Soup

Today I'm making soup. No, not the kind that you eat. The kind that you write about when you have too many things on your brain and they don't tie together in one subject. You ever have soup in your brain?

So far this holiday season, two of the MAIN projects that I like to do every year have ended up disastrously. Okay, well, maybe that's too strong an adjective, but let's just say they have not turned out the way I wanted.

First my MaMa Kimball's Not Like a Fruitcake Fruitcake. I baked it last night. Now, let it be known that this isn't just any old fruitcake. This cake has none of the nastiness of other fruitcakes. In fact, it's full of only good stuff. And let it also be known that this cake recipe came from a farmer's wife who had the biggest, most prolific pecan tree known to man growing right in her front yard and a husband who had a sweet tooth bigger than the state of Texas. PaPa was a bad diabetic, and he L-O-V-E-D sweets. From syrup to chocolate, he didn't care as long as it was sweet.

So anyway. This cake isn't cheap to bake. It calls for EIGHT cups of pecans. That's right. EIGHT cups. Two pounds of candied fruit. A box of brown sugar. Two tablespoons of vanilla. One-and-a-half cup of coconut. Four eggs. And, of course, self-rising flour. Three cups.

I guess I should've had a premonition of how the cake was going to turn out because when I was mixing it all up, Jeff said why do you make fruitcake. Nobody likes fruitcake. I think he thought I did it just for the heck of it. I informed him that maybe nobody likes fruitcake, but they like the Not Like a Fruitcake Fruitcake. I like it. My kids like it. My mom and dad like it. But my biggest blunder was that I didn't look up to the heavens and dedicate my fruitcake to my sweet MaMa. It just slipped my mind.

Her recipe says to cook the cake for an hour and a half at 300 degrees. That's what I did. The buzzer went off and I took the cake out of the oven. Let it sit for almost an hour before I tried to turn it out of the pan. When I turned it out, only the top half of the cake hit the plate. The bottom half stayed stuck in the pan. It was mush. I was sick. So. I got Jeff to come help me put the top half of the cake back in the pan, stuck it back in the oven for another 30 minutes. Turned the oven off. And went to bed. By that point, I had decided that however it turned out, was the way it was going to be. I couldn't cry over a messed up fruitcake.

This morning I got up and went straight to the oven and took the cake out.
But now I'm too scared to try and get it out of the pan. It may stay in this pan forever.

My Christmas cards. I don't like them. I hate them. I want to spit on them. So if you don't get a Christmas card from the Kellys this year, don't wonder where it is. It just may not be coming.

Cam has a huge SAE project due this Friday. I mean huge, literally and figuratively. He's building a shed. With wood. And nails. And a saw. And when I say he, I really mean he and Jeff. And Jeff's brother Ronnie.

You would hope that a project this size would be worked on over a period of weeks, if not months. But noooooooo. Cam starts working on his Saturday. Five days before it's due in its entirety. Of course, all along the way he had to turn in bits and pieces of it. Like pictures that he made of some old wood in the basement that isn't even going to be part of the project. A blueprint that he made that ended up being altered BIG TIME. You know, you gotta make it look like a lot is going on with it. Ugh.

And best of all, now I'm going to have a homemade by a 17-year-old shed in my backyard. I bet my neighbors will love me more than ever now.

Well, that's my soup for the day. I hope it was your favorite kind and that you didn't burn your tongue reading it.

Till next time.