On Friday, we bake! (Return to Normalcy #16)

One thing I really enjoy about the Emperor being this particular age is that he's actually quite fun (if somewhat messy, slow, and prone to interruption) cook things with. He has great enthusiasm and can discuss the process, and occasionally he actually does something helpful like take out ingredients for me or remind me where I've put down a particular measuring cup.

I've dedicated the afternoons of the past few Fridays (and today) to baking something with him. It's sort of a deal we have. You take your nap, and when you get up, we'll bake something. Today he couldn't fall asleep at nap time but made an excellent effort... he stayed in bed paging through books quietly for about an hour and a half before asking if he could get up. Fair enough.

When he got up, we made this:



Pineapple upside down cake. I don't know if I've *ever* eaten pineapple upside down cake before-- certainly not since childhood. For some reason I recall that it's my dad's favorite cake, but I can't remember ever seeing him eat it. Weird. Anyway, the Emperor loves pineapple and this showed up as another of Isa's test recipes so we jumped on it. Delish.

Other things we've made together recently include raspberry brownies (he ate a ton of the frozen raspberries and half an ounce of baker's chocolate, but wouldn't touch the finished product) and oatmeal chocolate chip cookies (again, wouldn't touch the finished product). He *would* eat the cake, which was a pleasant surprise... I think the slices of pineapple sold him on it.

Oh: we also really needed a baking activity this afternoon because it was rainy. It's been raining all week and is supposed to continue for approximately forever. It's great, we need the rain, but ugh. Here's a picture of the Emperor all rain geared up at the park earlier:



We spent an hour there and didn't see another living soul.

And here's the Magician on the diaper bin... compare to earlier pictures to see just how much taller (longer?) he is at 8 weeks old: