No Tosca

I was told that there was a typo in the recipe by one of my friendly commenters and I looked it up and was shocked to see that the whole blog was messed up. I worked for hours trying to give it in columns. I don't know how to make columns the proper way so I did it my way and the computer objected to my way of doing it. In the first column I had the three separate parts of the recipe with the ingredients and the amounts of same. In the adjoining column I had directions on how to handle the ingredients. And so on. It was a master stroke of genius to do it that way, and I think you would have agreed with me if my computer had not jumbled everything. I wish I could remove the whole thing and let the world live without Tosca. For I think I will never try it again.

When I last posted my blog, I was talking about Laguna Beach. We did manage to rent a house in Emerald Bay. We made great friends right from the beginning. There were tennis courts and there were scads of tennis players and we spent a lot of time there. Eventually our new son-in-law was hired as a recreational director while he was finishing college at University of California at Long Beach. Our daughter and he had been an item wile they were at university of California at Davis. He and Anna were married in Emerald Bay and it was the most fun wedding. I asked Anna what kind of wedding she wanted and she said 'sort of like Fiddler on the Roof'. I said we could not afford the Fiddler they had in the movie, but otherwise we would try to resemble the movie.

We got permission to close off the short street we lived on so we could have a street dance. That meant we had to invite all the people who lived on our street. Luckily it was a short one. Steve had chosen one of his college friends as best man. He was related to the Hoosier Hotshots who used to play (live and on the radio) from Crazy Water Hotel in Mineral Wells, Texas. They agreed to come to play for the street dance. Steve had learned to know the two little five year olds who lived on our street, who were little trouble makers, so he deputized them and gave them a each a to wear.

College friends and very good friends of ours were invited to the wedding, performed by our very good friend Judge Bruce Sumner in our backyard. Steve's family were staying in the house next to ours. A little house hardly ever used by the owners who lived in Pasadena. Steve's parents and three brothers and one or two in-laws of his stayed there. We used their drive way to set up the table for wedding cake and coffee and later, pizza and beer. The Hotshots played in the driveway across the street. And the dance stretched between these houses.

I asked Anna what kind of cake she wanted. She said: Carrot cake. I said she could have carrot cake but it had to be frosted with white icing. I also told her we could not have a many tiered cake, for carrot cake is too heavy for that. She agreed we could have many white cakes. So we filled the freezer with square ones, and round ones, and heart shaped ones, and rectangular ones and they stayed frozen until the day before the wedding. Then I put my mother's Hardanger embroidered wedding sheets on a redwood picnic table in our garage. Anna and I frosted the cakes while they were hard. Next morning the mother of one of my tennis pals came to decorate the cakes and they became truly elegant looking.

The wedding was one of the most fun events. The dancing went on into the wee hours, The little deputies did a good job. Everything was peaceful and they even danced with people old enough to be their grandmothers. Anna and Steve left for their honeymoon in Palm Beach.