Lemon Verbena Pound Cake - Total Eclipse of the Sun Picnic

Lemon Verbena Pound Cake

 aka Darlene's Birthday Cake

The pound cake recipe is from my father-in-law, Wilson Hackney who was an awesome cook.  We would request that he bake this for us every  Christmas.  And he always did, packed it carefully and sent it in the mail which we would promply consume with ice cream, fruit and just plain.  I actually think the flavors improve when its a few days old but somehow it never seemed to last that long.

In celebration of the total eclipse of the sun and our friend Darlene's b-day (and Mike wanting me to make this again - it's been years) I whipped this up.  The recipe is for a buttermilk pound cake and I lined the bundt cake pan with the lemon verbena leaves.

                                                                Wilson's Buttermilk Pound Cake

3 sticks soft butter                                                        1/4 tsp. baking soda

3 c. sugar                                                                      1 c. buttermilk

6 eggs - room temerature                                             1 tsp. vanilla or lemon extract

3 1/2 c. flour

Cream butter and sugar well, gradually add eggs one at a time.  Cream all until smooth.  Sift flour and soda together.  Add flour and buttermilk alternately,  ending with flour and flavoring.  Pour into greased  bundt pan, 10" tube pan or 2 loaf pans.  Bake at 325 degrees for 1 1/2 hours.  Check at 1 hour and 15 minutes.  Cool and remove from pans.

For lemon verbena leaves, after spraying pans with cooking spray, I added the leaves at the large segements of the bundt pan and then poured batter into pan.

As you can see by the pics, a little of the cake stuck to the pan - oh, but what a delicious excuse to clean the pan with my fingers!  Yum!

Here's some pics of our total eclipse picnic. 

Pos, our trip guru furnished our special eclipse sun glasses,  everyone brought food, drinks.  Mike A.

our "alway be prepared" friend, brought tables, chairs and even snake bite anti-venom just in case.

What an incredible day!

Off To A Good Start

                                              

                                         Fresh apricots, multi-grain Cheerios and 1% Milk
                                         can breakfast be any better than this?

Spring Slipping Into Summer

Spring is quickly slipping away and we are facing warmer days ahead.  I mowed the grass in the backyard today and noticed our apricots are almost ready to pick - actually some had already fallen from the tree and the birds are beginning to peck at the perfectly ripe ones.  We will be picking apricots this weekend and feasting on them, maybe put them on cereal or ice cream.

I took pics of the changing palette of the yard.  The irises are done, the roses need to be pruned of spent blooms.  The volunteer pomegranate tree is blooming so we will have some fruit in the late fall, the figs are beginning to flush out - another thing we have to compete the birds with, and my niembergia is blooming.  I love these purple flowers.  They are a little hard to find in the nurseries.  A beautiful trailing plant to cascade down a planter, this plant is about 4 years old.  It blooms profusely for a few weeks.  It dies back in the winter and needs to be cut back in the spring but what a nice reward. 

Girlfriends

They Teach This at Stanford

In an evening class at Stanford, the last lecture was on the mind-body connection - the relationship between stress and disease. The speaker (head of psychiatry at Stanford) said, among other things, that one of the best things that a man could do for his health is to be married to a woman, whereas for a woman, one of the best things she could do for her health was to nurture her relationships with her girlfriends. At first everyone laughed, but he was serious.

Women connect with each other differently and provide support systems that help each other to deal with stress and difficult life experiences. Physically this quality “girlfriend time" helps us to create more serotonin - a neurotransmitter that helps combat depression and can create a general feeling of well being.

Women share feelings whereas men often form relationships around activities. They rarely sit down with a buddy and talk about how they feel about certain things or how their personal lives are going. Jobs? Yes. Sports? Yes. Cars? Yes. Fishing, hunting, golf? Yes. But their feelings? Rarely.

Women do it all of the time. We share from our souls with our sisters/mothers, and evidently that is very good for our health. He said that spending time with a friend is just as important to our general health as jogging or working out at a gym.

There's a tendency to think that when we are "exercising" we are doing something good for our bodies, but when we are hanging out with friends, we are wasting our time and should be more productively engaged—not true. In fact, he said that failure to create and maintain quality personal relationships with other humans is as dangerous to our physical health as smoking!

So every time you hang out to schmooze with a gal pal, just pat yourself on the back and congratulate yourself for doing something good for your health! We are indeed very, very lucky. Sooooo… let's toast to our friendship with our girlfriends. Evidently it’s very good for our health.

Life isn't about surviving the storm; but how you dance in the rain.

Spring Returns to The Desert

                                             Antique French Rose

                                        
                                           Minature Roses

                                        
                                          Bearded Irises

                                        
                                         Perennial Geraniums

                                         
                                          Ivy Geranims


Can you guess I love flowers?   My backyard as it transforms itself.  Spring flowers . . . wait till summer and the palette changes . . . .