Birthdays and Bread

Last Sunday we celebrated Peyton and Shane's birthdays. Actually, Shane's birthday was on Monday and Peyton's was on Tuesday. But we knew that during the week it would be hard to get all of us together and have the time to celebrate. So, I bought the only cake mix I could find that had directions I could read and made them a small cake. Since only four of us would be eating it, that was a good thing. Peyton got to blow out the candles. The cake wasn't big enough to hold all of the candles we would need to put on it for Shane. :) So here is a photo of the cake....Here is Peyton getting ready to blow out the candles. (Gracie is still working on finishing her salad so that she can have a piece of the cake.)
Here is the younger birthday boy. He just couldn't wait to get to those gifts!
He's getting into all the new pieces of his construction set.
Gracie was lucky enough to get some little gifts too(thanks to friends and family at home!) She was very thankful for this. :)
Later in the week, I decided to finally try to make some bread. We have been looking for a bread-maker, but haven't been sucessful in finding one. So, between classes one day, I just decided to "go for it". I got it all going and went back to class, leaving the dough to rise. I got to my class and said something about having dough stuck to my hands. I was telling my class about making the bread and looking for a bread machine. One of my little younger girl students asked me, "How do you make bread?" I told her about putting the ingredients in and as I was listing them, I realized that even though I knew I needed to put salt in, I had forgotten to do so. Ooops!
So when I got back, I ended up having to put salt in and knead it again. This caused me to have to let it rise again, and it made the texture a little different. I also had to leave it too long, because I didn't get a chance to come back for some time. Anyway, on top of that, I discovered that I didn't have a bread pan. So...I ended up putting them in the form of rolls and baked them. They turned out really good. Our oven is very small, and I have one small baking sheet 'pan'. So, after the rolls were done, I put what was left in this "french bread" shape. I decided to take a photo. It's not very pretty. The rolls looked better, but they all got eaten up before I could take a photo. It turned out very tasty. I decided that I want to keep making it. It would be easier with a bread maker, but it didn't take that long. Now I can't find a bread pan anywhere. I guess we will just be eating it in the form of rolls and french bread. So here's my funny looking loaf...