January Weather and Fruitcake

It is January, right?  

The children have had a bit of spring fever lately.  

It has been so hot!  I think we've hit the upper 80's/lower 90's for several days.

It is still cool in the evenings/early mornings...40's and 50's so I'm still enjoying hot tea and champurrado for breakfast or before I get to bed.

But in the afternoon...

Well, it's been a bit difficult to get everyone to finish up school after lunch.

We get a good early start, everyone studies/works hard all morning, and then we have lunch around 12:30 pm.  We all eat outside on the picnic tables and then nobody feels like going back inside to finish up.

Of course, we don't usually follow our feelings.

Unless Daddy happens to be home and turns on the sprinklers and grabs a basket ball.

If you can't beat them, join them.  That's when I got out the ice cream. :)

We did finally finish all our studies that day...around 7 pm :-).

But it was sure fun!

 Tell them to smile for a picture and you get this...

Tell them to act normal, and you get this...

Yep, I think I'm rubbing off on all of them! :)

Several people have either emailed or commented asking me for the recipe to the bread I posted a picture of recently.  I make this bread several times a week and it always turns out perfect!  

It calls for white flour and sugar, but I have made it with whole wheat flour, half and half, and also used honey instead of sugar before.  

I currently only have 1 bread pan, and since I usually make 4 loaves at a time (double the recipe), I just shape them into loaves, score the top diagonally with a knife and put them on a couple cookie sheets.  

You simply combine everything, knead it well (I just use my hands...I love kneading bread by hand!), let it rise, punch it down (I love that part too!), shape it into loaves, let it rise, and bake!  Eat warm with butter!  Mmmmmm!

I was going to take pictures of the process, but didn't get very far :)  My hands got messy!
But I did take this shot.
There are only 3 reasons I can think of for which I will remove my wedding ring.
#1- If I am in the hospital and they make me.
#2- If I am making meatloaf and mixing the meat with my hands.
#3- When I knead dough.

Which brings me to fruit cake.  

Did I ever mention that the top of our wedding cake was a fruit cake?  

Really, it was!

Yes, Daniel and I have both been called a fruit cake a time or two :), but that's not the reason we had one on the top of our wedding cake.

It's because my hubby does not really like cake.  But he LOVES fruit cake. 

Yes, he has strange tastes, but I'm glad he picked me! ;)

We were told that you save the top of your wedding cake, freeze it, and then eat it on your one year anniversary.

So I had the lady who make our beautiful cake make the top out of fruit cake.  She had to charge me an extra $25 dollars for that and while I don't know why anyone would pay so much money to make/eat such a thing as a fruit cake, I was (and still am) deeply in love with that man so I was happy to pay for it.

She wrapped the fruit cake with plastic wrap before she frosted it so it would be nice and fresh/frosting free for our anniversary.

I was 6 months pregnant with Timothy our first anniversary and Daniel took me overnight to the coast.  And we brought our fruitcake.

And he ate a lot of it.

And I ate the frosting.

See, we make a perfect match!

I think that was the last fruit cake we had.

Until this week.

Daniel went to pick up the mail at our little post office.

He came home with this small but very heavy box sent to us from a church in Texas.

I opened it up and inside was a beautiful round tin from Collin Street Bakery.

I opened it up and inside was a fruitcake.

The nicest fruit cake I've ever seen!  It was pretty.

I'm sure this church has no idea how much my hubby loves fruit cake.

It reminded me of just how much God loves us to send a fruit cake all the way down to Mexico.

Every day, when Daniel is studying, I serve him a cup of tea or milk and a nice slice of fruit cake.

And he doesn't even have to worry about me eating it. :)