Wild and Free Like a Mustang

OUCH!

Sun, 26 Oct 2008 04:59:20 GMT

Ok, so I was going to post another recipe tonight (the carrot cake I made for Mom's Mother's Day cake) tonight... but this morning I ran into a bit of a small problem... my pinky, ring, and middle fingers of my left hand are covered in blisters!! I was baking an apple crumb cake this morning to go with breakfast for Mom (it's her favourite!), and when I was pulling the oven rack out so I could toothpick the cake and see if it was done my oven mitt slipped and I ended up grabbing the 425 degree oven rack with my bare hand! Ouch! I immediately ran it under cold water and wrapped it in an ice pack. Ugh... my fingers are all red and swollen and I can't even move them. This sucks, no guitar, I can't grasp the fret board, and I can't even carry food buckets or feed the chickens without help! Now there are huge white blisters running all up and down my fingers :-/

This took forever... I can only peck out letters with one hand!!

I'll put of the carrot Cake and pics when I can type normally again.
--Mannus

p.s. disaster tonight... Dad, o god is he great, had to kill two chickens tonight. One was little Polly, I have been trying to save her but she has serious neurological problems, and the big hens plucked her tail last night. The other was one of the big beautiful leghorns, I think it had Mereks like the first one... it was limping and could barely walk. We decided to let the leghorn go because the other one that had mereks didn't make it and we don't want to go through that again, and Mom said we should put Polly 'out of her misery' while Dad was dealing with the leghorn. Bless him, Dad dealt with both and didn't complain. We even gave him the option to let a friend do it... He is so great.
--Mannus

p.p.s Mom and Dad voted tonight! Republican across the board... McCain/Palin '08!!

My First Cake/The Easter Bunny Cake/The Cake That Started it All!

Sat, 18 Oct 2008 06:51:27 GMT

Oh kay! Here goes:
This was a Yellow cake with Buttercream frosting and coconut 'fur'. The pink ears were cotton candy. The tie knot thingy and the whiskers and mouth were strawberry Twizzlers (yummy! I 'accidentally' bought more than I needed to :P). The nose was a truffle, and the eyes were mandarin orange slices (I couldn't find anything else... I forgot to buy something!!).

Recipe, and Construction under the cut.

The Yellow Cake Recipe:

Ingredients:
2 Cups white flour
2 1/4 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt
1/2 cup butter
1 cup sugar
3 eggs
2 tsp. vanilla
3/4 cups milk

Baking:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees; grease/flour 2 9-inch round pans
In bowl, combine dry (first three ingredients), set aside.
Cream butter and sugar, and beat eggs in one at a time. Add Vanilla and mix completely.
Add Milk and Flour alternately and mix well. Batter should be smooth when pouring into pans.
Bake for 21 minutes. Cool no more than 5 minutes (more like 2 or three) in pan, then flip out onto wire rack and cool completely.

Constructing the cake:
Set one cake on board as the head. Take the other cake and cut it like the picture below:
The pink are the ears and the blue is the bow-tie. Set up to look like a bunny with a tie. Frost with the Buttercream and decorate. Then, cut and eat!!!

Ok, so I hope I can keep up with this recipe/online server thing.
--Mannus

New Purposes

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 14:58:24 GMT

I have officially changed my major. I was going into CSUCI as a pre-med student; I am now going into it as a business major. I'm so sick of school at this point, I can't imagine another 13 or so years to be a doctor. Plus, knowing my luck, the government will be in control of medicine and healthcare will be socialized by the time I finish school. I want to open a bakery. Mom said that I had to get some sort of college education (pastry school apparently doesn't count as a 'college education'), so I figured business would help me the most in the running and managing of a bakery.

Anyways... I decided that I am going to use this journal as a sort of on-line recipe holder, but only the good stuff! Any baking, cooking, decorating, etc. will be posted here with, more importantly, a recipe so that I can access my best and favourites no matter where I am! The first recipe will probably be sometime next week. My family and I are going to DisneyLand for four days tomorrow!! Yay! but... Shhh! Don't tell my Economics professor, I told him I needed a test date changed 'cause I was going to be in Washington D.C. (Heather totally lives there now!!)! I feel so naughty doing that... Oh well, I'm sure any and all guilt will be forgotten the second I step through that magical, germy turnstile into the heavenly paradise that is DisneyLand!

I gotta go pack!! Bye!
--Mannus

P.S. Btw... The Pink Spiders totally rock... they are coming to LA next month, I hope maybe I can convince Mom to let me go! Maybe I'll tell her right when I hand her a Turkey Leg and a Frozen Banana in DisneyLand... that way she will be in her 'Happy Place' Lol... my family has serious issues. Mannus

Here we go again...

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 06:42:57 GMT

So tomorrow I officially start school again. I am taking Macro-Economics and Political Science: American Government both online so I can travel. I am looking at Disneyland in September, Washington D.C. in October, and Ohio and Idaho in November.

Mom is going to be home tomorrow evening after being gone for nearly a week. I miss her so much, and she was even gone on her birthday. I have spent the time baking her cake and such (which was a disaster, more below) and wrapping her presents.

Mom is always talking about how yummy a tangerine cake and tangerine frosting would taste (idea came from Because I Said So, her favourite movie... don't ask, please!). So this year I decided to try it. The cake itself came out more than perfect, and I ended up filling it with some leftover orange-flavoured frosting from my birthday. So I dyed the tangerine frosting orange and frosted the cake ect. Well, I was trying to change the tint a little, and I ended up just dying the whole damn batch of tangerine-flavoured icing grey. I was devastated, no way was I going to use GREY icing to finish off Mom's birthday cake. Dad says I can make an awesome tombstone cake for halloween... that'll be interesting, a tangerine flavoured Halloween Tombstone cake. :-/ I am going to dig some old frozen frosting out of the freezer tomorrow to put the finishing touches on Mom's cake.

Btw... I feel so bad for Nastia Luiken! She just got totally ripped off on uneven bars...

I Hate School!!

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 03:07:11 GMT

I hate school so incredibley much right now... I swear I'm only three weeks into the semester and I am already gasping for breath, I am so far behind. Monday, my first big formal paper in English V01B is due... I'm not even halfway through with it yet. Tuesday, I have a HUGE Chemistry test, that I am not going to get to even start studying for until Monday night. Wednesday, I'm supposed to study for my Trigonometry test, but I doubt that will happen because it will be the first day since it rained to groom the horses. Thursday, my Trig test. Friday? Start working on the next formal english paper that is due next Monday. God help me. I don't need to be a soothsayer to see that there are all-nighters and cups of caffiene in my future... Maybe posting a little here will help me to relax. Probably not, lol.

New Interests

Sun, 18 Nov 2007 02:49:35 GMT

I know I promised to finish my vacation for all my friends who know I'm on LiveJournal... but time got away from me. Now, for my list of excuses lol... My grandmother died, my dalmation died, my family and I went on another three-week vacation (I'm am not leaving the house for at least a year!), and I've been fighting with my mom over how many classes/units I am going to take this upcoming semester (she says two on-line with eight units, I say a bunch more classes equaling roughly 15-17 units).

However, providence smiled upon me during the second vacation. We spent most of if in Washington D.C with my sister, and she convinced me to read Dracula. After I wolfed the book down, we rented Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula. What an amazing movie! I now find myself fully immersed in a fascinating study of the real Vlad the Imapler as well as the study of Vampires (would that be called Vampire-ology?). What is interesting about Vlad is he is so black and white. I found it difficult to find an essay on him where he was fairly portrayed. Every essay either turned him into a blood-thirsty monster that loved to torture people, or he was a kind soul that was forced to commission unspeakable acts in order to keep his enemies at bay. Where do I stand? Somewhere in the middle I suppose. I feel that Vlad was twisted and gruesome, but I also feel that he did need to instil a sense of fear into his enemies to protect himself and keep his ass on the throne. So I guess I think that Vlad was heartless and cruel but he was justifiably so. Plus, you have to admit his punishments were imaginative; he has to get some points for that!

I swear, I could study nothing but Vampires and Vlad for the rest of my life and be totally content. Oddly enough, reading today some of the things Vlad did to his enemies I actually felt sick and nausous; it is the first time I have felt that way since I was 6 and watched Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom for the first time. I'm waiting for the Bela Lugosi version of Dracula to come in from Netflix... it has been so long since I have seen that version, I would like to compare it to all of the information that I have gathered thus far.

Anyway... off to feed my babies and get the obese cat out of the food bag again, lol. Muah!

Hello to LiveJournal and my sad vacation story.

Tue, 09 Oct 2007 07:52:27 GMT

Hello to LiveJournal! I intended to introduce myself here several weeks ago when I returned home after a three week driving vacation with my family. However, the fates decided against that, and threw so much crap at me these past two and a half weeks that I haven't had time to even ride my beautiful horses. Now, I am sitting on my bed with some good music, a cup of mint tea, and an extremely obese cat at my feet, and I feel ready to tell my Charlie Brown-ish tale to cyberspace.

On September 4th my mom, dad, and brother, Randy, drove out our driveway on our way to Denver, Colorado. We drove until we hit St. George, Utah, only stopping in Las Vegas. We spent three hours driving around the residential district of Las Vegas looking for a Whole Foods for Mom. Uneventful first day, unless you count our driving tour of 'life outside the Vegas Strip'.

Our second day we drove through Capitol Reef National Park. It was so beautiful, I really recommend that everyone that reads this go there! On our way to our second night hotel, we stopped at a seedy-lookin Mexican restaraunt and had dinner... big mistake. Mom and I woke up at 3 AM with horrible food poisoning. We seriously had to debate whether or not to continue. Fortunately, Mom and I were feeling a little better by checkout, so we continued on and ended up driving through Arches National Park. Dad and Randy ended up doing all the hikes and taking pictures of everything for Mom and I because we couldn't walk very far! Based on what I saw out the car window and from Dad's pictures, I am disappointed that I missed everything! We made it to the Utah/Colorado border that night.

Next morning, Mom and I were feeling normal, so we were able to make it to Denver, Colorado by midnight. We were staying with an old friend of my moms, Ray. Of course... the first morning of our stay in Colorado Randy caught a horrible flu bug!

Next Post: Colorado, South Dakota, Wyoming, and Utah (second go round!).