Happy National Bundt Day 2011!!

Yay! It’s finally here!! National Bundt Day is my favorite holiday.

This year I made a pineapple upside down bundt!

I used my favorite vanilla pound cake recipe and just put some melted butter and brown sugar in the bottom of the pan, laid in pineapple slices and maraschino cherries, and poured the batter on top. It worked well and is quite delicious!

I want to try it again and put more pineapples all over the sides, etc. It’s very good but I think there could be more frequent delicious pineapple moments!

Hope you have a wonderful National Bundt Day!! 🙂

 

PS – I also just learned recently that November 15, 2011, is also International Catan Day! Catan + bundts sounds like a great combo!!

National Bundt Day is on its way!!!

National Bundt Day is next Tuesday, November 15!! Don’t forget to celebrate, y’all! Brian and I just had a meeting to decide which bundt we will try for the festivities, and I’ll share it with you as soon as it’s ready!

For great bundt inspiration, click over to The Food Librarian, who is celebrating bundts with I Like Big Bundts 3 — her third year in a row of making 30 bundts leading up to the big day on November 15.

We’ve had a couple of technical snafus with our blog, but we are trying to get everything straightened out and get back in the swing of things as quickly as possible… thanks for your patience!!

The Cell

Brian’s final stop-motion project:

Here’s one of our production stills from making the film.

The End Is Near

Here is Brian’s second group project for stop-motion animation class.

Tiny Foot

Check out Brian’s stop motion film (a group project from this semester’s stop motion animation class)!

The Judge

My grandfather passed away the Sunday before last. He was a unique and wonderful person who happened to lead a truly incredible life and had an exceptional career. He was a federal judge (in fact, he was Chief Judge of the Fifth Circuit for 11 years), and we all referred to him as “the Judge,” and although many people will remember him primarily for his legal career judicial service, I will remember my loving and hilarious grandfather who got me hooked on Dairy Queen Blizzards the year they were introduced (1985). The Judge loved ice cream in any form (as do I), but Blizzards were a special Isabel-and-the-Judge treat I looked forward to every summer. In addition to desserts, the Judge loved his life partner for 70 (!) years, my grandmother Emily, his six children, and his gaggle of 14 grandchildren and 3 great-grandchildren.

Here is some of the news coverage of his passing, the obituary, and a good article for all you lawyers out there.

UPDATE: Another piece about the Judge appeared in the Jackson paper last week: Judge Clark embodied the law

Heart Cake

Sure, it looks like an innocent, normal cake…

But there’s a surprise inside!

That’s a cake-within-a-cake; method inspired by Bake It in a Cake — recipe inspired by Chowhound, mostly.

Seriously, Mississippi?!

Happy National Bundt Day!

We are celebrating with these:

In the background is blueberry cake, and in the foreground you’ll find Epicurious’ Pumpkin Spice Bundt Cake with Buttermilk Icing (via The Food Librarian, who has serious love for bundts!).

In other cake news, I recently made these rainbow cupcakes with cloud frosting:

We’re super busy with the end-of-semester crunch. More updates over winter break, we hope!

Regular Tub Time Machine

Our house has two bathrooms, one of which has a regular tub/shower (the other has a shower stall). When we moved in, our tub surround looked like this:

It’s just a plain white plastic tub surround, but it had some issues, such as hair dye/paint stains:

… and sagginess/falling-apart-yness:

However! The previous owners also left us this:

They had plenty of leftover floor tiles from the renovations they had done in the kitchen and bathroom. Plenty! So!! Demolition began!

Apparently, when you put in those inexpensive plastic tub surrounds (which are just glued onto the wall, by the way), removing them is quite a procedure. It involves removing the plastic and then removing bits of the wall, layer by layer, so it’s like looking back through time to The House Before It Was Yours, then installing new drywall, THEN putting up the tile. Check it out!

The most recent wall with the swirly glue lines that attached the plastic:

The wall behind that…

In older houses like ours, there was plaster at one point, which was attached to these big planks of wood. The previous owners added the shower to this room, so it has a regular/modern wall with normal studs and drywall (I think there probably wasn’t a wall there before at all). Also, check out the awesome wallpaper that used to be in this bathroom:

Anyway! After all the time-travelly demolition, our new tile was installed, and now we have this!

Quelle difference!!