T-Mobile Mom to Mom Quiz

So, technically, I'm not a mom yet. But I guess it couldn't hurt to find out what kind of mom I will be, right?

T-Mobile Mom to Mom Quiz: "

Take the fun, Mom to Mom quiz and discover your parenting style.

"

Living room

Some people have asked me for some new pictures of my house. So here is one of the most finished rooms of the house: the living room.
First: view from the kitchen. Never mind the coats hanging over the chair: we don't have a coat rack yet..

Lots of light! We have a lot of windows, which I totally love. Almost all of them are double glazed, so they're energy efficient too.

The piano that my grandfather gave me for my wedding (it used to be his).

Turned around (the piano behind me). Note the nosy kitty.

Nosy kitty is also a lazy kitty.

Thank You Cake

A friend of my mother's gave me nine tomato plants for my garden. Every year, since I started gardening, he has given me plants. The first year there were two, last year five and this year nine! He never wants anything in return, and it's always hard to think of something to thank him. This year I decided to bake him a cake. Well, it's really a banana nut bread recipe, but I left out the nuts. And this recipe turns out more like a cake than a bread, so I renamed it Thank You Cake. I found the recipe on allrecipes.com but I changed it a little.

Nicolien's Thank You Cake
100 g white sugar
100 g brown sugar
100 g butter
1-1/2 eggs (I use one big egg and 1 one little egg)
170 g mashed bananas (about two little bananas)
100 g cake flour
100 g wheat flour
150 ml buttermilk
3 g baking soda
3 g baking powder
3 ml vanilla extract
30 g chopped walnuts (this time I used chocolate chips instead of nuts)

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
2. Cream together butter and sugar. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Mix in bananas, buttermilk, and vanilla. Mix in flour, baking powder, and soda. Stir in chocolate chips or nuts if desired. Pour batter into a greased 9x5 inch pan.
3. Bake for 50 to 60 minutes in the preheated oven, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the loaf comes out clean.

This makes a really moist, crumbly cake. I've baked it several times and everybody who has tried it, loved it. Of course, people over here don't know banana nut bread so they have nothing to compare it to..

Kitchen chicks

New addition to our household: the first two chicks that hatched! One was born yesterday, the other one today. As far as I know the chickens are still brooding on four or five more eggs, but it's hard to see. For some reason my chickens always brood in pairs: they co-parent the eggs and later the babies. That's fine with me, but the only problem is that when you lift one chicken up to see how many eggs are underneath her, the other chicken hurries up and covers the eggs with her feathers (and warmth). I'll have to be patient and let them surprise me.

I brought the chicks in the house to have them pose for me. Isn't it funny how the brown chick is almost twice the size of the yellow one? They're different kinds of chickens, that's easy to see.