Royal Wedding Tea Party

The tea cups came out of storage. We watched the Royal Wedding on Saturday morning in a tea party, complete with egg salad sandwiches, pound cake and scones with jam and Devonshire cream.

We made it from Thursday night to Saturday morning with varying degrees of discipline. I lost. I saw the dress on the news and I saw the kiss on the front cover of the newspaper. Emily, off whom Mozart is mooching below, won. She saw nothing. 

My favourite part: the glance at each other when the bishop referred to "making a decision."

 I'd also like to take this opportunity to display to you one of my prized possessions: a Winston Churchill tea cup made during the Second World War to boost patriotism. Bottoms up!

The $340 Granola Recipe

1. Make granola from a recipe loosely based on this recipe and your sister's version: 3 cups of oats, 1/4 cup peanut butter, 1/4 cup apple sauce, splash of maple syrup, splash of canola oil, handful of diced apples, teaspoon of cinnamon, and a handful of raisins. Bake for 30 minutes at 350. Cool.

2. Begin to transfer to a plastic container. While in complicated mid-pour, watch as a raisin falls on the floor and your dog darts into the kitchen and eats it. 

3. Google, "Are raisins poisonous to dogs?" Answer: yes.

4. Of course, the regular, very reasonably-priced vet has just closed for the evening. Decide not to fix the situation yourself by driving very quickly around the block in your friend's Mazda 3 with your dog in the back. 

Take dog to emergency vet clinic to induce vomiting. Total cost to you: $340.

How I Made My First Wedding Cake

32 eggs. 24 cups of grated carrot. 15 cups of icing sugar. Yes, I made my first (only?) amateur wedding cake last weekend.

It's based on an Epicurious carrot cake that the groom remembered from a potluck long ago. The recipe is very forgiving. I made minimal adaptations, adding 1/2 cup of coconut and subbing 1/2 cup of apple sauce for some of the oil. I also had to bake the bigger cakes for an hour in order to get the centre to cook.




The first cake went into the oven at 8:30 am. The last one came out at 7:50 pm (granted, I went to work for a few hours). The cakes finally went into the fridge at 11:30 pm in their little nests of paper boxes lined with garbage bags.

Keys to success / mental stability:

1. A long skinny spatula.

2. The help of my lovely boyfriend. Not only did his mother teach him how to iron as a teenager, she taught him how to ice a cake. She is awesome.

3. Lots of practice cakes, which were consumed by my charming co-workers.

4. Accepting that I am an amateur baker, and it will look like an amateur cake. Yes, there were a few little flecks of cake in the icing. C'est la vie.