I love baking with parchment paper. I use it for cookies, bread, biscuits, chicken nuggets, and meat loaf, to name a few. Lifting a whole meat loaf out of the pan cleanly is probably the most satisfying! I cut a piece larger than my pan and press it in (I tried fancy folding, but it is just as effective to press it into the corners; the wrinkles don’t make much difference).
My youngest suggested making chocolate cake to celebrate the end of the school year… that is definitely worth cake. I pulled up a new recipe for gluten-free chocolate cake and in the tips they recommended “insulating cake strips”. I had to look it up. Apparently someone discovered that if you insulate the sides of the cake pan, you get a flatter top, rather than a dome. That is all well and good, and fancier than I usually do for cakes (my cakes look very homemade), but can I make them myself? Like right now? Yes, yes I can. Here are some great instructions on how to make these using aluminum foil and paper towels. Well, then, I will give them a try.
They strips did seem to help reduce the cake dome. My cakes were still uneven. Not sure if my oven tray is out of level (it’s not, just checked) or if it is the curse of the chocolate cake (the last few I made were mostly inedible). Even with aligning the thick side with a thin side the finished cake was leaning. It look some camera angle magic to make it look sort of even. It tasted just fine! Hurray for edible!
I know skinny t-shirts are a thing, but there are times when they are too skinny! My eldest has a favorite print shirt that fits this category, and drives her crazy when it rides up. We did look for a larger size, but it has been a few years since she received it as a gift. To fix it, I found a thin knit fabric that matched the weight of the shirt (and coordinated with the print), then picked out the side seams all the way up, including the sleeve seam. Using a different, well-fitted shirt as a guide, I cut 3” strips of the new fabric and sewed them in using the jersey stitch on my sewing machine.
Oops. I bought the wrong size filter for our house air filters. I’m going to chalk it up to distraction in the store because I had the correct dimensions on my list. I did not want to go back to the store. Luckily, they were oversized and I could cut them down.
In an effort to keep the caterpillars from falling into my lap, and the random bird droppings soiling my yarn, I draped netting over my chair. Jury is still out on the effectiveness long term, but I didn’t have unwanted visitors that day.
Critters and Craft 