Yesterday I baked for a good part of the day. I consider myself a good baker. A baker needs energy, heart, optimism...but one thing she doesn't need is cockiness. Once you start feeling secure in your baking skills, FLOP, a special birthday cake reminds you that you're only human. The infuriating thing is that I don't think I did anything wrong to it, other than be a little lax with the measurements and not mix the batter well enough. In any case, I ended up with a nice tall 8" square chocolate/butterscotch chip cake (the first thing I baked), a gooey and good hot fudge pudding cake (the second), and a moist yellow FLOPPED bundt cake with its companion 8" square cake that was fine. Yes, the 8" square cake, from the same recipe as the bundt, did not flop, but I extracted it from the pan prematurely, resulting in a crumbled up mess of cake upon which I had to pour my caramel frosting, which is always delicious, though it's never of a true frosting consistency. The bundt cake I managed to salvage by flipping it over soon after I took it out of the oven. I drizzled a double recipe of chocolate glaze on it, which topping is not conducive to disguising the flopped part, but it was my brother's special request. Finally, I made sure my mom got ice cream, in case the cake can't stand on its own merit.

Recently, I've had an odd recurring theme to my dreams (last night excepted). The theme is that I got too behind in my homeschool work, and my dad finally said, "Do you want to go to [public] school?" I decided that I would, so in the dreams I'm in public school, except that, being a dream, it's nothing like real life, much less real school. However, the dreams are disturbing because they suggest that I may be escaping reality more than usual.