Recently

Oops, I guess I lied about having more time to blog! We've been having lots of fun with Grandma Sari the past couple weeks, she got here on Labor Day and has been a HUGE help! Seriously, we could not get by without her! She's been cleaning my house, cooking for us, driving me around everywhere and taking care of the boys. What a blessing it's been to have her here caring for us so well! The boys are loving having so much extra grandma-time too!

This is what happens when Mommy's out of commission, Grandma hasn't arrived yet and Daddy's in charge. I love this picture, they look like tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum :-)

I threw a tea party bridal shower for Renee last weekend. The food was delicious, but then again, the food is always my favorite part of showers. I made some cream scones, tea sandwiches, a salad, and that strawberry cake.

I used this recipe here for the cake (it's a keeper) and just a general buttercream recipe. I had never made a buttercream icing before (I generally stick with cream cheese icing, which I could eat by the gallon) and the texture didn't turn out quite like I had hoped, but it sure tasted great. What I hadn't taken into account was that I had to add strawberry puree which made the frosting too liquidy, and then I had to keep adding stuff to keep the texture stiff. Eventually I decided it would be too sweet if I added anymore powdered sugar so I just left it a little bit gloppy, frosted the cake and then refrigerated it to keep the frosting from getting runny. It worked but wasn't quite as pretty as I'd hoped. Of course now I have a great excuse to try again and make another strawberry cake, so all's well that ends well!

Oh! And as an accompaniment to the scones I made Devonshire Cream (also called Clotted Cream in Britain) and all I can say is that you absolutely MUST try it! I used this recipe from Joy of Baking which is supposed to be a pretty good substitute for real clotted cream:

4 ounces mascarpone
1 cup heavy whipping cream
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 or 2 tablespoons of granulated sugar (I used powdered sugar)

You just beat the cream until it forms stiff peaks, then mix in the vanilla and sugar, then fold in the mascarpone and you're done.

It's the perfect mix of rich, creamy, sweet and tangy. My words can't do it justice so I won't even try. This stuff changed my life and now I desperately want to travel to England to try the real clotted cream. I've heard that it can sometimes be found at specialty markets and nice grocery stores here (maybe Whole Foods?), so if anybody spots some, let me know where! In the meantime, do yourself a favor and make a batch of fresh scones and this Devonshire Cream. You'll be seriously missing out if you don't!

Ok, enough about food, moving on...
to this classic Renee face

I made her this apron, she looks great in it!

Jack and Cullen baking with Grandma, good thing we don't care too much about germs in our house ;-)

Decorating Daddy's birthday cake

Happy 27th Birthday Daddy!

I just got my cast put on this morning. They're going to let me have it cut off a little early so I'm not wearing it at Renee's wedding, so I have exactly 25 days until I'm back on my feet... but who's counting?

In other news, we had a great opportunity to join a pre-school co-op with some friends of ours from church so we're going to do it! Maybe it's just DC with all of its ambitious, type-A people, but we've been asked/told for months that we should be enrolling our boys in pre-school this fall. I was totally against the idea because 1.) I don't think a 2 1/2 year old needs to be in pre-school and 2.) who wants to pay thousands of dollars to send your kid off to pre-school at such a young age anyways?

Well, while we were in California, my old small group leader emailed me and asked if we'd be interested in joining her and 2 other ladies from the group in doing an at-home co-op once a week. There will be 6 kids, including Jack and Cullen, all between the ages of 2 1/2 and 3 1/2. I thought it sounded fun for the boys to spend time learning with their friends and for myself to be around my friends too. So after talking with Brandon about it, we decided to join. We're using a book called Kitchen Table Play and Learn by Tara Copley and Andrea Custer and rotating teaching a chapter each week. So once a month, I'll be responsible for leading the lesson and preparing the activities and the rest of the weeks, I'll be helping the kids do the crafts and activities or helping care for the two babies. We're starting next week and we're actually getting really excited about it! I think it will be fun for all of us!

The temperature dropped dramatically overnight and today is a crisp 67 degrees. YES! I'm so ready for fall! It's my favorite time of year in DC, the only season when the weather isn't unreasonably hot and humid or cold and stormy. We will definitely be enjoying the perfect fall weather over the next couple months.