Rum Tweed Cake

Growing up nearly every member of our family chose either Rum Tweed or Black Forest Cake for their birthday. Rum Tweed seems to be the all time favorite now and I find myself making it for every birthday. I have no idea where my mom got the recipe from, but it's amazing and tastes even better on the second or third day.

Rum Tweed Cake


1 box white cake mix
2 eggs
1/4 cup oil
2 tbsp instant coffee powder
4-6 tbsp golden rum (just depending on how strong you want the flavor)
1 1/4 cup milk
2 oz semi-sweet chocolate, grated
500ml whipped cream

Blend the cake mix, eggs, oil, coffee powder, rum and milk together on medium low speed for 5 minutes. Then fold in 1oz of the grated chocolate.

Bake in two round layer cake pans according to cake mix instructions on box.

Once cooled, cut the top off of one of the cake to make it level. Layer on some whipped cream and place the second cake on top. Ice the whole thing with the remaining whipped cream (or as much as you like) and sprinkle the second amount of grated chocolate on top.

Getting Ready

We've been getting ready for Halloween the past 2 days. Nothing has been quite as productive as it might have been but I've been sick since Monday night so pretty much everything and everyone in our house has been getting minimal attention. I feel considerably better today so hopefully I can catch up a bit before it's the weekend! Not only is it Halloween but Sunday also marks Travis' birthday. Usually by now I have the costumes made, Trav's cake planned if not baked already and generally everything ready. Definitely not there this year but oh well.

okay so this pic isn't very clear but how cute is that smile?

Yesterday we made some crafts and did some decorating. I made a bat banner for the front window and we cut out some little ghosts to hang on another window. Thanks to a certain Backyardigans episode, Kaed has been a little obsessed with ghosts lately so ghosts are the theme this year.

The banner looks much better from the outside, the bats are actually black, but it's cold outside and I didn't feel like getting cold to get a different picture :)

Brayer is going to be a spider, and his costume is nearly done, Kaed will be a ghost so that costume shouldn't take long to make either.


We also made some little ghost puppet things on popsicle sticks. I basically cut out 4 ghosts from white crafting foam and glued a popsicle stick between 2 matching ones. It's amazing how long they entertained the boys for.

Kaed showing me his ghost puppet

What are your plans for Halloween?

Artisan Bread

I recently took Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day out from our local library and tried out some recipes. Everything in the book is so simple and easy and I loved being able to just cut some dough out of a container in my fridge and eating an hour or so later.

I definitely hope to purchase this book sometime in the near future and now that I check out the website I see that that there is a new book coming out too. Guess I'll need to check that on out too.

Seriously though, how awesome is a library? I love that I can first check out a book I'm interested in and make sure it's worth it to me to buy before I go and spend a ton of money on a book I didn't really want. Our library has a great online holds system where you can just search for a book you want and put a hold on it. Then when it's available it gets shipped to the library of your choice (we happen to have one 2 minutes from our house) for you to pick up. It's amazing.

just gonna brag for a minute...

Seriously how cute is this kid??

Success!

I successfully accomplished two of my sewing goals for the day! First I made this bag. I absolutely love it. The fabric is my favorite part, I even have enough left over for another one so I've got the itch to make one more.

(just a little sample of the inside fabric)

I also made up that bath mat I was talking about. For some reason though I didn't think to make it to match my bathroom. Mostly because I had an exact towel and old pillowcase that I wanted to use for it. Oh well, it will be in our upstairs bathroom which doesn't get used much by anyone but us so I don't care. I have plans to make one that matches a little better yet but for now this one will do fine. I never did end up finding one of these mats on a blog somewhere although I'm sure I've seen them before but I just got Handmade Home out from the library and voila! there it was! I followed the pattern very loosely but it turned out pretty good. The best part? It didn't cost a dime and I used materials that would have otherwise been tossed eventually.

Home Again

We recently got back home from a trip to Saskatoon Saskatchewan. Trav had to work there for a couple days so we headed up early and spent a couple nights with some good friends of ours. On the way home Kaed suddenly said to me "mommy look, Kaed a tiger!!" Lately he's been pretending to be all kinds of animals so I didn't think anything of it until I looked at him and burst out laughing...

I've been doing small amounts of sewing and crafting here and there but not near as much as I'd like so today I spent the day doing about 8 loads of laundry (seriously...) and vacuuming and cleaning the whole house so I won't have too many domestic duties this weekend. It's way past time to get started on some christmas presents.

I made Kaed a few pairs of pants a week or two ago. I was having a hard time finding him warm pj's for a decent price so I thought I'd tackle making him some pj pants out of scrap sweater material I had. They actually turned out great but for some reason I don't have a picture at all. I made 3 pairs, each pair turning out better than the last.

I plan to make myself a new bath mat this weekend. The one we have is white, and well 3 years old, you get the picture. Time for a new one. I've seen tons of the towel backed bath mats in the blog world lately but of course I can't for the life of me find a link to share with you now. I just hope I can show you my finished one by monday!

no inspiration

okay I'll admit I haven't blogged in a long time. I still don't have any inspiration though so you may have to wait a while again....