Dogs and Oven Usage

This is Leo. I'm babysitting (dogsitting?) him for my friend while she's in Oklahoma for a week. I am his regular babysitter whenever she goes out of town, so Leo is used to me & my family's house. All right, so that's a bit of an understatement: the dog loves me. He follows me EVERYWHERE. He won't even go to bed until I do. Good thing he's so cute and sweet or else I'd find this extremely annoying. (I'm a cat person and usually don't warm up to dogs too much, but Leo and Fred [my family's dog] are some of the few exceptions.)

In other news...after hanging out at a friend's house all day, watching chick flicks and getting majorly owned at Batman Monopoly (seriously, I mortgaged all of my properties and still went bankrupt...) I went home to the beginnings of rain! ♥

Rain and clouds are my favorite type of weather, probably due to the fact that I don't see them more than a handful of days each year. So I was very cheerful this evening and decided to do some baking (since no one was available to go to the Cheescake Factory & devour overpriced-yet-delicious cheesecake with me). After some thought I settled on a recipe for Oatmeal Chocolate Chip cookies from my trusty Nestle cookbook. I tweaked it a bit (they never add enough cinnamon in their recipes...and there's no such thing as too much cinnamon!) and they turned out pretty good. Want to see?

They taste better than they look, really.

And since I'm on the topic of baking...for Mother's Day a couple weeks ago I decided at the last minute to make breakfast in bed for my mom, and I found a recipe for blueberry buckle (basically coffee cake w/ blueberries in it) online. I had never made coffee cake from scratch before; I'd always relied on the Bisquik box recipe (which is never quite sweet enough for my taste), so I was excited to try this recipe out. Well, let me tell you, it was AMAZINGly delicious. There's nothing like fresh blueberries to spruce up a recipe.

I ate it for breakfast for the next few days...I think I ate more of it than anyone else, hehe...

Beautiful.

...And that is that.

Oh, by the way, I've a sad confession to make: I just now, after over a year of having this blog, realized that I don't have to use the html view when writing my blog post. ¬_¬;; Speak of this to no one...