Ezra's birthday was yesterday, June 1st. He turned seventeen years old. We had a big party at our house after church, with delicious snacks and food! We all played a game called Bang. It was so much fun!!
All of our siblings came except Gideon, who lives in Alabama. Some other friends also came. Caleb and Risa brought their baby, Benjamin. He's so cute and growing up so fast! He was always smiling at someone, and he is almost seven months old.🩷
Ezra got a sailboat for his birthday! He's been wanting one, and so we all pitched in and now he has one. I also got him nice tennis shoes since he plays a lot of pickleball and has needed a new pair.
Here are some pics and vids I took of him on the sailboat. It's pretty cool! Noelle also tried getting a cool pic of me on the kayak.
We went to our lake ( which is about five minutes away ) to sail the boat. It was windy enough, too. We all sang Happy Birthday super loudly over the lake to Ezra while he was sailing the boat. He totally loved it. Even random people heard us and told Ezra Happy Birthday. 😂
My dad, Sophie, and I will be going to France in August to visit our grandparents! We will stay for about two weeks. The first week will be Sophie, my dad, and I, and then my mom will join us the second week because she is going to her mom's birthday party in Florida. That's why she isn't coming with us in the first week.
Sophie is getting a passport for the first time. I had one, but it expired, so I must get a new one. We already took the pictures and paperwork for it, and will have our passports done soon!
I've never been on a big plane, only ridden on a four-person plane, so I'm excited about going!
My goal while I'm there is to get a lovely French dress and little trinkets and to see all the cool architecture. What I don't like, tho, is that France, I think, has a nine-hour time difference. So if I want to text any of my friends, it would be at completely different times.
I also don't know any French and haven't been learning it since I've been learning Spanish. But my grandma knows a lot of Spanish, which is super nice! So she's fluent in three different types of languages. English, French, and Spanish.
Anyway, I can't wait to go! I'll definitely write a whole blog post about it and include lots of pictures. 😊
The performance went great! Sophie and I had so much fun being in choir this semester. We made lots of friends, especially Sophie. I'm already sad that it ended. Everything passed so quickly! But I can't wait for next semester, which will be the Christmas one. I might try out for solos then, since I didn't try out for any this semester. I'm so glad I didn't try out this semester because my allergies have been so bad that it's been hard to sing well. But maybe next semester. It's just that I get so nervous right before singing that my voice gets shaky, and I sing in the wrong key. Plus, my brain will go blank at the last second. ☹️ I can sing fine when I'm by myself or when people are singing with me, though. It's just facing the crowd that's scary.
Anyway, the performance went great! My favorite part was when a group of choir people performed an instrumental song called " I'll Fly Away." That's my favorite song, so I was so happy they did that! One of the guys did a banjo solo that sounded amazing. In the ensemble, there was one banjoist, two guitarists, one mandolinist, and two violinists.
Sophie is in the Junior choir, which is the darker blue shirt. She is in the middle row, last person on the far right.
I am in the Senior choir, wearing black shirts with blue lettering. If you go from top to bottom, I am in the second row from the top, in the second to last on the far right, if that makes sense.
I am a pickleball fan, and so, of course, I go looking up how it all began. 😉 I found an interesting video, and so I took notes, and this is what I got out of it:
Barney McCallum was a man who lived on Bainbridge Island in 1965. He had a neighbor/friend named Joel Prichard. He and Joel worked together in an envelope business and were great friends. Joel was a politician and a congressman of the United States.
One day, when the men came back from playing golf, their kids were bored, giving the adults a hard time. So Joel and some other men picked up a wooden paddle and a plastic baseball and headed to a badminton court with the kids. They wanted to show the kids how to be creative, going back and forth to create a game. From there, adults started taking over the game. Barney realized that ping pong paddles wouldn't work since they would break, so he had to create some other sort of paddle. He went to his band saw and first sketched out three different versions of a paddle. Then he cut it out of wood. And there he had his first wooden paddle made.
It wasn't exactly a game yet. So the adults made up rules as they went along. The scoring part was a big argument. They had tried doing tennis, badminton, ping pong, etc. Eventually, the scoring system was developed.
Dick Brown, one of the men, would always run up to the net and spike the ball aggressively. His height was 6 feet 4 inches. And the badminton serve line was 6 feet 6 inches. So the men decided he would have to stand behind the badminton serve line to spike it in the air. And that's what we call now in the game of pickleball, the kitchen.
Joel would go to the net and put it as high as his waist, which was 36 inches. They did it like that so they would know if anyone messed up the net.
Since Joel was a congressman of the United States, he would play pickleball at one of his political events. That's mostly how pickleball came to life. Joel would get people to play, and after a while, everybody wanted pickleball paddles. So Barney had to keep making paddles for people and make it into a business.
Years and years later, pickleball is super popular!
There's so much more I haven't mentioned in this blog post that I got out of the video. But you can go watch it for yourself! It's worth it, trust me.
Have you ever wondered why bakers use all-purpose flour rather than cake flour when baking? I sometimes wonder, and that's why today's blog post is about the difference between cake flour and all-purpose flour.
I was recently looking for a cake to make for our church's potluck this Sunday, and I couldn't figure out what flavor to do since I didn't want to do vanilla or chocolate. For the last potluck, I made a lemon cake. But this time, I wanted to do a flavor I hadn't done yet, so I chose a strawberry cake with strawberry frosting.
In the ingredients list, it called for cake flour. So I did research, and this is why people will sometimes use cake flour rather than all-purpose flour:
If you want a lighter texture, you would use cake flour since cake flour has less gluten and protein, which causes the cake to be more delicate and spongy. It also has a lighter color than all-purpose flour and is ground finely using soft wheat. You would use cake flour for pastries, cakes, or whatever baked goods you want to have a soft, delicate, light, or spongy texture. The downside is that if you're planning to have a lot of frosting or filling, the cake is liable to crumble or fall apart since it's so delicate and soft.
You would use all-purpose flour if you want a stronger, grittier texture that will hold up well. Since all-purpose flour is ground together from hard and soft wheat, it has more protein and gluten, which causes the texture to be stronger and will hold up well under weight. So, if you want to put lots of frosting, filling, or any heavy weight on your cakes, it will hold up better than if you had used cake flour. Just depends on what texture you like better.
I watched a video of a lady baking two cakes, one using all-purpose flour and the other with cake flour, just to see the difference. The cake made with cake flour seemed lighter in color than the cake made with all-purpose flour. She tried each of them and said the cake made with cake flour tasted so light, airy, and the texture was like a pillow. Then she tasted the cake made with all-purpose flour, which had a grittier and firmer texture. She said she liked the all-purpose flour cake better because she's so used to its texture.
You can use either one. It's really up to your personal preference.
Here is the video of the lady who baked the two cakes:
