It’s quite hard to imagine that one can actually forget how to make something they’ve made a thousand times, isn’t it?  However, on Saturday, I had one of those lapses.  I didn’t have time to prepare the fruit for Okanagan Harvest Cake, so decided that Marilyn and I should bake Totally Decadent Fruitcake instead.  I hadn’t made it since last November.

For some unknown reason, on the recipe, I had written baking soda.  However, it calls for baking powder!  Marilyn had no reason to question it, and merrily followed the new recipe.  We had two batches in the ovens, and one in the gigantic mixer.  I looked into the oven, and Mein Gott im Himmel, if there’s wasn’t dough burbling out of the pans, with handfuls of dough plopped over the oven floor!

It took me a moment, and then I realized what had happened.  We had to throw out three batches, but then all went beautifully after that.  At the end of the second arduous day of baking, I wearily came upstairs, and joy of joys, found my new leather Dockers chewed to bits by that little menace, Ricky!  ARGH!

I feel silly even writing this, but Luke has once again said he’s moving out.  He’s going to move in with a hoard of people, one of whom I know.  It sounds like a hell-hole of a house, but what do I care when you really get right down to it.  I’m quite sure that he’ll stop by here each day on his way to work to get his lunch.

The other day Nicky said that he wanted to get some new clothes for school.  I looked at him, and said, “Well, have at it.”  He wailed, “I’m not gonna waste all of my money on clothes!”  For some reason, I must present the image of a person who wants to waste her money on a kid’s wardrobe.  He said, “Let’s go to Tommy Hilfiger” to which I said, “Tommy Hilfiger?  I’ll give you $100 towards it and that’s it.”

He grudgingly had to accept that, and then suggested we go on the weekend.  I explained that I was baking, to which he said, “Well you don’t sound very enthusiastic about it.”  Very astute on his part, as I was openly balking.

Sadly, I don’t think much will change as we go into fall.  On Saturday when I was running up and down the stairs between baking batches of fruitcakes, I alternately saw Denis reading the paper or watching TV.  Nicky knocks off after a few hours of work, and as Luke works three long shifts, he has four days off.  I am surrounded by sleeping dogs and cats.  Everyone else’s life looks so leisurely.

No time for self-pity, however, as I rehearse the gloating I’m going to do when I’m the Fruitcake Queen.  I’ll pretend to feel terrible leaving the family behind as I board a plane to a balmy clime in mid-winter.