we’ve almost gotten through all the candy now, but not quite. My older son took his camera and took some pictures, so hopefully he’ll get those up on his blog soon. He’s way overdue for an update on it. I see a blog writing assignment in his near future if he doesn’t do it on his own.

I believe this is our 4th, uh, 4th in this house. We just discovered Friday night that we can see the town’s fireworks display almost perfectly from half a block up the street. Over the years, we have tried to see them through trees, from across the street, driven around looking for a parking spot to get closer (unsuccessfully)… and the whole time we could have just walked half a block over. At least we know now! Maybe next year I’ll even remember to take my camera with me. I was hurting too much to walk back to the house for it, so I just went without.

In other news, we are over-run with ants. We usually get a small invasion each spring, then we set out some Terro and by the next day all is well again. Not this year. I suspect it has something to do with all the rain/flooding/humidity/what-have-you. Whatever it is, they are coming in the front and the back and who knows where else. I haven’t been able to find the point of entry. It’s getting kind of frustrating, especially when I can’t spend a lot of time being upright now without a lot of pain ensuing. (It’s getting better, but it’s going to take some time. Trying really hard not to whine about it!) I also have to be very careful about putting poison out with all the pets we have. Soooo…yeah. Ants. Go away.

I’m happy to report that we sold our treadmill which we got a lot of use out of but that we just didn’t use anymore. A family from our homeschool group bought it for what they considered a bargain price and we got it out of our garage and are sending the money to Selena’s family in Tanzania, where it will stretch even farther. So that worked out well. Oh, and I got a teacher’s guidebook I needed out of the deal, too. :-)

I had a couple more things I wanted to chat about but this is getting pretty long. I guess I’ll save the Bible study stuff for the next post so I can focus on it a bit more. I’m going through a Kay Arthur book now (”How to Study the Bible”, I think is the title) and need to decide what will be next after that. Need help on that! So that will be next time.

P.S. - Note that I have added a Twitter box to my sidebar. I tried to resist the Twitter pull, I really did. Alas, it was too strong for me and I have succumbed. So if anybody wants to ‘follow’ me on Twitter, there ya go. If not, I shall tweet into the void.

Technorati Tags: holiday, parade, fireworks, ants, Compassion

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Saturday, July 5, 2008 - Knitting Show Off

Posted in Home Arts

As I was reading my Wonder Woman neighbor Gina’s blog today, I realized that I haven’t posted any pictures of my knitting projects here. At least I don’t think so. Forgive me if I have and I duplicate anything. I haven’t been knitting all that long, but I enjoy it and have done quite a bit.

Here are some of my favorite projects from the last year or so:

Cell phone hoodie
I didn’t want my cell phone to get cold, so I made it a little hoodie.

This was the first felted bag I made. I use it as a purse.

This is a bunny I made for a friend’s baby. The body is actually just a square folded and seamed to make it the right shape.

This is a bunny I made for another friend’s baby. I guess I was on a bunny making kick.

Some baby booties.

More booties. :-)

Baby blanket - the pattern is called “Angel Baby”.

Baby sweater (fuzzy picture of a fuzzy sweater).

I have another felted purse that is what I use now, but apparently I never took a picture of it. I guess I should do that. And yes, my friends have all been having babies lately! Baby girls, every last one of them. Hooray for an excuse to have some pink in my life. :-)

So that’s what I have to share today. Maybe I’ll share some other items another time. I need to remember to take pictures of things when I finish them. Usually I’m so excited to move on to the next thing, I forget.

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Tuesday, July 1, 2008 - Nature coming out my ears

Posted in True-Life Tales

I’m not really an outdoors person. During summer, I greatly prefer the air-conditioned indoors. I have had a few interesting encounters with the natural world in the last couple of days, though.

Sunday night when we came home from church, there was an interesting addition to the neighborhood. A hawk had landed in our next door neighbor’s yard and it had *something*. The hawk seemed to have no fear and was kind of glaring at the cars that drove by, probably just daring them to try to take its treasure. It had some prey and it wasn’t going to share. Several neighbors came outside to watch. It was kind of funny because rarely are so many of us outside at the same time. One had a camera, a couple of us brought out our binoculars. We couldn’t figure out what it was eating, though. We could just see it tearing out clumps of something white and throwing it all over the grass. Hawks are not neat eaters, it seems. We were pretty sure it was fur and hoped it wasn’t a kitten or something! It seemed like too much white to be any of the rabbits I’ve seen in the area. We were all fascinated and a little grossed out at the same time. Yes, I know, it’s the circle of life and all, but this was a pretty aggressive ‘tearing limb from limb’ session we were witnessing here. Eventually we decided we’d seen enough and left it to finish its meal without an audience.

The next day I got brave and inspected the leftover carnage. It wasn’t fur. It was feathers. Lots and lots of white feathers. From the length of what was left, I’m guessing it was a pigeon/mourning dove. We have quite a lot around here and the feathers were pretty large. I didn’t see any bones, just feathers and some other unidentifiable inner body part that I tried NOT to look at. So it seems the hawk’s prey was not much smaller than he was!

Yesterday we needed to go to the post office and I decided to make a stop on our way back. We’ve searched for a geocache at this park once before and failed. So I thought I’d let the kids play at the park for awhile and search for it again. We got a little more brave and ventured further into the woods where I’m certain it’s hidden. My GPS was only giving me an accuracy range of 21 feet at best, so we were looking in a little wider area. I found many places that would be awesome locations to hide a cache, but none of them hid the one I was looking for. I finally had to give up because I was getting eaten alive by mosquitoes. The final tally was 7 mosquito bites (although I think one might actually be a spider bite as it’s on my knuckle and my finger is swollen today). Those were all on me. The boys had NONE. I am not kidding when I say I’m a mosquito magnet. For some reason they just love me, even when they aren’t biting anybody else. I feel so honored (not). We again found some of the tiny frogs that are in the grass between the pond and the woods. They are so adorable. I think they are called cricket frogs. This is because of the sound they make, but I really thought they were crickets at first, they are so small. It’s fun to hold them and they are very cool to the touch. I thought about getting a couple to keep as pets but I did some research and it seems they only live a few months and like to eat *gulp* crickets!! I’m not dealing with crickets, no-siree. So we’ll just go visit the frogs in their natural habitat instead. And next time we go I will try to remember to take my camera!

Today I went out and harvested more raspberries from the back 40. Actually, we don’t have a back 40. We have a regular ol’ suburban back yard. I’ve written about my raspberry bushes before. They actually were volunteers that snuck under the fence from our neighbor’s yard. I decided to go with the flow and have made a little patch for them. It’s about 2.5 x 5 feet. I am amazed at the amount of berries I’m getting already this year. They’re very early and there are tons of them. For the last week I’ve been getting a good cup to cup and a half of berries every day. I didn’t get any yesterday so I got a ton today. This is my harvest from this morning shown in a 3 cup container:

Keep in mind that anything I purposely plant dies almost immediately. But volunteer raspberries…they thrive.

Oh, I almost forgot. We have also discovered that we have a mulberry tree. Actually the neighbor behind us does, but the tree is on the fence line and a good portion of it hangs over our property. This tree has never had fruit until this year. It’s making up for lost time. I read that people don’t like to plant female mulberry trees because they make such a mess with the fruit. I can attest to this fact now! There are mulberries everywhere. It’s like a mulberry carpet in part of our yard. The part where the swingset and shed are. Mulberries stain. My children play on the swingset. One of them walked all over the carpet after coming inside. Do you see where I’m going here? I have some carpet cleaning to do.

Nature and I…we have quite the interesting dance going on here.

Technorati Tags: nature, fruit, frogs, geocaching, hawk, raspberries, mulberries