The deadline to register my students for the piano contest is tomorrow, so I’ve been working hard on getting everything in order. It took me a few hours yesterday (and a lot of double and triple checking things) but I’m finally done. I want to be careful that I enter everything correctly. I don’t want to have to break the bad news to one of my families that I accidentally registered them on the wrong day.
So this year I have 22 students signed up to participate in the state piano contest preliminaries. I’m excited–many of them are trying it out for the first time and I’m hopeful that they have a positive experience. I’m trying to remember how many signed up last year, and I’m thinking it was 12 or so, but I can’t remember exactly. And the funny part is that out of the 22 students, 17 of them signed up to go on Sunday afternoon which is the same time that I’ve volunteered to help out, so I should be able to see many of them. Contest is held at Bethel University, which is a bit of a haul for me, but you gotta do what you gotta do, right?
In other news, Tim wanted a chocolate cake today so I made a chocolate fudge cake from scratch. It sounds scrumptious, but it didn’t turn out very well (at least in my opinion). It took almost 4x longer to cook than it was supposed to–weird, huh? And it used unsweetened cocoa powder which left the cake a little bit bitter. Tim doesn’t mind it, but I’m not crazy about it–which is actually a good thing, so I’m not tempted to snack on it. 🙂
I learned something interesting yesterday about making cakes. If it is a cake where you have to beat butter with sugar, if you don’t beat it long enough, that causes it to not cook in the right amount of time – to stay rather raw in the middle. It is because there isn’t enough air incorporated with the batter during the beating of the butter and sugar. Could that have been the problem?