Freaks of the World Unite

This is my friend, Janae. I've posted about her before, and I'm sure I'll be posting about her again because dangit, she just provides me with such great material.

Janae could be my personality flaw twin. Really. We are both obsessive, compulsive, perfectionist, germ phobic, and, well, weird. Janae has a way of making me proud of my strange behavior.

Sometimes though, Janae surpasses my weirdness and even surprises me. Take grocery shopping, for example. Her husband will not allow her to grocery shop because she cannot shop like a normal person. She will pick up a box of cake mix, or whatever, and if it has a bent corner, she will not buy it. As you can imagine, it takes her seventeen hours to complete the grocery shopping. Not very efficient.

Since this is Pick-on-Janae Day, I'm going to air her dirty laundry and tell you how she does her laundry. This fascinates me, really, and I think you will be fascinated as well. Janae does not mingle colors in her laundry. She does separate loads for pinks, reds, oranges, etc.--all the colors of the rainbow for crying out loud. This means that she is never done with her laundry. I like to exaggerate and say that I'm never caught up on my laundry, but really, Janae is never, never done. Even if she did her laundry like a normal person, she probably would never be done because she has nine girls. Now, as I sit here dissecting the poor girl, I've just realized that this must be some strange coping mechanism that she has developed to deal with her never ending laundry pile.

Janae has told me about her laundry routine and I keep telling her, "But I want to see how you feed all those kids. I want to come over to your house at dinner time and just watch." She is not the least bit amused by that and, to this day, has ignored my requests and will not let me in her house when I come knockin'.

All that being said, you must know that I truly love Janae. She is one of the sweetest, most upbeat people I know. Janae is also the Scrapbooking Queen. She can scrapbook circles around me. Which reminds me of something else. Janae is on the cutting edge of all things scrapbooking. She comes on Saturday nights and the first thing out of her mouth is "I found the CUTEST, blah, blah, blah!" Then she'll give everyone a little lesson on how to use glitter, or rub-ons, or the Crop-a-Dile. Whatever. If there's something new in scrapbooking, Janae knows about it and the UPS man is en route to her house with the whole shebang in a big 'ol package from the Home Shopping Network, and Jo Ann's and, well nevermind, we don't want her husband to know about her bad habit. Ssh. Don't tell.

Just Tryin' To Beat the Heat

Peanut Head, Thing 1, and Thing 2 have been spending a lot of time in the pool these days. I have too, but you won't be seeing a picture of me in my bathing suit, no siree.

At the end of last summer we got one of these funky looking blow up pools and, I have to tell you, it was a good buy. Even if we accidentally popped it today, which we won't, it would still be worth it. Not only are they just plain refreshing to go into when it's 100 degrees outside, they are fascinating to behold.

The physics behind these puppies are amazing. You must have a level surface to set one up, otherwise it will roll right out of your yard. Not kidding. I relate it to muffin top on my jeans. Now you skinny girls out there (and guys, I suppose) have no idea what I'm talking about, but when you have extra flesh and it oozes over the top of your waistband, that's a muffin top. When your jeans are particularly tight, the muffin top causes your waist band to roll. Well, that's sort of how these pools start to roll when gravity is working more towards one end. Don't underestimate the power of physics.

When we are in the pool with the girls, we spend most of our time tossing them to and fro. There's no chillin' for us, they won't allow it. "Throw me head first this time. I want to do a cartwheel." Ugh, it makes me tired just thinking about it.

Here Peanut Head is starting to think about sinking the boat. His passengers are unsuspecting.

Things overboard!

Got pool?

Barefoot Contessa's Fourth of July Cake

As promised, here is the recipe for the cake I made Saturday. It was the second time I made it, and since I was feeling cocky, I mean confident, I ignored some of the more ridiculous instructions requiring that ingredients be room temperature and that the butter be unsalted. What-EVER! Who has time to be so rigid? So I made my recipe card to reflect the technical changes that I did make, one of them being to reduce the salt since I did not use unsalted butter. Also, I actually made this into a layer cake so I doubled all the cake ingredients (although not on the recipe card). I do not want to ever see the calorie count for this. Can you imagine? I used a dozen eggs, six cups of sugar, two and a half pounds of butter, one and a half pounds of cream cheese, etc. We should just call it Heart Attack Cake and be done with it. Except that it's not my cake to name. And I prefer to go with denial when eating dessert. Always.

So here's some of what I did. The first pound of butter, the 6 cups of sugar, dozen eggs, etc., would not all fit in my mixer at the same time so I had to mix up each layer separately. Because the first layer I made had to sit while I mixed up the second batch, they went into the oven looking a little different. The first batch is on the left and the second batch is on the right.

Pretty noticeable, isn't it? Here's what they looked like out of the oven. I was surprised to see that they still looked different. The taste was the same though, so no worries.

Since I made it into a layer cake, the parchment paper I put underneath was a necessity. They allowed me to lift the cake out of the pan so Peanut Head could do this.

I wanted the cake to have clean edges and both layers needed to be uniform, because even though I'm a rebel with recipe instructions, I'm still pretty anal myself. This next picture is some of what was cut off. The scraps disappeared pretty quickly and they were delicious.

I was a chicken when it came to putting the top layer on so Peanut Head helped out. He got the top layer close and said "I want it to be right about here and . . . SLAM (top layer connects perfectly with bottom layer!) "I'll just do it before I think too much about it." Normally I don't like to compliment him too much because he has an overabundance of confidence as it is, but I just had to after this slick move. This was his slam dunk . . . there was no readjusting or sliding the cake around, he hit it right on.

And here is the completed cake. It was sooooo hard not to dig in right away. The wait was worth it though.

Oh man, I just realized that this post follows my work out recommendations. This cake is going to shred all my hard work. Oh, the irony.