I Scream, You Scream...

What says summertime better than an ice cream cake? I'm pretty sure I don't know. I got a crazy hare to try making ice cream cakes after I saw a Food Network special on ice cream desserts. (Yes, this channel is Son's new favorite TV addiction. Somehow, it doesn't feel like he's rotting his brain cells when he's watching chefs whip up fancy sauces. I don't know why.) Anyway, I went a little nuts for my sister's 4th of July party this year and made two ice cream cakes.

I'm here to tell you that it's not as difficult as you might think. Also that you can make it much easier if you learn from my mistakes. If you want to impress the heck out of friends and family at your next dinner party, here's all you need to know to whip up an ice cream cake.

1. Start with a good, buttery cake recipe. The pound cake I made, which contains six eggs, 1 cup of sour cream, and two sticks of butter, tasted fantastic when frozen. The chocolate cake I made, which is always very good at room temperature, was not chocolaty enough for my taste when frozen, and I think it's because it's not nearly as rich as the pound cake. I would think that a decadent brownie mix might be a better choice for a chocolate cake layer.

2. Freeze the cake layers separately, once you've removed them from the pan. Then freeze the ice cream on top of the cake layers. There are two ways to do this. You can buy ice cream at the store, soften it slightly, and then press it on top of the frozen cake layers, stacking cake and ice cream alternately, and then freeze the entire thing (which is what I did for the pound cake and raspberry sherbet above). Or you can make homemade ice cream, churn it, and then freeze it on top of the cake layers.

For my chocolate cake with mint chocolate chip ice cream, I turned the cake layers out of the pan and froze them, and then I made homemade ice cream and froze it in the layer pans. I thought I was being clever, but none of the layers of ice cream or cake were perfectly flat, so they were hard to assemble. Next time, here's what I'd do:

Bake the cake layers in spring-form pans (the kind you use for cheese cake). Turn the cake out, and freeze those layers (no need to wrap them up yet). Once they're frozen and the cake pans are clean, put the cake back in the spring forms (it should only come halfway up the side of the pan), and then put the freshly-churned ice cream on top. Smooth top of ice cream as flat as you can. Freeze. This way, you can just unmold from the spring forms, and have two nicely melded halves to stack up.

3. Don't be afraid to be creative with the icing. On one cake, I used Cool Whip, which spreads easily and freezes beautifully. On the other cake, I used freshly-churned vanilla ice cream. It was very cold work spreading this on, and I had to work fast before the churned stuff melted (best to do this on a well-frozen cake), but it looked pretty good, if you like that casual home-made-icing-swirled-on look. Neither was completely smooth like fondant or professional icing would be, but both tasted great.

4. Have a plan for transport: meat is your friend. My sister lives half an hour from me. I took a small square cooler, and I put a container of frozen short ribs on the bottom of it. Then I lined the sides with packages of frozen bratwurst and stir-fry steak before placing the cake (wrapped lightly in wax paper) in the center. All those slabs of frozen meat kept the cake nice and cold for the journey, and we didn't suffer any tragic melting incidents. We did pop it straight into the freezer to firm up before serving.

5. Make more than you think you need. There were thirteen of us. We ate half of one cake and three-quarters of the other. Each cake contained nearly three quarts of ice cream, as well as a standard 8" layer cake recipe of batter. If I weren't so busy licking the leftovers off my fingers right now, I'd do the math to figure out how insanely much dessert we each consumed on the 4th. Suffice to say, people can eat a lot of this stuff when they're outside and being social.

It just goes down easy when you're fresh from the swimming pool.


Let them eat cake!

* * * * *
Need some time to make ice cream cakes? Here's how I bought myself a little time to get some cooking done.

Something is Rotten in the State of Denmark

...or at least in my garage.

Can anyone explain to me how it's possible for one very small dead thing to produce such a very large dead odor? I don't know what thing is dead, but I do know that it about makes it impossible to go into the garage without fainting. I also know that we've looked for it almost endlessly and can't find it -- which must mean it's very small, like a mouse, perhaps? So small it's practically invisible. And yet, oh my goodness, the smell alone is practically visible.

This happened once before, in even more mysterious circumstances, where something smelled horrendous in our mudroom. It got a bit better as you went towards the garage, and it was worse when standing in the doorway between mudroom and laundry room. It was not in or under the shoe rack. Truly, the smell was worst in a completely open doorway where absolutely nothing could be hiding. The smell, though awful, only lasted a few days, and then it completely disappeared.

Could it be ghost mice? I feel like this is a problem that could be accurately solved by Scooby and the Gang, and I'm sure the real answer is benign (if yukky). But honestly, I'm thinking pirate ghost mice right now. It would explain the sudden onset, sudden disappearance, and lack of any visible signs, don't you think? If only the Mystery Machine were to roll up into our driveway right now. I'll bet then I'd have the answer in no time.

Wordless Wednesday: You can dress a girl up...

...but there's no accounting for what some girls think constitutes fancy clothes behavior.



(This post is for Mr. Lady. She knows why.)

Super Awesome Things To Do With Your Kids This Summer

Even though I think a little boredom is healthy and helps foster creativity and independence, I'm always looking for fun activities to occupy my time together with the littles. I want them to be self-sufficient, but I also don't want to be driven round the bend more than two or three times per day because they are squabbling over some inane toy that neither of them really cares about, just because they don't have anything else to do.

So last weekend we spent a very enjoyable several hours at the Bass Pro Shops, practicing archery,


shooting the laser rifles at the target range,


watching the giant fish in the pond, and marveling at the taxidermy.


What? You've never marveled at taxidermy? Then you've never been to a place with a giant bear at the entranceway,


badgers hanging out atop clothing racks, and enormous bucks, deer, fox, ducks, and who knows what else, arranged in a huge waterfall scenario. (If you think I'm exaggerating, watch the slideshow here. You will be amazed and horrified all at the same time.)

Admittedly, it's not a store for the faint of heart. There was a point at which Husband noted with a wry smile that we looked like "the poster family for the NRA," which, if you knew us, would make you howl with laughter.

I'm pretty sure that point was right after this photo was taken:


Want to know the best part? This was all free. That's right, all the fake shootin' you can handle is at your fingertips, if you can stomach the hundreds of antlers suspended from the archway over the entrance, and the sign that tells you that all rifles and cross-bows must be checked before you proceed into the store (and they aren't kidding either; there's actually a staffed gate you have to walk through; these hunters don't mess around with safety).

If imagining yourself cozied up with a laser rifle isn't your idea of a fun Saturday afternoon, I don't know what is. But just in case it isn't, may I suggest another fun free activity we recently discovered?

Bowling.

There's a great program called, conveniently, Kids Bowl Free that gives kids under 18 two free games per day every day all summer long. One game of bowling is ten frames times two balls per frame = twenty throws of a very heavy ball if you are three years old = one very happy mama with tired children at the end of the day. Two games would probably take my two kids nearly two hours to complete, if they ever had enough energy to do that much bowling at a stretch. I still had to pay for shoe rental (discounted from the regular rates), and our local alley limits the free-game coupon use to noon-midnight on the weekends and noon-6pm on weekdays. Those aren't exactly very restrictive hours.

Want to know the best part? You too can have this for your nearly-free entertainment. All you have to do is sign up, and they email you coupons on Sunday to print out for the week. Couldn't be easier. There are participating alleys in multiple cities in 41 states. Check here to see if an alley near you is participating.

How did I find out about these fabulous activities involved giant moose heads and heavy balls? Through my all-time favorite site for kid activities: Go City Kids. This site, through some miracle of interneticity, compiles activities for hundreds of metro areas, big and small, across the country. If you live in Michigan, for example, everything gets listed from weekly story times at Border's Bookstore to the Detroit Jazz Walk to the Target sponsored book festival (which is a completely free carnival with a bouncy house and rock-climbing wall at a giant local park). Entries contain links to the theater, festival schedule, or venue website. Listings tell you about special exhibits at museums and all the places that it might occur to you to take your children, but they also give you all sorts of great ideas for things you never knew existed. If you live in New York or some other more cosmopolitan place, I'm guessing there's not a whole lot of Family Summer Camp at the Bass Pros Shops to wade through before you get to the cool independent art gallery kids days or the free lunchtime concerts in the park. (But if you live in Michigan, you get to choose! Lunchtime concerts or Hunter Safety Classes, take your pick!)

So, if you're starting to feel the burn of the long long days of summer stretching out in front of you, take a gander at Go City Kids. I swear it will become your new favorite one-stop shop online for fun activities.

To be clear: No one at any of these places even knows I exist, let alone approached me to write a post. I just know that the level of whining over "what can we do today?" plummeted dramatically after I discovered Go City Kids, so I thought I'd spread the word. Not all activities listed there are free, but I have yet to hear about a gallery, theater, book reading, street festival, store craft project, or any other fun thing to do with the kids that was NOT listed there.

Happy Summer Exploring!

Chatter at Dinner

The children's menu contains a big drawing space, at the bottom of which is a double turntable. Son picks up his red crayon and draws a stick figure that I later learn is himself. He has on giant headphones, and both hands have fingers splayed out across the turntable. "Oh look," I say when he holds up his picture. "You drew a DJ!"

He looks back at me, confused, "What’s a DJ?"

"It’s a guy who spins records," I tell him, not sure how he could draw someone spinning records if he's never seen the image before.

"What’s a record?" he responds.

* * * * *

Daughter, anxious to get in on the conversation, offers me a prompt. "How was my day? How was my day at school?" she asks in a pleasant, curious voice.

"How WAS your day?" I reply dutifully, even though she did not go to school but spent the whole day with me.

"Good," she says, closing her lips tightly.

"What did you do today?" I ask, try to engage her.

"I can’t tell you. It’s a very secret," she says, and turns back to her food.

* * * * *

Having asked for a glass of water, now that he’s finished his milk, Son looks confused as the waitress walks away. "How come she is going to get a new cup?" he wants to know, pointing to his empty one.

"Because that one had milk in it."

"But she should just rinse it out," he says. "That’s wasteful."

* * * * *

On the way home from the restaurant, Daughter exclaims with delight, "Daddy, look. I found another key. Look, Daddy, LOOK!"

"Honey, he can’t look," I say. "He’s driving. He has to look at the road."

Son interjects, "You could tell him which way to go."

"No," I say. "He has to look where he’s going; otherwise, it's very dangerous."

"Well," says Daughter. "He could just go this way [leaning to the left], that way [leaning to the right], port side [left], starboard [right], over the deep blue sea."

* * * * *

Getting out of the car, back at home, Son announces, "Let’s have a race!"

Daughter, already many steps ahead of him, replies, "Okay. On your mark, get set, go!" and starts running.

"No! Wait! I wasn’t ready yet," Son shouts after her.

"I said go," she responds, still running.

"Okay," he concedes, and takes off. With his much longer legs, he manages to pass her about halfway down the driveway. As soon as he does, she turns around. Reaching the top well before him because she only went half the distance, she announces triumphantly, "I won!"

"Noo!" he protests, still running. "You cheated. You didn’t go all the way to the end of the driveway." Thereupon reaching the top, he announces, "I won!"

She looks at him, smiles, and offers a complacent compromise: "It was a tie."

* * * * *

Watching them develop their conversational skills, trot out ideas I didn't know they had, amaze me with their thoughts has struck me with this: children listen, they really listen, when you tell them things. They don't always listen to the things you want them to hear, but they hear everything. It's good to keep that in mind.

Write Your Own Bestseller

What do you call that person who does not like the idea or book or movie that everyone else in the universe is LOVING right now? It's not exactly a party pooper; that's more of a person who brings down a group of shiny happy people with a drawn-out story about her latest infected hang-nail. No, I'm talking about the person who looks at the current rage, the hottest fashion, the summer must-read, and says, "Um, yeah. No thanks. Not for me." Or, even worse, who says, "Yeah, I read/tasted/wore that and it was boring/gross/unflattering."

I don't know what to call that person, but I'm about to be her. Fair warning.

So today, on summer reading lists everywhere: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

It's a hilarious premise. Genius actually. It has a few moments of brilliant execution, where only a couple of words in a given passage have been changed from the original, so that some Benett daughter or other is lamenting some boy or other, and it becomes clear that the reason she'll never appeal to him is not that she has no fortune (which she doesn't) but that she can't stop hiking up her skirts and showing off her zombie-killing prowess, which really is not quite ladylike enough and is somewhat intimidating to all the male less-proficient zombie killers near Lonbourne.

But, New York Times bestseller list notwithstanding, it's a little bit of a one-trick pony. Mail delivery is slowed because mail coaches are invaded by zombies; the odious Mr. Collins marries Charlotte Lucas and is so obtuse in this, as everything else, that he can't see that she's been infected and is turning into a zombie before his very eyes. Lady Catherine de Bourgh, so sure of her superiority over everyone else, obviously has a dojo full of Japanese ninjas and some mad zombie-fighting skills herself. Elizabeth gets to kick Darcy in the jaw -- which is the one moment in the novel where anyone who's ever read the original will jump up and shout with glee because, honestly? Darcy has been deserving that kick for a solid 100 years.

But the zombies and any mention of them disappear for at least 75 pages or so, long enough for a reader to think, okay, enough with the romance and endless gratuitous mentions of vomiting, already, where are the zombies? And also long enough to think: really, what's the point of zombies in this book anyway?

On the other hand, it's hardly meant to be serious reading of the Great Literature variety, so one might call it successful at meeting its objectives. It's not an utter waste of time, although I do think that my friend pegged it when he said that, in the end, the people who love classics will only have so much patience for the zombie intrusion, and the people who love zombie lit will only have so much patience for the stilted language of the romance. Were the marriage of genres more deftly handled, this objection might be overcome. I'm not one of those purist naysayers who claim this book is a heresy. I think, quite frankly, it needed a bit of shaking up. But I think the addition of the gore could have been done with a bit less mash-up and a bit more finesse.

To my mind, more than half the delight in this hyrid novel comes from the brilliant absurdity of the premise itself. Which is why my friend and I had a great time a while ago trying to think of other old novels that might be usefully spruced up with the addition of a few zombies.

D.H. Lawrence's books might become more interesting: Sons and Lovers and Zombies or Lady Chatterly's Brains, for example, might certainly keep me awake better than the originals. I personally wouldn't add zombies to anything by James Joyce because those novels are already out there enough. Adding zombies might be enough to make readers' heads explode. (Which, come to think of it, would be exactly what zombies would like. What a great way to turn a classic modernist novel into an interactive post-modern one, assuming there are real zombies out there to partake in the feast produced by readers of Ulysses and Zombies, of course. And now, this has become an aside that the Bloggess could certainly write better.)

We decided Dracula didn't really need zombies added, though Friend suggested that it might be improved through the addition of the Hardy Boys. In fact, the bumbling band of boy/men who hunt down Dracula could easily be the progenitors of the Hardy Boys, so that could be an interesting re-write.

See? Try it yourself. Nearly as good as reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is thinking of other books you'd personally like to zombify. Or enhance with a band of boy detectives. Your choice. What's on your list to be the next great best-seller?

There's Clean, and then There's Goofy Clean

It's no secret that I'm not the most fastidious housekeeper in the world. I am a piler. I have piles of papers, files, books, folded laundry, and bills to pay in various corners of different rooms. I don't like them, but I have generally had the attitude that there was simply not enough time in a day to keep my house immaculate, play with my children, and do all the reading, writing, prepping, meeting, and grading necessary for my paying job. I picked the house to be the thing to suffer.

But a few weeks ago, I just couldn't stand it any more. So I decided this summer I was going to work through the rooms of our house systematically and purge them. I call my little game with myself, "Pretend We're Moving." We're not moving. But I am slowly making my way through the house and pretending we are, and either throwing out or donating every single thing that I wouldn't pack to take with us if we were moving. Things are starting to feel so much more open and free around here as I'm finally getting rid of clutter and finding proper places to store things.

I've also started a chore chart for the kids that involves putting lots of daily check-marks down for every element they contribute to household upkeep. If they get enough check-marks, there is the promise of a weekly addition to their slowly-accumulating tally of "chips" in their Good Behavior containers. The reward system is totally working. After just four days, they are already getting better about picking up after themselves. Yesterday, they both followed me into the kitchen as I started to get things out for dinner and offered to help. We had a great time cooking together, and it made the pre-dinner melting-hour completely disappear.

Interestingly, this whole check-mark-chore-chart-chip system has also had the inadvertant consequence of making Husband better about picking up after himself too. Seriously. He's been making our bed every morning! His dirty laundry lives in the hamper! It's the weirdest thing. I haven't said one single word to him about his habits, but I think he decided that if the kids were going to be on a system, he'd better set a good example. I feel like a huge weight has lifted from my shoulders.

And now we come to the reason I started writing this post in the first place. In the process of all this cleaning and purging, I've been keeping my eye out for excellent organizational strategies, gems of child discipline, basically, anything that I could cobble together into a system that would work for our family. No idea or gizmo is too big or too small to be (potentially) useful.

Until I saw this advertised -->

ScotchBrite Ultra NailSaver Sponges.

That's right, a brand new dish sponge contoured so that you can tuck your fingernails in and never have to fret about your French manicure again when you wash your already-clean wine glasses.

Because the very first thing that most of us think about when the children are losing it, the floor is gritty (as Daughter announced last night "couscous sure is droppy"), bedtime is imminent, mama is tired, laundry needs folding, the dog needs walking, and someone needs to remember to mail the bills tomorrow, is "oh, no, what if I chip a nail rinsing the couscous off these plates before shoving them in the dishwasher!"

But now, for a mere $2.50 per sponge, you never have to worry your pretty little head about that pesky couscous again.

Honestly, I just can't figure out why anyone who really cares about her manicure would buy insanely expensive sponges when she could spend $1.99 on a pair of sturdy rubber gloves that will last months, protect her nails, and BONUS! keep her from getting chapped hands from all that hot water and soap.

Am I missing something here? I think I am supposed to see these sponges and think, "Ooooh-la-la! Look at those luscious curves!" But all I can think of is that old Saturday Night Live commercial for a razor with eleven close-shaving blades, which was quite possibly the best ad ever for a useless new product.

Sadly, my two minute search on YouTube did not turn up that ad for your viewing pleasure. But you get the point.

So tell me this: would you buy these sponges? Or tell me this: what's the dumbest product you have ever purchased, thinking it would change your life, only to find out it was useless? (For me, the answer to that is an In/Out box for our kitchen. It's typically shoved full of junk and sits idly by mocking its own intended purpose and laughing when the bills fall on the floor.) Or tell me this: what should I really get to keep some tiny aspect of our house organized?

Basically, any advice you have that will get me through the next six days to Clean House Paradise (aka the day when my parents arrive for a visit) would be much appreciated. Or make me laugh. That will help too.