Pumpkin cupcakes for two

I love pumpkin things and eat them all year, not just in the fall. I made pumpkin cupcakes from Dessert for Two.

I got lazy and didn't make the buttercream icing. I made a simple glaze for the top instead.

OH MY GOODNESS. These were so good and so easy. Dave liked them, too.

Dave: What's the name of that cookbook again?
Me: Dessert for Two.
Dave: It should be Dessert for Four or Six!
Me: Then it would be a regular cookbook.

Hahaha!

Devil's food cake for two

I made another chocolate cake from Dessert for Two.



This one was a devil's food cake, and it had two layers.



We didn't like this as much as the other one, but it was okay. The icing was a little too sweet for our taste, I think.



It's so nice to be able to make dessert that's sized for two!

More pandemic planting

We don't just have a well mound. We have a weird mound. There's a mound on the front lawn, and we don't know why it's there. At least, we didn't know before I did this. This was even more of a weedy mess than the well mound, but I forgot to take a before picture. The sellers had planted ornamental grass and a small bush there. I took them out in favor of native plants.



This has some of the same stuff as the other mound- bee balm, phlox, aster, purple coneflower, and amsonia. It also has coreopsis.



Oh, and I found out what's in the mound. See that empty spot? There's a tree stump buried there.

Mini Texas chocolate sheet cake

Chocolate cake! This was another recipe from Dessert for Two by Christine Lane.

This was fast and easy. It made a 6" chocolate cake with chocolate frosting.

The icing poured on like a ganache and thickened more as it cooled. You can see it's shiny and not like a buttercream. Anyway, it was tasty. It was even better the next day. So, I don't recommend eating almost the entire thing the night you make it and only having one piece each the next morning, like Dave and I did.

So far, this cookbook is two for two!

Pandemic planting

Time for more native plants! Our well mound was looking sad. Do you see the bit that looks cut off in the left of the photo? That's from Dave crashing into it with the mower. Haha!

Maybe I should back up a bit. We have well water, and the access cap has to be in a mound. I don't know why. I also don't know when we'd ever access the water that way, since it comes into the house underground via the pump.

Anyway, it gets a lot of sun and seemed like a great place to plant some stuff. So I dug everything up and added some soil before I started planting.

Tada! There's columbine, aster, bee balm, salvia, purple coneflower, crocosmia, phlox, and something else that blooms in the spring that I can't remember right now.

Our township turns yard waste into mulch and compost, which we can then take for free. People really make the most of it. Sometimes there are cars waiting to grab some from the piles. It's a cool program. I grabbed a bit to top off the mound.

Before I planted the stuff in the well mound, I put some aster with the coral honeysuckle.

It's wood's blue aster, a compact, native variety. This weekend I hope to start the next gardening project!

Coral honeysuckle

We had an unusually cold spring, and I've been itching to transform our property to be more bird, bee, and butterfly friendly with native plants. There's also a ton of landscape rock that I need to remove before I can replace some invasives with natives. The first project: coral honeysuckle!

Dave took this pic. Jedi is checking out the plants.

Hummingbirds are amazing. We've seen them randomly a couple of times in the yard since we got the house last year, and they've come to the hummingbird feeder a few times. But not enough! Haha. This plant is supposed to be great at attracting them, plus other pollinators. I got the "Major Wheeler" variety, which is native and is supposed to have more blooms. It also has berries that other birds may eat in the fall.

Tada!

I removed the sod, put down a little bit of new soil and compost, and planted the vines. Whew. With our rocky soil, this took much longer than I was expecting. It was getting dark when I was done. I hope they grow!!