Backyard Camping

We were able to have our house cleaners come for the first time since February this week. Of course, we had to be out of the house while they were here. This meant hanging out in the backyard, with Ryan and myself set up to get work done. But how to entertain the kids for a couple hours?

Ryan had the brilliant idea to task them with figuring out how to set up and take down the tent. We told them if they did this, they could sleep in the tent with me Friday night (we need some more gear to make Ryan comfortable sleeping in the tent, plus we only have 3 sleeping bags, since the last time we camped Mal was 2 or 3, so Ryan sadly can't join us).

It ended up being a great task for a 13 year old. Mal wasn't as into it, until he could see it starting to take shape and see that it really was a tent. He helped with some of the poles and with the stakes. 

We then let them play in the tent a bit while the cleaners wrapped up and we completed our workdays before having them take it back down. They're quite excited to do some backyard camping this weekend.

While they did this, I discovered that the deck is a great place to sit in the afternoon and finish up charting/attend meetings. The sun isn't shining directly on it anymore and you often get a nice breeze. I'll definitely have to start sitting out there in the afternoon whenever I can!

Biking

Mal has long loved going on bike rides. In the trailer. On the front seat of Colin's bike. He was always drawn to the bike racks at Gareth's old elementary school, wanting to ring all the bells and touch the wheels and just look at the bikes. So I thought for sure he'd be one of those 3 or 4 year olds riding around without training wheels. But then we tried to put him on the balance bike and he was frustrated and nervous. We tried on and off, but usually with the same result. And then we moved to our current house, with no sidewalks and both streets a hill and getting him out on it got pushed down the importance list when it was such a battle to get him on board. So that's how we got to where we have been, with his inability to ride a bike constantly in the back of my mind as a semi-urgent thing that I feel kinda guilty and frustrated about.

I was finally going to give up and put the training wheels on Gareth's old red bike (that we got for his 5th birthday), knowing that it was probably a little small, but hoping spending some time on it would give him a little more confidence. We did that a couple weeks ago. There was some frustration still, caused by being a little too big for the bike and by the fact that you pedal backwards to brake. But it did seem to be working - he was zooming around on it and getting more comfortable with the slight downhill of the elementary school playground. Then he forgot to brake, ran into the fence, scraped up his elbow when he fell off, and I'm pretty sure you could hear the screams of anger at how his bike was trying to kill him all the way in downtown.

We took a few days off for him to get over his wounded elbow, but knew we needed to get him back out. He knew there was another bike in the garage that would fit him better, but without training wheels. We opted for that one last weekend, removed the pedals (but brought them with us, just in case). Still lots of frustration on his part about the weight of the bike and how it kept trying to tilt over or turn (always the bike's fault, never his). But he was seeming to keep his balance pretty well, even if he wasn't zooming along confidently. Eventually, he was ready to give the pedals a go.

Within a couple tries, he was riding with only a little help to stay balanced as he got started. He even was willing to try to start on his own, but kept getting nervous and would stop before he could get going. We went out again the next day and I brought my bike. I wasn't getting much riding time since he kept stopping every time he got to a curve and I kept having to help him start. Finally I told him that I was going to ride around the playground once, but that I'd be back to help him. Of course, while I was doing that, he got started all on his own! He's not to the point where he gets going on his first try 100% of the time, but pretty close. Still some confidence work to do, but we're hoping to get him out practicing regularly to buoy that up.

Cast Iron Chocolate Chip Cookie

We were supposed to be driving down to Utah to visit with my sister's family this past weekend, but there's this little pandemic that put the kibosh on those plans. I know we're all getting bored with it, but Utah is particularly bad right now and so many places are getting worse that it's absolutely not the right time to be travelling and visiting family. We're feeling pretty sad about this, as we are finally at a place in our lives where we feel like we were settled enough (not in school, moving, changing jobs, buying a house, etc) and the kids are old enough that we can actually plan trips without them being terribly stressful. We weren't particularly going to enjoy driving for 13 hours, but it was going to be so worth it to hang out with their family for a week. This summer was also supposed to be the first year both kids went to sleep-away camp, and Ryan and I had planned to do some local exploring while they were gone. Hopefully next year.

Since we weren't able to make our Utah trip, we did some more baking. One of Ryan's birthday gifts for me was a new cast iron skillet. I'd finally accepted that I was never going to get around to scouring and re-seasoning the one we already had, and they're inexpensive enough that I figured I'd just get a new one and try to start off on a better footing with it than I did the last one. But I needed to measure the skillet to make sure I got the correct size and never got around to that. Ryan did, though, and it's so exciting to have a new one! I treated it to a few more layers of seasoning (I've done this recently on our small one and am really pleased with how it turned out/how it's been working).

Old one. Definitely not irredeemable, just needing more time than I have.

New one, all nice and shiny after I'd added a couple coats of oil

Ryan's spent the past few days reading up on cast iron; he probably knows way more than I do about it at this point. And he remembered a video we'd watched at a friend's house from America's Test Kitchen of them making a chocolate chip cookie in the cast iron. We decided that should be our first bake.

I started off by burning the butter (wasting so much butter lately with all my mistakes!), but once we re-started everything went smoothly. The end result - a giant chocolate chip cookie that didn't stick at all to the pan. Crispy on the edges and soft in the middle. A fun alternate way to make chocolate chip cookies if you aren't wanting to scoop and bake individual sheets.

July 4th and Birthday Bakes

Last weekend we did more garage clean out, starting with all the electronics boxes that for some reason we'd kept for years. I was so happy to get rid of this pile!

This weekend, we're hoping to give away this bike.

Ryan got it from a friend 5 years ago, but it needs a little work and then he stopped riding. He is wanting to start riding again, so tested it out and realized it is too small for him. Hopefully someone in the neighborhood will be able to use it. If we had tons of storage space, we could consider keeping it for Gareth, but we don't.

We returned to baking Friday night, trying our hand at florentines. Or "Quarantine Florentines", as the kids like to call them. Turns out they're pretty easy. The GBBO recipe is available, but Brits seem to like to add dried fruit to everything, and that wasn't really what we wanted. We started with our almonds, flour, orange peel and then mixed it in with our hot sugar/butter mixture. We let that cool while we put dinner together:

Then we rolled them into small balls and placed them on the cookie sheets:

We thought we'd provided plenty of room for them to spread, but apparently not. After the first tray, we stuck to 9 cookies per tray.

We even heated the chocolate over water. But decided not to really attempt tempering, and didn't pay attention to temperature while melting it.

The kids and Ryan had lots of fun making various designs in the chocolate. Because we didn't truly temper the chocolate, it got more dull as they cooled.

Mal got to have the first taste and deemed them good.

We'll definitely be making these again. And maybe next time we'll actually make an effort on the tempering.

For my birthday, we decided we'd try Nadiya's lemon drizzle cake with fondant. We'd decided we wanted to try a cake with marshmallow fondant (Ryan thought it looked fun to knead and work with) and this one seemed a good place to start.

We started the day by realizing the batteries in our kitchen scale were dying/dead. So I had to look up weight to cup conversions for all the dry ingredients. Then I realized the recipe was for an 8-inch pan and all of my pans are 9-inch, so I added 25% to all my calculations. It also calls for self-raising flour, which of course the stores don't have, so I needed to figure in how much baking powder to add to the all-purpose flour.

After a few laughable mistakes while trying to do all of the above too quickly, we got it mixed up and ready to go in the oven.

Rose quite a bit. Then I had a sickening realization. Almost as bad as when Toby realized he'd put salt instead of sugar into his technical challenge cake.

The recipe called for 8 oz of butter (so I needed 10). I'd put in 10 tablespoons of butter, half of what I needed. So, we set about to re-make the cake.

While waiting for the low-butter cake to finish, we got going on the lemon curd filling.

And learned that we should probably always start with a nice low heat. At least we're guessing that heating it too quickly is why we ended up with egg white chunks and needing to sieve our curd. Tasted delicious once the egg whites were gone!

Second cake out of the oven.

Cut in half, with buttercream and lemon curd filling. The curd seemed well-set, but I wasn't sure how to keep it from oozing out the sides. I'm sure there's some trick to it, or maybe I just should've got the curd even more set?

With the crumb coat on, trying to hold that curd filling in place.

The marshmallow fondant was weird to work with. Very sticky, unsurprisingly. Lovely and smooth to knead for a few strokes, but then it would just stick everywhere again. Maybe we needed even more powdered sugar? But it really didn't seem to matter how much we added. It rolled out beautifully, but then stuck to the counter in a couple spots right at the end and to get it off the counter caused some wrinkles. I was nervous that if I pushed down on it to try to smooth it too much, it would just smush all the filling out. Gareth made a braid and Ryan made a flower out of some of the excess fondant. Ryan thought the flower was hideous, but the kids insisted we put them on top of the cake.

Sure enough, after a bit, some curd started to ooze out.

But the leak stayed fairly small, so it survived to get candles on it.  Never having made a drizzle cake before, we weren't sure if we were really supposed to use all of the drizzle sauce on the cake. We've decided we probably were (or at least a lot more than we did). We were nervous it would become a soggy, collapsed mess if we put too much on, but turned out it didn't get very far down the crumb.

So, lots of lessons learned! And, despite all the mishaps, it was a fun way to spend the day. And the cake still tastes good, even if it was far from perfect.