Tantrums and Baking

Sunday brought the “terrible twos” a day early. Church was a battle of wills: Chloe vs. Mommy. The only thing I heard of the sermon was the first couple introductory sentences and then somewhere in the middle there was something about a lion. My girl who usually sits so nicely in church acted like a little terror. Sure, she wasn’t running down the aisle or screaming, but I walked away from church with some new bruises.

The remainder of the Sunday was much the same. Chloe was very tired since she didn’t get a nap in on Saturday and I had to wake her up for church that morning. She fought sleep at naptime, so the remainder of the day after nap was spent just crying and whining. Great fun. Even when we put her down to bed for the night, she screamed for an hour and a half before finally falling asleep.

I also had just a little issue with the birthday cake. In all fairness, it wasn’t my fault. On Saturday Mom gave me a recipe for a real apple cake in stead of a cake that uses applesauce. I chopped my apples, mixed my ingredients, floured my pans, poured the batter into the pans, and put my cake in the oven. All was going very well… until there was a knock on the front door. It was our neighbor letting us know that a power line had snapped and was lying on the ground right behind our car. He wanted to make sure we didn’t go near it. Very kind neighbor. We had a little excitement on our street as the police came and blocked the street for a while. Then I guess they got the all clear from the electric company saying it was dead or something because the police left before anybody showed up to fix it.

Anyway, what does this have to do with the cake? After all, it didn’t appear that our power was affected at all. About 20 minutes into the 40 minute cook time, our oven started making clicking noises. Shortly after that it stopped working. It stayed off for a little over an hour while the power line was being fixed. My cake was baked in two stages. We had no idea how it was going to turn out. After taking it out of the oven and attempting to put it on a cooling rack, we determined it would just have to be served out of the pan. There was no way that cake was coming out in one piece. So much for a two-layer round cake. We would have to wait until Monday to see how it tastes.