I may not like flour-based birthday cakes, but I do love the old timey cake flavours and the artwork on the boxes back when I was a kid. Let’s take a trip down memory lane. 🙂

I think, over my lifetime, I have eaten a slice of every one of these cakes at some point. A few of them are classics home bakers still scuttle back to a few times a year, but the decadent ones are huge throwbacks. They only get made when someone is feeling hardcore nostalgic, or bought from a good bakery when basic cakes won’t cut it.

I remember this Raspberry cake mix like it was yesterday. My aunt bought it to make at our house for one of her daughter’s birthday the year it came out, and she loved pink so it got paired with pink frosting. I can’t remember if I liked it or not, but I remember the standout look of her final cake most of all. And how tickled pink (yes, I went there) my aunt was with her creation.

My mother bought these two often. Every birthday cake was one of these mixes, and decorated by my mother to her tastes. I ate way too many slices of birthday cake in my lifetime given how many siblings I have, so I would never make one of these today.

I’m surprised so many cake flavours endure. They really do. I see the Butter Pecan and the Chocolate Fudge boxes in the grocery store all the time. They wouldn’t be on the shelves if they didn’t consistently sell. Shelf space is like a hairdresser’s chair – it’s there for paying clients only.

We wanted to do a full main floor reno where we ripped down the two kitchen walls, redid the flooring, changed the paint colour, and installed a new ceiling with pot lights after some structural work we wanted done (even though a few contractors said wasn’t necessary).

In the end the quotes we got were too high, so we decided to do the flooring and painting ourselves. This is how it’s going.

So, the floors are ripped up in the foyer, around the basement stairs, the living room and the dining room. The last part of that puzzle is the kitchen since we’re redoing that floor space as well. There are a few things to address there: where to store the fridge and stove while we do the kitchen flooring and how do we move them without ruining any of the new flooring in the process.

I’m a bit nervous just thinking about that part. Eek.

I have all of the main painting done. I have to paint all the floor and window trim boards, and then we can put the paint and rollers back in the garage where they belong and start playing the tile puzzle game with our furniture and belongings from corner to corner until the new flooring is all installed. Someone other than me wants this project done by the end of this long weekend. Wish us luck!

Day off today. All I wanted was to make some jammy bars for the husband. That’s all. I swear! *sigh* But, what I got instead was a lot of grief. Grief from the new fridge, and from the oven. Have a look: First up, we have the fridge which decided to puke out the door shelves and their contents all over the floor, but more importantly on top of my two toes. See the big bottles? They hit straight down on my big toe and its sidekick, my Morton toe, on my left foot. I thought for sure they were broken from the amount of pain, but they aren’t even achy or bruised anymore. My toes are in tact.

So, that happened when I was reaching in for the blueberry jam I was going to lay down as the middle layer of my jammy bars. I cleaned up this mess after I put the bars in the oven.

And that brings me to my next kitchen mishap:

Never in my life have I ever burned food like this that I can recall. These bars are burned from the top all the way down to the bottom of the base layer. Wow.

The oven was so hot when I reached it, it had already turned itself off to prevent a fire from starting inside its cavity.

I assume I was so distracted by the shelves and their contents falling out of the fridge onto my foot that I hit the broiler button instead of the bake button on the stove when I reached over to preheat the oven right before I dumped and smoothed the jam layer out, and continued on with the crumble topping.

I didn’t even noticed the oven temp was too hot. I was upstairs organizing a load of laundry when I smelt a burning fumes smell (I thought my husband had burned some pizza cheese in my oven again the other night as I cursed him while running down the stairs as the smoke alarm screeched out my open patio screen door.)

It was bad. Really bad. Worse than I thought it would be. I couldn’t open the oven for an hour after turning it off and letting it cool down, all the while running the range hood vent at full blast. And the smell took hours more with the front door open, too, to create some kind of cross wind to air out the house.

This is what I was faced with after I was finally able to pull the jammy bars out.

I just left them on top of the stove and turned out the kitchen light. The kitchen officially closed in the middle of the day. There would be nothing else happening in there today. I was over the urge to do some baking and cooking today, my only day off this week.

Ugh. I should’ve stayed in bed.

In a former life, I made jewellery. I still own a lot of the custom pieces. This is one I still wear a lot. The silver plated Celtic knot is one of my fave themes for metal jewellery.

PUBLIC SERVICE POST

This is an extreme topic that needs to be discussed because every year we hear about at least one, if not up to a few dozen cases, where a parent who doesn’t normally have their baby in the car as they go to work and needed to be dropped out at a daycare ends up forgetting that child in the backseat as, typically, the temperatures soar. You can imagine what the outcome is. It’s all so sad.

Here is a fantastic thread discussion from Coffee With Julie with some some suggestions for parents tasked with driving with their babies in their car. BTW, if you think this only happens to parents on sweltering hot days, you’re sadly mistaken. It happens all the time – we just don’t hear about it unless the cops and blistering heat is involved, or the child dies.

Read this post, and I ask that you all pass it along to other parents. This is so very important. As a non-mom, I take this seriously enough to talk to all of you about this situation. And if we’re all discussing it enough, we’re bound to find a way to help prevent it from continuing to happen as commutes to work to get more and more distracting, and we try to multitask on the ride in to get a jump on the day’s workload using our smart phones, or as we drift away in a daydream as we drive in autopilot mode and the child is sound asleep. Out of sight, out of mind.

I hate to stat it that way, but I have forgotten valuable stuff in cars and on city buses as I tune the world out, deep in thought, and barely realise I’m about to miss my stop so I jump up and take off, never giving much thought to what I had in my hands, or didn’t, until it was way too late. I once left my full coffee travel mug on the counter at the convenience store beside my old apartment building on the way to work one morning, and hilariously and fortunately, it was sitting exactly where I left it when I ran into the store at 10:30 pm in a panic when that realisation hit me after a long and busy day. The clerk didn’t bother to move it for other customers. He knew I’d come back, but not when. (He was such a kind soul. I really miss not seeing him every day since we moved away.)