Baking, Building and a Bit of History

This post features a bit of this, a bit of that and a little history too… I’ll start with baking, something that we rarely do.  The main reason we don’t usually bake is that we like fresh bakery items better than almost any other food.   In Laurie’s case, she would prefer lobster…but baked goods would be second.  At my stage and age, some baked items would overshadow a nice steak or most fried chicken…

Laurie spotted a recipe on-line that sounded amazing.  It was on Erin Napier’s Facebook Fan Page.  For the uninitiated, Erin and her husband Ben are the stars of HGTV’s ‘Hometown’ show.  It is one of our favorite HGTV shows, hands down… Check it out at Home Town | HGTV.

What you see in the Bundt pan above is in reality, a pound cake.  It had just come out of the oven and we were letting it cool down a bit before removing it and slicing it up.

The plan was that with enough Pam sprayed on the inside of the Bundt pan…then dusted with a bit of flour, the pound cake would just slide out after it was baked.  No such luck!  Having had this negative experience, and knowing that her sister Bonnie in Missouri was also in the process baking this same cake, Laurie called and suggested that more Pam spray should be applied.  The warning was in time and Bonnie’s cake was easily removed in one piece.

I knew I was in trouble when I began smelling the beguiling scent that was saturating the house as the cake neared completion.  I can’t remember any kitchen scents that have ever reached my computer room/man cave before.  It is about as far from the kitchen as possible…and it has its own HVAC system.  I hurriedly headed for the kitchen!  

My first warm slice of Miss Dot’s warm pound cake was amazing…warm, rich, and sweet, a bit dense…we both thought that it was just excellent.  Of course, as you can see from the recipe above, the rich and satisfying flavor and texture might have something to do with the fact that it contained 3 cups of sugar, 6 eggs, 3 sticks of butter and 8 oz. of cream cheese!  We’ll have to limit the production of this treat or we’ll have to buy larger clothing… As it was, Laurie took a large hunk of the cake over to our neighbor's house just to lighten the task ahead of us!

Moving on from food…here in East Tennessee new houses are still being built faster than I can count them or take photos of them.  Some builders are just overwhelmed, don’t have enough crews but others, like the contractor building this home about 3 blocks from us, really have their crews going flat out.  It is going up very quickly!

One of our neighbors who lives about a half block to the left of our home, (looking out our door), has begun the process of having a new home built for them…about a half block to the right of our home.  As they’ve aged, they wanted to move into a single story house and they wanted to stay in the same neighborhood.  Since this is clearly a seller’s market, they should do rather well with the sale of their old house.  We are sorry to see more trees disappearing though…

Another short street through the woods branches off our road just a house down and across from us.  When we first moved here, there weren’t any houses on this street…and it’s about 3 or 4 blocks long.  It was all woods and rocks.  In the last couple of years, 2 homes have been built along the street and 2 other lots have been cleared but they are sitting dormant…

Then we drove down the street the other day and discovered that the rocky hilly and heavily forested portion along the way had been breached!  Look at all the rock…boulders that had to be cleared to ready the lot.  There is even a rock ledge across the back!

While we are getting older ourselves and there are advantages to having more neighbors close by, we haven’t seen our flock of turkey for months now and deer sightings are increasingly rare.  Sad L!

The other day we had to visit the Loudon County Tennessee Courthouse and I’d remembered reading about a group that had been working on revitalizing an historic school in the town of Loudon.

The Rosenwald School had been a sad structure…very poorly cared for…the last time I’d stopped by a couple years ago.  It has been greatly improved and will survive as an important history lesson for the community.

Booker T. Washington of the Tuskegee Institute and Julius Rosenwald, philanthropist and President of Sears Roebuck built state-of-the art schools for African-American children across the southern USA.  Rosenwald provided the seed money and the communities raised the rest.  It was a critical initiative in the advancement of black education in the segregated early 20^th Century.  A total of 5,357 Rosenwald schools, some shops and a few teacher’s homes were built in 883 counties across 15 states.  By 1928, a third of the South’s rural black school children were served by these schools.  Today, just over 2,000 of these structures remain…

That’s all for now… Just click on any of the photos to enlarge them.

Thanks for stopping by for a visit!

Stay Safe and Take Care, Big Daddy Dave