Flatcake Creativity

We skipped dessert on Valentine's Day because we went for Dim Sum for lunch (yes -we had a babysitter! Yippee! Okay, not a real sitter, it was a friend, but still, we got out for a few hours) and brought home a peanut butter mochi ball, a sesame ball and a taro ball. So Sunday, Mr. Burli offered to make a cake. Unfortunately, the cake did not work. We tried a new recipe where you beat eggs with sugar over a double-boiler. And apparently the eggs should increase in volume. A lot. But the recipe was not clear on that, and ours didn't and the cake was flat. And not tasty. So last night I made the trusty chocolate yogurt cake recipe - and it turned out flat, too!! I threw out the leftover remnants of the baking powder, thinking that the baking powder was the culprit but perhaps I measured wrong or something (it calls for self-rising flour, so I just add in some extra salt and baking powder). In any case, that cake tasted fine even with its flatness, so I just got creative, cut hearts out of half the cake and stacked them for supper tonight. Delicious.

And since I was feeling somewhat creative, I made some sort of pork chops in mushroom-sherry-thyme gravy and even made a bread crumb topping AND added green onions to the mashed potatoes.

And apparently JT hit the creativity mode as well, because all of the sudden he has become a complete artist. The other night he decided to draw a train and asked me how - I helped him find a toy engine and away he went. He then proceeded to draw all sorts of cars, even caboooses and tank cars. And today he drew a more complicated map than he has done previously (he loves to draw maps) on the sidewalk complete with traffic lights with red, yellow and green lights. Then he said that he wants to drive the big boy (a very large steam engine) and be a "picture maker" (aka artist) when he grows up! For a while I wondered if he would ever move out of his somewhat abstract picture drawing phase and try more complicated things. And again I have learned my lesson: he does things at his own pace. Now I just need to buy some new markers because his are worn out.