April 7, 2012

Outside Temp: 28 F (the storm has passed and it was beautiful today!)

What I cooked today:
Carrot Cake (and cream cheese frosting... from scratch): Oh my goodness, if I had only known for the last X number of years, how easy carrot cake was to make!  I usually buy the mix from Betty Crocker (and I'm not knocking Betty... she's pretty cool).  But, I thought that for the Easter Dinner at our Aunt's place in Helena, that I would make a cake from scratch.  Carrots, flour, nutmeg, cinnamon, baking powder, baking soda, eggs and yogurt (yes, plain yogurt).  The cake took about an hour to cook, and it looks great.  The frosting was extremely easy, with just butter, cream cheese, vanilla and powdered sugar.  The frosting was probably the best cream cheese frosting I have ever had, and so simple!  I haven't tried the cake yet, so we'll see tomorrow if it's edible!

Update:
Patrick got up early and went skiing with his dad.  It's the last day of the season, and after yesterday's storm, they were hoping for good ski conditions.  Patrick said it was the best skiing of the year!  They stayed for a few hours and were home by 1:30pm.

Which was good, since we had to run into town today.  I needed to get some groceries and we decided to pick up 4 more chicks.  I know, I know, we're nuts.  But they had the Araucana chicks, which are the cool ones that lay blue eggs.  It will be months before we actually get eggs out of these chicks, but it will be neat just the same.  A little late for this Easter, but hopefully, we'll have some for next year!

The chicks come in different colors, so we picked a light yellow one, a grey one and 2 brown ones.  Of course, once we added them to our 'flock', we immediately lost the brown ones and couldn't pick them out of the crowd.  They are extremely similar to our 10 Partridge Rocks.  After some searching, we figured it out. 

The chicks are all getting along, which I think is because they have such a large area to play in.  The temperature in their room got up into the high 80's today, so we actually turned off the space heater (we left the heat lamps, just in case).  They are getting bigger and they are definitely pooping more.  Their room had a very definite 'bird poop' smell.  Boy, am I glad that I moved them out of my bedroom.

After getting the chicks settled, we rushed off to the Easter Vigil at the church.  Of course, I just assumed that it was at 6:30, since mass on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday was all at 6:30.  Silly me, I should have remembered that the Easter Vigil is always in the dark.  We got to the church, and we knew there was something wrong when there were no cars there.  Sure enough, the Vigil started at 8:30.

We headed back home and I had just enough time to make my cake and boil some eggs.  Then it was back to church (on time this time).  The Vigil was beautiful, with the candles and the readings and everything was great.  Ryan behaved himself and didn't make a ruckus.   It lasted a little less than 2 hours, and the kids were all great.

Once we got home, we colored the eggs, cooked up a frozen pizza for a late snack and made the frosting for the cake. 

Now, at 1am, I'm going to sleep.  It's going to be a long day tomorrow!