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Dear Reader,
My two teenage grandkids from Wisconsin are coming to visit next week. One of our summer-visit traditions has been to bake something memorable. This year we're baking a polka-dot cake. If you're curious, I found the idea at: http://tinyurl.com/polka-dot-cake
I'll take photos and give you a play-by-play. Hopefully the kids, my friend, Linda, and I don't run into the "sliding" problem we had the year we made a rainbow cake. The original idea was to make an 8-layer cake, but magically the rainbow cake grew and grew and grew--to 11 layers!
Enjoy one of my favorite baking stories...
One of the most memorable activities I did with my two teenage grandchildren, Seth and Bailey, when they visited for two weeks, was baking an 11-layer cake. Each layer was a different color, and we lathered the cake in a sweet, almond-flavored wedding cake frosting. Our masterpiece took four bakers: Seth, Bailey, my good friend Linda (who found the idea for the cake on the Internet), and me, five hours to complete. It was a challenging afternoon; mix, bake, cool the layers, then freeze them for 10 minutes to make them easier to frost, periodically attempt to keep the tower of layers from tipping over, make wedding cake frosting from scratch and finally frost the cake.
I'm a bake-a-cake from scratch kind of person, but thank heavens I realized the size of the task before we started and I bought white cake mixes instead. Normally you get two cake layers from each cake mix and since we needed 8-layers, I bought four mixes. But when we started pouring the cake batter into the pans, I realized the layers would be too thick. So instead of two layers from each box mix, we got four. What would we do with the extra batter? Build a bigger cake, and make two batches of cupcakes, too. One single slice of cake is too much for one person to eat, so what did we do with all of that cake? Friends, relatives, the postman, neighbors, strangers who stopped to admire my flower gardens, they all enjoyed a piece and gave a thumbs-up on our cake.
It's an amazing rainbow cake of colors and I think it was the start of a vacation-baking tradition with my grandchildren and my friend Linda. So what are we going to bake next year Linda?
To see photos (don't miss them), there's even a photo of our towering, leaning cake before we put the whole thing in the freezer to set, go to: http://www.emailbookclub.com/photo/cake-071311.html
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
[email protected]
***** AUTHORBUZZ *****
Confessions of Joan the Tall (NonFiction) by Joan Cusack Handler
The time was 1954. The place, the Bronx. I was a very tall twelve year old. 5 feet 11-1/2 inches to be exact. I was also funny, smart, loving & resilient. I open the locked door of Joan's (my) adolescence and reveal what she's never shared with anyone about what inspires her, what torments her--bullying by an older brother included. Confessions records Joan's fight to understand herself against the backdrop of family, religion, blossoming sexuality, and of course her six foot frame.
Go to: http://authorbuzz.com/dearreader click on Confessions of Joan the Tall to find out more about the book and the author, Joan Cusack Handler. Send her an email, she'd love to hear from you.
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