My Birthday

I had a really fantastic birthday last Thursday. Celebrating my big 3-0 was marked mostly by eating a lot. I grabbed an early coffee and bagel after a very nice morning walk and then I headed to the grocery store to get ingredients for a cake. Later I had a lobster roll for lunch. Baking my own birthday cake is a newer habit of mine that I've been doing the past couple of years. This year I wanted to make a chocolate frosted cake with lemon curd filling between two layers of yellow cake. It mostly turned out okay, but I forgot to add a cup and a half of milk in between batches of flour, which made the cake dense. It was still very good and I was very proud of it. The homemade lemon curd was fun to make and it got me to use a lot of arm muscles that I usually don't.

For this past weekend John and I headed up to Wisconsin to spend time with family, celebrate our second wedding anniversary, and visit one of Wisconsin's most bizarre attractions, called the House on the Rock. The House is definitely worth several future blog entries. Along the way, we saw a farm stand that had a very large jack-o-lantern, and since I love Halloween, I could not resist getting my photo taken with it. 

Later on, John had a good idea to grab an old family bicycle for me and bring it back to Oak Park so that we can ride around the village together. John has a great bike he got this past spring. We spent Sunday morning putting some WD40 on some gears, air into tires, and then we took a tour around Kewaskum. Spending an hour riding around the village and smelling the fresh summer grass was a very relaxing way to enjoy the weekend. John's mom made us a great pot roast lunch and then we packed up and headed home. We had a wonderful time.