I realize I'm about to have my one year anniversary for this blog but haven't posted in 3 1/2 months, so better get busy! There is way too much to ever catch up on since the last post so I thought we'd start with the most recent events . . . THE MUFFIN GIRLS!
Mom and I baked 60 muffins on Thursday night for the 3rd grade muffin sale to raise money for our spring farm trip - each family takes a week to bake muffins. We made 1 dozen gluten and dairy free banana muffins and then 4 dozen regular banana muffins, using our friend Ann's famous banana bread recipe (thanks Ann!).
We weren't sure exactly how many ripe bananas we would need, so after piano lesson we picked up a few more. After making the first 3 batches we started to get nervous if we'd have enough to finish our muffins. One of my main jobs was mashing the bananas. For our first two regular recipe batches, we had to use 6 bananas to get 2 mashed cups. For our second two regular batches we only had 4 bananas left and they were pretty small - this is what made us worried . . . ! After I mashed those 4 smaller bananas I was surprised that we had a little more than 2 mashed cups and I realized it was like . . . THE CHANUKAH MIRACLE!
A few more things from this past fall. My Grandpa Mickey and Ms. Wendy came to our house for Thanksgiving. On Friday after, we went downtown to ice skate . . .
and see some of the Christmas displays. This creche is the only one modeled after the one at the Vatican and is the largest one in the United States.
We had lunch at Habitat, where this blog started, and dinner at DISH, which I've already written about as one of my favorite restaurants in Pittsburgh. At DISH, I had the Gnocchi with Wild Boar for dinner and I've never had anything like that before. I have to say that it was SOOOOO good (and Daddy agreed by eating my leftovers the next day for lunch). We're headed back to Habitat over the holidays and really like sitting where we can see the kitchens best. (And we'll also go back to DISH soon too because our friends just gave us some gift certificates - THANK YOU Marian and Jim!)
Back in October I helped Mom bake her famous carrot birthday cake (her favorite baking ordeal of the year) . . .
and then delivered with birthday song and fork at the ready!
Make a wish Mom!
You can see that there are pieces already taken out of the cake because after two days of working each night to make this cake, Mom decided she wanted to have her cake for her birthday breakfast - let's just EAT IT!
