A cake for my young man

We had a barbeque at Shawn's parent's house to celebrate both Shawn and Nick's birthdays. Nick wanted a lemon cake so I did my best to make him one. I had some lemon extract that I added to a white cake mix. I also tinted the cake mix green as it is his favorite color. I decided to tint the frosting yellow since we were attempting to make a lemon cake. I had kept a small bit of frosting off to the side and tinted that green and used it to write on the cake. Nick thought the beaters looked really cool. He compared them to easter eggs.

The finished product. It didn't have a strong lemon taste but everyone got a kick out of the cake being colored. We used vanilla frosting.

I had also made Samantha's cake this year. We had always purchased their cakes in the past. I think the kids appreciated these cakes more than any of the ones that we bought.

My "garden"

We are trying container gardening this year. We are doing it with our next door neighbors. We have a wide variety of items as I wanted to see what would work for us. These are the two tomato plants on the neighbor's patio. We have Grape and Early Girls.

Sweet peas at the top, cucumber in other big pot. Arugala in top small pot and cilantro in other small pot.

Brussel sprouts in the big pot and sweet basil in the small one on the corner.

Straight neck squash.

These were all planted the weekend after Memorial Day. We have added a few more items to the "garden". I will post pictures of those in another post.

I'm Still Alive

Things have been a bit hectic around here. I'm going to try to catch on posting about the vacation tomorrow.

I wish I had thought to take a picture of our breakfast on Sunday. I put Nicholas to work as my sous chef. We had "dunky" eggs, bacon and homemade hashbrowns that had onion and mushrooms in them with toast on the side. He seems to enjoy cooking. He has stated to Grandma (my MIL) that "Miss Erin is teaching me to cook". I'm trying to teach him the basics and how to be frugal when preparing meals.

We got an awesome deal on eggs at a local store this weekend. 1 dozen large eggs were 2/$1. There was a limit of 6 so we grabbed the limit. I filled up the spaces in the fridge door. I had 4 eggs left out of one package. The door only holds 20 eggs. I took those 4 eggs plus another dozen and hard boiled them. We try to keep hard boiled eggs on hand as Shawn will take them with him to work as quick and easy protein. It can get confusing though when we have cartons of non hard boiled eggs in the fridge also. I think I found my solution today though. I had picked up a 4 pack of liquid food coloring when I made heart pancakes for Valentine's Day breakfast. I pulled the bottle of green out and put some in the water that I was boiling the eggs in along with a splash of white vinegar. My idea worked. Now it's very easy to tell which eggs are hard boiled. They are the green ones.

Wordless Wednesday

VACATION!!!!

Well, we are currently in Fayetteville. We spent Friday and Saturday night in Pigeon Forge, TN. Dollywood was our destination on Saturday. Had a great time there and will discuss further in another post.

I think I will be waddling this whole vacation. We have eaten at buffets for 3 nights in a row. Friday night we ate at Duff's . Shawn had remembered eating there when he was younger with his family. We were not too impressed now. Saturday night we dined at Wood Fire Grill Buffet. It's part of the Western Sizzlin company. We loved it. Tonight we dined at Golden Corral . It was as good as I remember from growing up. It was also great to get real Sweet Tea that I didn't have to make. I joked with the waitress that she could just bring a pitcher to the table and leave it for me.

We been so far to The Lost Sea in Sweetwater, TN and Dollywood in Pigeon Forge, TN. We plan on making a trip to the NC aquarium at Fort Fisher and taking the kids to see the ocean while we are there. They have never seen the ocean. I grew up visiting the ocean. I guess I took it for granted that everyone has seen the ocean not thinking about the fact that most of the country is landlocked. We have a few other ideas up our sleeves but not sure what will happen yet.

I have pictures from The Lost Sea and Dollywood that I will post in separate posts about each attraction.

Talk to ya'll later.

Is it Thursday yet?

Make that Holy Thursday (4/9). We will be leaving that night on vacation. I'm so ready for it. We're starting to warm up here but I just looked at the weather widgets in my sidebar and it's 55 here and 68 in my hometown. We're going to my hometown.


Dinner tonight will be fish due to it being Friday during Lent.

Time for the Big Dance!

This is one of the times of the year that I look forward to the most. I grew up in ACC country. I was born and raised in North Carolina watching 3 of the greatest college basketball coaches ever. For those who can't figure it out, I'm talking about Dean Smith (UNC), Jimmy V (NC State) and Coach K (Duke).


I'm expecting this to be an interesting tourney in my household as there is the possibility of the Championship game being a Michigan team (Michigan or MSU) vs a North Carolina team (UNC or Duke). I have my brackets set up as it being MSU vs UNC. Of course the Tarheels will prevail just like they did when they met MSU at Ford Field (site of this year's Final Four) back in December during the Big 10/ACC Challenge. If my bracket holds up, ya'll may hear some serious screaming coming from my household on the evening of April 6th as Shawn and I would be on opposite sides of the living room yelling at the television and trash talking to each other.


Shawn has stated that he hates dealing with me during Tourney time as he knows I'm going to trash talk about the Big 10. ACC rules in College Basketball!