Now that I’m working again, we end up packing a pretty ridiculous amount of stuff into our weekends. This weekend was no exception. We went to the Durham farmers market, had a nice lunch outside on the patio at Tyler’s, went to Wake Forest for a birthday dinner and celebration for my dad, did a couple grocery/general shopping runs, got Griff his first professional haircut, stopped for post-haircut frozen yogurt, and tried to go for a walk around West Point on the Eno (except we parked, turned around, and found Griff completely passed out in his carseat, over an hour before he was “supposed” to be napping). Also, I made my first batch of homemade doughnuts, and started knitting a sweater for Griff. No wonder we’re so treaking fired. 😉

Some photo highlights of the weekend:

Griff climbing on the turtle at Durham Central Park.

I have to show some photos of this inexcusable cake wreck we special-ordered from the N Durham Harris Teeter, which has the most incompetent bakery staff of any Harris Teeter in the Triangle. This is a special order cake, this is not a cake being sold at a deep discount over in the scratch and dent section of the bakery cooler. Griff and Sean were waiting in the car when I ran in to pick it up, so I just glanced at it and headed out. Once we got home and looked at it, it became obvious that the cake was severely sloped and a half inch shorter on one corner than the other, there were gobs of crumbs/cake showing through the icing at the back, and whatever alcoholic had scrawled the message on the cake had put it in “frigging quotes”.

I was too embarrassed to give this piece of crap to my poor Dad, so I called Robin and begged her to pick up another cake at a real Harris Teeter in Raleigh.

See? Perfectly level.

My dad put Griff to work on sweeping the porch right away.

We made my Dad blow out the minimum required number of candles (3).

We all enjoyed the cake, but Griff enjoyed it on a different level.

If he grows up and grows a black Hitler mustache and a beard that resembles that Wooly-Willy guy who you add a beard to with a magnet and iron filiings, this is what he’ll look like.

And on to the doughnuts. I made pumpkin spice doughnuts using this recipe adapted from one at Epicurious. When she says this is a sticky dough, believe it. It was a real pain to work with and it stuck to everything in sight, which was really annoying when cutting it out and trying to move it from place to place. Luckily, doughnut dough doesn’t mind being worked over and reshaped a lot. I used my largest and smallest biscuit cutters to cut the doughnuts. It took a little fiddling to figure out the right burner setting to keep the oil from losing too much heat after the dough was added, but otherwise, this was a messy and time-consuming but not very difficult project.

The dough really puffs up, so don’t make the doughnuts overly thick. If they’re too thick they’ll take longer to cook through, and you’ll risk burning the outsides.

I found that a fondue fork was perfect for flipping the doughnuts over and fishing them out. I used a metal barbeque spatula for the holes. The holes really needed to be kept spinning in the oil to cook evenly.

I rolled the doughnuts in cinnamon/nutmeg sugar. They were deeeeelicious. This recipe makes an absolute ton of doughnuts, and we have a lot of leftovers. If they’re still decent tomorrow we’ll have them for breakfast again. Next time I’ll halve the recipe.

And on to the knitting. I’m knitting this sweater (Ravelry link) out of brown Plymouth Galway and the squooshy 3-ply handspun that I made from the FatCatKnits Polwarth fiber. This pattern is perfect for small amounts of handspun, and I think the colors are going to be fantastic together.

Last but not least, Griff’s haircut. Sean and I have been finding it increasingly tricky to trim Griff’s hair, and the last haircut I gave him was so bad it made me want to put a paper bag over his head. He was starting down the toddler mullet path and it was driving us both insane every time we looked at him.

Sean found a place called “Peek-a-Do” (yeah, yeah, shut up) near Southpoint and we decided to give it a try. It went very well. The stylist was really good with Griff and he was totally enthralled with the toys she gave him to play with (there was a DVD of “Cars” playing also, which he totally ignored). In fact, he was so enthralled with the toys that he had to be dragged out of the salon kicking and screaming! Yay toddlerhood!