Cake, Cake, and More Cake!

When I was growing up money was tight.  We ate our three meals a day and rarely had sweets or snacks.  Every year on my birthday I was allowed to choose what my mother would cook for dinner (almost always chicken nuggets).  This dinner was eaten on a special plate that said “today is your special day”, and that was a treat in itself.  The real treat happened after dinner however, when my mom would bust out the treasure we had all been waiting for.  Every year she made us angel food cake topped with this insanely gooey melt in your mouth boiled frosting.  The cake was spongy, light, and tasty, but the frosting, let’s just say I would give up a limb for that stuff.  Lucky for me, mom was always willing to make it, and she gave me her secret recipe. 

I believe that is where my obsession with cake started.  When I graduated high school, I did so with ambitions to become a world famous artist.  You can see how well that dream worked out for me.  I realized pretty quickly I would still be eating just one cake a year off of what I would make on my artistic abilities.  So I got a boring old office job and crammed my creative side into a box shoved to the dark recesses of the closet and happily ate cake whenever I wanted. 

Then came my daughters first birthday and the need for a pink bunny cake.  A tiny bit of my creativity somehow escaped the box and battled its way through the dark to create my little girls birthday wishes.  What I created was a monstrosity.  Something nightmares are made of.  All of my friends assured me it really did look like a bunny, not Satan’s spawn, and if nothing else it was delicious.  I was mortified.  How could someone who was an art major claim that thing?

That is really the beginning of Beth Al-Qudah’s Personalized Cakes.  From that moment I needed to prove myself.  I dug through that scary closet and ripped the rest of my creativity out of that box and got to work.  I redeemed myself with corn-cob cupcakes at a work potluck.   After that I spent a lot of time experimenting with fondant.  It generally won the battle, but finally I created a blue M&M wearing a diaper for a baby shower.  Success was mine!  I started offering to make cakes for everyone’s events and after the millionth birthday cake I made for my five year old niece (not exaggerating the numbers here) I decided to make myself a legitimate business. 

I can create nearly anything you desire.  Simply give me an idea and I can find a way to make it into a cake.  I have several favorite flavors, vanilla bean, double chocolate, reese peanut butter, pink lemonade, red velvet, and my own personal concoction neopolitan.  I make all my own cake batters and frostings so anything is possible.  Each cake is unique in its own way and completely personalized for to your tastes.

And of course, for those of you who would like a new addiction, I still have my mother’s secret boiled frosting recipe.

https://www.facebook.com/BethAlQudahPersonalizedCakes?ref=hl

A New Love In My Life!

Once upon a time I visited the Red Sea.  On this day I fell head over heels in love.  It was an all-consuming love, the kind that you will never forget and don’t want to ever let go.  It is the kind of feeling people chase their entire lives and often don’t have the pleasure of finding.  Me, I am lucky though because I found it, I lived it, and I will forever remember it.

I had been begging to go swimming in the sea since last summer when we visited Aqaba so my husband decided that we would go today.  We packed up the family, got in the cars, and headed to the beach.  When we arrived we were at the beach, but it wasn’t the beach.  It was a resort set on the beach with three swimming pools.  Swimming pools on the beach!  What?!  That was not part of my plan, so I broke away from the group with just my husband and three children and headed down to the actual beach. 

I had come prepared, or so I thought, and was determined to get in the sea and swim around.  I plunged into the water with complete disregard to my surroundings.  Went out to waist level and then looked down at the ground and discovered a whole new world at my feet.  I couldn’t believe it, there were about 20 brightly colored fish right there, I was practically stepping on them.  I am sure I stepped on some reef life on the way out here without even knowing it.  I got so excited I started waving and yelling frantically at my husband on the shore.  “You have to come out here and see this, it’s amazing!”  “Omg, look at that fish, it’s so cool.”  I ran back to the shore line and grabbed my daughter determined to share this awesome sight with someone.  We waded back out and I started to show her fish.  She wasn’t interested, not at my level. 

At this point I learned you can rent snorkel equipment.  So naturally I had to have the snorkel equipment.  My dutiful husband wandered up to the rental counter and purchased me a snorkel and mask.  Then the real kicker, offered to take the kids back to the pool and leave me all to my lonesome to explore the sea.  I seriously was so overjoyed at this moment in time. 

The excitement I felt above the water was nothing compared to that first moment I dipped my face underwater and spied the aquatic fantasy world that awaited me.  I was in complete and utter awe.  I began to swim around in crazy circles looking everywhere trying to take it all in at once.  I discovered every few feet was a whole new world.  There were so many colors and shapes.  Life was everywhere.  I would see fish that had a funny face and laugh out loud through the snorkel tube.  I got a little too excited a few times and ducked too far under only to suck down a heaping mouthful of salt water.  I reluctantly resurfaced choking and gasping for breath, to drain the tube and clear my goggles.

 

I spent an entire day swimming only about 20 feet off the shore.  Everywhere I turned was some super fantastic sight that I was sure had never been seen before.  With my head stuck under the water I couldn’t hear or be distracted by the world above.  I had entered a place of sheer peace and happiness. 

Even though my mouth was dry and the salt was slowly dissolving my skin, I couldn’t bear to part with this wonder I had found.  It was too magnificent.  I knew once I left the sea that day I wouldn’t make it back again this trip and so I selfishly swam until the sun was setting and I was developing sores from my bathing suit rubbing salt into my skin. 

As I wandered back to the pools, I did so with a grin that could not be disguised and heart so filled with happiness.  I knew in that moment I would forever love the Red Sea and I would never forget this special gift she gave me. 

I didn’t know it that day, but my wildest dreams were about to come true.  A few days later we actually went scuba diving in the sea!  I know I will never have enough of this special underwater world and I look forward to next summer when I will be reunited with my love, the Red Sea.  

A few pictures from my diving experience!

Justice for socks.

There it is. Right there, sticking its insane red head out and staring me down.  It looks like it owns the couch.  I mean I was going to sit over there but then I'd have to pick it up and I would probably feel obligated to lift all the cushions to check for more. I've been sitting here across the room staring at it in all its disgusting glory for about a half an hour now.  It’s that darn dirty mate to a sock I threw out last week.  I knew the other was here somewhere, but he was too much of a coward to show his face on laundry day. 

I have to tell you, I am getting so sick of these yellow bellied socks hiding all over the house.  I mean I even found one in the fridge once.  Those chicken livers will hide anywhere to get out of being cleaned.  I am fairly certain that with every load of laundry I do, at least 10 socks end up MIA.  Every single load, no exaggeration.  Since I do roughly three loads every day that makes about one billion socks a year gone missing. 

This is a major threat to sock society.  For every billion socks that go missing every year, there are another billion that are now jobless.  On top of being jobless, they also belong to a broken home and have deep seated psychological problems.  It saddens me greatly for those poor jobless socks. It’s not as if they could have done anything more to keep their mates from running off. 

In my opinion there is nothing worse than a sock who runs out on his spouse.  Leaving her to sit in a useless sock pile, dreaming of his return.  This usually comes to late as further humiliation occurs when her owner gives up hope of reuniting her with her love and dumps her in the trash bin. Personally I believe the cruelty of these socks who don't think twice about running off and leaving their mate is beyond unacceptable. We must band together and find these fugitive socks.  They must be held accountable for their callous actions. Laws must be declared and enforced with swift, strict punishment.  Something must be done immediately to stop this epidemic.

The first step to putting an end to this horrific injustice is to understand the underlying cause. Recent research suggests that the runaway socks do not have commitment issues, but rather suffer from a deep irrational fear of the washing machine.   "These runaways are not really criminals, they are in a way just as much victims as the mates they leave behind." states Ibrahim Al-Qudah. Mr. Al-Qudah, a specialized psychiatrist, has been counseling runaways in his clinic, Scared Socks, for upwards of thirty years now. He has been working diligently towards finding a solution for the problem.

I urge each of you to help us in this mission. We can no longer afford to overlook this catastrophe. The socks must be saved.  This madness must end.  My children must start putting their dirty socks in the laundry basket or I will go utterly and completely insane!  I mean, they really need to stop leaving dirty socks all over the house, I can’t take it anymore.