Baking Twenty weeks, that means I am about halfway. Feeling great, still tired but not as bad any more as it used to be. I now get tired when I do things, as opposed to feeling exhausted all the time! Feeling the baby move more and more AND Sander has felt him move too! So the pregnancy is going well. Last week on vacation, we stayed at my friend's house, who does a lot of baking. She bakes bread every day and bakes lots of other stuff too. Staying there really inspired me to do some more baking too and this week I have been having fun with it. We had two birthdays, Timmy and Sander, so that gave some baking opportunities already. But I did baking the rest of week too. We came home on Saturday and on Sunday I started out with making bread, rolls and chocolate chip cookies. Especially the cookies were very much appreciated by my kids :-) I also finally got around to visiting the King Arthur Flour store, which I had been wanting to do for ages, but never did yet. I didn't buy many things, but it was nice to just browse around and get some idea about what they sell. I ended up buying a bigger bread pan, a cooling rack and a great cookbook. It is the King Arthur's Flour 200th Anniversary Cookbook and full of great recipes, and lots of baking basics and history. I have been really enjoying reading the book and making things out of it. I also drooled over the mixers in the store, but they are very expensive, I think I'll have to use my small hand mixer for a while longer and knead the bread by hand. Monday was Timmy's birthday. Until now, he always wanted a store bought cake (which I used to do all the time anyway when I was still working full time and just couldn't find the time to bake), but I hoped to be able to convince him to have a home baked this time. So I had told him that he could choose what he wanted for a cake, store bought or home made, and that if he wanted home made, I could decorate it exactly the way he wanted. I could for example made a 'lego cake' That sparked his interest! We talked a little about it and decided that castle lego would be fun, have some castle things on top of a cake. So on Monday I baked his cake, although I cheated by getting store bought frosting (someday I'll make that myself too, but I didn't want to experiment on his birthday cake). I had gotten some castle lego especially for his cake and borrowed some of Sander's castle lego (he is a lego addict and has tons :-) After the cake had cooled down, I put on the frosting, some green sugar to serve as 'grass' and then put the lego up. It looked great! And it was very simple to make. Tim was very happy with it, especially when he found out that he could keep most of the lego (apart from Sander's set) It even looked so great, that Cees decided he wanted a lego cake too, which is a major accomplishment, since he really wanted a store bought one before. The picture shows how the cake turned out. The rest of the week I made scones, a few more batches of cookies, chocolate chip waffles, a birthday pound cake for Sander, and I experimented with making braided bread. Tara was very interested when I was making the braid, she had never seen a braided bread before. She looked at it for a few minutes while I was braiding and then said 'Mama, is that bread called Karen?' I guess since I always braid my hair! LOL So now we call this bread 'Karen bread'. Of course, the house is still a mess, I haven't even washed and cleaned up all the vacation stuff yet, but at least we have been eating well :-) Now we'll have to see how long this baking enthusiasm lasts. Page design by mabear | Send email to Karen | Page last updated: Dec 29, 2001