Over, Under, and Through

One of the things I had really wanted to do this summer was to ride through the Stewart Tunnel on the Badger State Trail.  Early on we had planned a camping trip to nearby Yellowstone Lake State Park, thinking that on one day we'd make the short drive over to New Glarus and do the tunnel.  But then that camping trip fell through and I was thinking I may not get to go through the tunnel after all.  But then an opportunity opened up and it was back on.  Happy Day!

In Wisconsin there are a number of abandon railroad tracks that have been converted to recreational trails.  You can walk, run, or ride bikes on these trails but no motorized vehicles.  Not cars, trucks, motorcycles, ATVs or anything else with a motor. Horses are not even allowed on most of them, either.  Because these trails run on old train tracks, with the tracks removed and a regular trail surface installed and maintained, they have some nice features, too.  I've ridden on a few of them now and found that where they pass through hills and valleys they have leveled out the track by cutting into hills and raising up the valleys so they are, as a general rule, pretty level.  For my kind of biking that's pretty nice.  The trail surface tends to be hard packed dirt, chipped gravel, or limestone,or some combination of those, with occasional sections paved for short distances.  But for the most part they are not paved.  Some walking trails will be surfaced with wood chips or some other, soft material but these state trails usually aren't that, which is a good thing. That makes for slower going.  And if it rains they become almost impassable for a day or two until they dry out.

Anyway, on the Badger State Trail there is the Stewart Tunnel, a few miles south of Belleville, WI.  It was completed in 1887 and is a quarter mile long, 21 feet high and 14 feet wide.  And its curved out in the middle so you can't see one end from the other. At the time was built it was a bit of a marvel.  They began from each end and met out in the middle in almost a perfect match.  One end was off an inch and the other about 3/4 an inch, near perfection.

I did some studying on Goggle Maps to plan a route that would take me through the tunnel.  I ended up mapping out a triangle. Because the Badger State Trail intersects the Sugar River State Trail near Monticello, WI I could do both trails.  So the plan was to start in New Glarus and go to the Badger State trail just above the tunnel.  Then I'd go down the Badger State Trial, through the tunnel and hit the Sugar River Trail, and then go up back to New Glarus.  That would put two sides of the triangle on state trails and one side on surface streets to get from New Glarus to the Badger State Trial just above the tunnel.

So I mapped it out and Goggle Maps said the elevation changes looked like this.

That spike was toward the end of the surface street section.  And it said the elevation gain from low point to high point was only 233 feet.  How bad can that be?  I ride around here and have gains of 70-100 feet all the time.  233 isn't that much more right?  And the whole triangle would only be 15 or 16 miles long.  Not bad at all, right?

So as the appointed day began to get close I started watching the weather, hoping it wouldn't rain.  I was in luck; on the day of the ride the weather was near perfect.  So I did a few things at the house before lunch and set out for New Glarus.  I got to the trail-head and noticed the parking lot was pretty full.  Nice day, lots of people on the trail.  Makes sense.  I have an annual trial pass so I can ride any state trail I want without having to put anything in the day box. I'm not sure anyone ever stops people on the trail to check for passes anyway.  I've never seen anyone out doing that.  Anyway, I pulled my bike out of the car, put all my gear on, hopped on my bike, and took off down the trail.

It started out real nice, the trail slopped gently downward, away from New Glarus.  In studying it out on the map ahead of time I had seen that I could save myself a lot of hills if I just went down the trail a mile or so before turning off onto the street.  So that's what I did.  Then at first, the streets weren't too bad but that didn't last long.  I expected the hills to start in the fourth or fifth mile and they did with a vengeance.  I learned pretty quick that 233 feet of gain is pretty serious.  And, if you'll notice on the graph, it wasn't just one hill and done.  I ended up walking up three hills, some of them pretty long.  I figured the speed for this first third of the trip was going to be really bad.  Ah, well.  You do what you have to do.  So I kept at it until I finally hit the Badger State Trail and from that point on it was pretty level. I was really, really glad to be done with those hills.

It was almost a surprise how quickly I got to the tunnel.  It didn't look like what I was expecting.  All the pictures I had seen were of the south entrance and I was coming at it from the north.  So suddenly I realized that what I had at first thought was some real dense overhanging trees was actually the entrance to the tunnel.

I had bought a 300 lumens light for this tunnel.  I had heard how utterly dark it can be in these tunnels and this was the longest one in the state.  I had a little 35 lumen light but I already knew from all the evenings I had ridden around home as the sun set that it wasn't going to do much against the darkness of one of these tunnels.  So I stopped, took the picture, turned on my light, and also turned on my movie camera to film my ride through the tunnel.  Then I started through.

Alas, everything worked perfectly except the camera.  My movie didn't turn out. I guess I still need to work on figuring out how to turn it on and off.  I had even taken it on a ride the day before and played with it in the morning, trying to be ready for this ride.  But I can't see the view finder very well while on the bike so I couldn't tell if it was working at the time.  Besides, the floor of the tunnel was not as smooth and even a surface as the rest of the trail, plus there were puddles of water that had dripped from the ceiling and I was too busy focusing on the path immediately in front of me to notice whether or not the camera was working.  But my light worked!  And I was very glad I had the stronger light - even with 300 lumens it was still pretty dim going through all that darkness.  But the 1,200 feet went pretty quick and pretty soon there was light at the end of the tunnel and then I was out.  Just a little down the trail from the tunnel was a koisk and bench with information about the trail.

So I continued on down the trail.  I stuff I had read about the Badger State Trail said there were quite a few little bridges along the way.  I came to the first pretty quick after the tunnel.  The bridges are numbered but the counting began from the south end of the trail so this first bridge I came to was bridge 23.  Most of the bridges were over marshy wetland areas.

The area along this part of the Badger State Trail was wooded, pretty heavy in some area, more open in others.  Some agriculture going on in the area, but not always.

I knew there was a bridge just before the intersection with the Sugar River Trail but I didn't know which bridge, or how many I'd have to cross before I got there.

But pretty soon I came to the Sugar River so I knew I was getting close.

Then, something unexpected.  A trestle.  I hadn't seen that on the map.  As I went under it I tried to figure out what kind of bridge it was.  It was to big to be a foot path, too small to be a train track, but it didn't really look like much of a road either.  After I got back I went back to the map to see and found there was a road called Pratt Road that at one time came in from the west, through a bunch of trees and went on to intersect with Marshall Bluff Road.  But on the map its no longer shown as a through street.  Must have been a train crossing at one time.  Apparently its no longer maintained.

Anyway, just after the old Pratt Road crossing I came to the intersection I'd been watching for.  And it wasn't much of an intersection, either.  More like just a clearing between the two trails, which were only about 20 yards apart at that point.  But not much of a trial surface.  As it is, the two trails don't actually intersect until quite a ways on down, almost a mile farther than I wanted to go. It would  have added almost two miles to go that far and back so I cut through the clearing to the Sugar River State Trail and headed north, back toward New Glarus.  And, sure enough, went under the old Pratt Road trestle again.

The Sugar River trail also  has a number of bridges but the area is more open and more developed into agriculture.  And it cuts through the Edleweiss Chalet Country Club so for a little while it felt like I was riding through a golf course.  I could see golfers out on either side of the trail as I went by.  Interesting.

The nice thing about the Sugar River tail was that being more open there were fewer bugs.  Back in all the trees every time I'd stop the mosquitoes would would come out of everywhere and I'd want to get moving again.

All in all, both trails were very pretty, it was quite a scenic ride.

Finally I was getting back to the part of the Sugar River trail I had begun on.  All in all, I think I crossed twelve of these little bridges on the whole trip. What I thought was interesting was that down the center of every single bridge the wood was very worn. So much so that it looked like the wood had eroded down away from the screws holding the boards to the bridge.  But only down the center of the bridge.  Made me wonder how that came to be.

In the end, even in spite of having walked up those hills on the first part of the trip, my average speed was still nine miles an hour.  I was pretty surprised.  I think, because of the work I had done at home in the morning, all the hills I ran into on the first third of the trip, and the long, gradual rise of the trail that last third of the trip, this turned out to be one of the hardest rides I've done since I started riding my bike a couple of years ago.  It reminded me very much of the 24 mile ride I took last year, even though this ride ended up being only 15.4 miles lone.  I knew there was an ice cream place there at the trail head and the thought of a nice bowl of ice cream was my motivation to finish the ride.  That, plus I had no other choice.  I couldn't very well just quit out there on the trail.  So when I got back to my car I stuck my bike and stuff in and walked across the parking lot and enjoyed a nice dish of ice cream.

Then, because I had seen that scattered around New Glarus were some fifteen statues of cows, I went looking for as many as I could find.  I drove this part.  And I only found nine of them.  Oh, well.

So, all in all, it was a successful trip, except for maybe the part where my camera failed to get the trip through the tunnel.  But it was a good trip, a good ride, and a good day. And I was able to cross the Stewart Tunnel off my list of places to go.  Now I'll have to pick another place!

All About Puzzels

On a recent visit to Heilebeere's home I had the opportunity to be instructed in the fine art of puzzle assembly by a young man who appeared to be very proficient.  He volunteered the instruction and being one always looking to expand my horizons, I took him up on his kind offer.

First, he got all the pieces out and made a pile of them in the work area.  That worked well for the particular puzzle we were using, the pieces where pretty big.  I'm not sure how well it would work with a 1,000 piece puzzle but for today's purpose it worked quite well.

Then, after checking out several different pieces, he selected an edge piece to begin with.  I was encouraged by that as that's normally how I also begin a new puzzle.

We stopped often as he put the pieces together to discuss this aspect or that nuance of puzzle assembly.  It was actually quite interesting to listen to him explain what he was doing as he went along.

He was very good to carefully consider and answer most of my questions as we went along.  Only once or twice did he look at me like I was crazy when I asked a question.  In those cases I didn't press for an answer - I didn't want him to give up on me as hopeless and cut the demonstration short.

He was very good to explain what he was doing at each step of the way.  I learned that corners are very important and, while they can be saved until late in the assembly, they shouldn't be left until the very last.

At last the puzzle was complete.  We were then able to discuss the picture the completed puzzle made and talk about the details of the illustration.  This was a marvelous puzzle.

And then, what do you do with the finished puzzle?  Well, you dance on it.  Of course!  All in all, a very enjoyable and educational experience with my grandson.  Gotta love him!

An Old Fashion Toy

The other day I was helping Brombeere do some cleaning at work.  We were cleaning out a closet that hadn't been cleaned that thoroughly for quite some time when we came across an item the likes of which I haven't seen for years and years.

We used to call them "tops".  What was amazing was that both pieces were there and in good shape!  The top and the string.  These were all the rage when I was in middle school - everybody had one.  Teachers were always taking them away from kids because they were disrupting class.  During lunch there were always several them going in the halls around the school building.

Of course I had to try it out and see if I could still make one work.  You take the string and wind it around the bottom of the top.  Yeah, backwards, I know.  But that's how it was done.  Well, maybe it was just a matter of winding the string and then holding it upside down to start.

So you get it all wound up and hold it with the end of the string between your fingers.  They always had something there to help it stay in place. This one had a big letter "H", which, while a bit cumbersome, still worked.  It served the purpose.

Then you stepped back to where you had a little room to give it a throw and let it go.  It would unwind as you tossed it to the floor and that would give the top its spin.  So while Brombeere continued to work, I had to play for a few minutes.  I was trying to get a good spin on it and get a movie of it at the same time. And I did but it wouldn't upload to the blog.  Disappointing.  But it sure looked cool to me!   And she let me keep it!

Cooking with a New Toy

A while back I was looking at some recipes and learned of a gadget called a "spiralizer".  This caught my attention, it looked fun.  Basically, it was a way to prepare vegetables for salad or other dishes, including making "noodles" of them to replace regular pasta noodles.  Now that sounded interesting to me because there are some pasta dishes I really like but I don't like the calories that go along with regular pasta.  So I made a note and did some additional research.  I looked into recipes that use a spiralizer, to see how much variety was out there.  Also to see what a spiralizer costs and, of the several different designs out there, which one might work best.  Finally, after several months, I bought one.  And a few weeks later, I got it out to use.

We had made regular spaghetti and had lots of left-over sauce so I decided to spiralize a butternut squash to use for the noodles.  I really like butternut squash anyway so I figured it would be a good item to try for the first time.  At the store I found what looked like the perfect squash, long neck and very little bulb, since you really can't run the bulb through the spiralizer.

I also had a recipe for spiralizing a butternut squash into "noodles".  So I started by cutting off the bulb end and peeling the squash,  That turned out to be easier than I expected.

Then I cut what was left into manageable pieces and got ready to go at it.

It took a little playing around, I also ended up finding a YouTube video demonstrating the use of my particular brand of spiralizer to figure out how to put the pieces together and make it work.

Then I got to work.  It really didn't take that long, nor was it all that hard to turn the whole squash into a nice bowl of noodles, ready to go.

Almost looks like a mountain of grated cheese.  And, for that matter, you can grate cheese with my spiralizer.  Or carrots, or zucchini, or cucumbers, or all kinds of other stuff.  But that's a different recipe.

Then it was time to spread the noodles out on a baking sheet, drizzle a little melted butter over them and pop them in the oven for a few minutes to cook.

For each piece of squash I was left with a "coin" of squash that wouldn't go through the spiralizer so I just cooked them, along with the bulb end, and ate it regular.  Yum, yum!

After they came out of the oven the whole lot had cooked down a little bit but now it was ready to go on the table.

Top it off with the spaghetti sauce and it turned out pretty good!  A little different than regular spaghetti but a whole lot less calories.  And still quite yummy.  And filling, as well. We'll have to try this new toy with some other vegetable, too, to see what we can come up with.  I also bought some sweet potatoes at the same time I was buying the butternut squash so they will probably be part of the next experiment.  And you could also spiralize stuff to put on salad, too.  All kinds of possibilities.  I think I like my new toy!

A Close Call

Hope you can stand a little more "family history".  I was gathering up some stuff this afternoon to put away in a more permanent place when I came across this postcard I sent home from my mission.  The story behind this card is kind of funny the way it turned out but it came close to being sort of tragic.

As my mission drew to a close I was packing and getting all ready to leave my last city.  Although no one actually said it would happen, I had just kind of figured all along that the mission office, or maybe the church in Sale Lake City, would send my parents the information about when I was getting home and all that jazz.  It seemed so obvious to me that I hadn't said anything to them even though I had known for a couple of weeks by that time.  But then, as we were walking out the door so I could head to the train station, I thought maybe I ought to send my parents something with my arrival time, just in case.  I wasn't sure, however, that at this point, it would even get there in time.  Our apartment was on the fourth floor of a building on the main market square several blocks from the center of town.  On the ground floor was a stationary store.  One that sold office supplies and all kinds of that stuff.  As we got down the stairs and walked passed the office supply store I said to my companion I wanted to stop quick and buy a post card.  So we did and then headed for the train station.

On the front of the postcard was a picture of the train station we were headed to, a place I was already very familiar with after eight months in that city.  Once we got there I wrote a quick note on the back side with my arrival time.  At the station was a post office so we went in, bought the postage, and put it in the mail.  Then I got on the train and left my last city.

That was in the morning.  I traveled to the mission office and got there in the early afternoon.  Then I spent the day getting a final interview with my mission president, making sure all my papers and ticket were in order, having dinner, and waiting around while the three or four other missionaries that were traveling home with me also got their final interviews and checked out.  We spent the night in a motel there in town and early the next morning we all hopped on a plane headed for London, New York, and home.

When we landed in New York, back on American soil for the first time in nearly two years, we each bought a fudgesicle because it had been nearly two years since any of us had one - you couldn't get them in Germany, at least not in the British sector where I had spent my mission.  Then it was catch another plane and on Chicago and to home.

As the postcard said, my plane landed at about 8:35 pm on what felt to me like two days after I had sent it, though I'm sure that I crossed enough time zones coming home that it was actually longer. And there was my family, my immediate family plus several members of my extended family, all smiling and happy to see me after two years gone.  It was a very good reunion.  On the way home my Dad told me that earlier in the afternoon, as he had been coming home from work, he had stopped to get the mail at the post office and there was my postcard, the only notice they had received of when I was arriving home.  So he hustled home and grabbed everybody from there, got word to a few aunts, uncles, and cousins, and headed almost immediately for the airport to be able to be there in time to meet my flight.  I came that close to not having anyone there at the airport to greet me when I got home.  That would really have been something.  Maybe that little postcard had some help making the trip in record time.  Who knows!

Love Notes

So I'm going through another of the boxes of stuff my Mom and Dad left and I came across these little bits of paper.  So I open them up to see what they are.  My Mom had left notes here and there as she had gone through some of this stuff after my Dad had died.  She had tried to make sense of some of it but it was a pretty big job.  Anyway , I figured it was another of her little notes as she tried to get this organized.  But, not so!  It was four little bits of paper that were notes they had passed back and forth, probably during the time just before they were married.  Three of them were short little notes, mushy, sentimental stuff - I'll spare you.  But one of them made me smile, chuckle, actually.  It was funny and would have been fun to be "a fly on the wall", as they say, watching.

It reads:
Dad: This is another example of taking up time on a program and saying nothing.

Mom: I can't concentrate 'cause you're tickling me.

Dad: He's not very interesting anyway.

Really makes me wonder what they were sitting though.  A bit of a different picture from what I saw as I was growing up.

A Pioneer Recipe

Grandma, 1965

An on-going project I am currently in the middle of is converting a bunch of family history stuff to digital format, which makes it easier to preserve and share.  So here recently I have been converting some cassette tape recordings my grandmother, my Mom's Mom, made of her life's history.  She was older when she did this.  She just sat with a tape recorder and reminisced about her childhood, growing up, going to school, how she got started on the violin, getting married, having kids, and so on.  She did five tapes, somewhere around five and a half hours of her soft, sweet voice relating all these memories from her life.  She even sang little bits of a few songs she remembered from her younger years. The wonderful things is that she did it.  The sad part is that she was not too careful to let the recorder get started before she began dictating, or other little details that would have made the quality of the recordings just a little bit better.  So there are gaps here and there, the sounds get a bit muffled from time to time, and here and there are background noises, although that's not always a bad thing.  Its just the sounds of life happening around her. I have only done three of the five tapes so far but its been real interesting.  My converter is such that I have to play the tapes as it captures the sound.  Then, when I'm done, I save it as a "wav" file.  Some really interesting stuff here.

My grandma was raised in a small, rural town.  She was born only about 40 years after the first settlers came to the area.  Her family home was one of the first to be built as families began moving out of the fort that originally was built to protect the new settlers. Later, as things began to be more settled, people began moving farther out from the fort and other small communities began to be established.  Grandma's family had some property about 40 miles from the family home where they often spent much of the summers.  They ran sheep and kept them at the summer place for the most part.  Free range sheep, I guess they'd be called now-days.  She spoke of going up to the cabin each spring and what they had to do to reclaim it from the vermin that had taken over during the winter.

Grandma, 1907

But I digress.  Anyway, as I was listening to tape two, Grandma began talking about a treat her mother used to make, one she remembered from when she was a small child, one that I'd guess she grew up with and made many times herself because she knew the recipe well enough that she included it in her history.  She said, after all, that she really liked it. Unfortunately, she didn't give it as a detailed recipe, she only mentioned the ingredients in passing, only giving the quantities of some of the ingredients, but not all.  As I listened to her talk about it for the few minutes she spent on it, it suddenly dawned on me that she was giving enough detail that I might actually be able to make the stuff.

So here's what she said:

"And there were gooseberries. And the gooseberries, of course, were the first fruit that came on that could be used in the spring and when mother baked gooseberry cake that was a real treat for us.  We'd go out and pick the gooseberries before they were ripe, when they were still quite green just barely getting ready to look like gooseberries because we couldn't wait for some kind of fruit.  And we'd pick them, at least a couple of cups she would want.  We'd bring them down and she'd make an old fashion cream cake and put the gooseberries in it.  The cake was made with - it didn't matter what measurement you used.  One measurement of sugar, one measurement of cream, and then enough flour with baking powder and so forth in it to make a good cake dough, just a regular kind of cake dough.  And the gooseberries were stirred into it just as it was put in the oven. And some vanilla was usually added.  And that was the best cake mother could ever make for us.  After it was cooked it was cut in squares and the squares set out in bowls for us and what was called "dip" was poured over it.  Dip was made from milk and vanilla and lemons and sugar to make it sweet.  And that was poured over the cake and you ate it like a pudding.  It was delicious, all of us enjoyed those cakes very much."

Now I'm not a stellar chef, but I can find my way around our kitchen so I began to figure out how I would make the stuff, how to fill in the gaps.  I have to admit that at one point it made me think of the movie Jurassic Park, how they used frog DNA to fill in the gaps missing from the dinosaur DNA they extracted from the mosquitoes embedded in the amber.  Fortunately, I knew that if I messed up the worst that would happen would be a poor tasting cake.  Nobody's life would be at stake.  Anyway, the other problem was gooseberries.  Not really the season for gooseberries right now.  I'm not 100% sure I'd be able to find any around here in the summer, much less late winter.  I ended up ordering some.  A little pricey and I ended up having to buy more than I needed for one cake.  But I really wanted to try this so I got them.

While I was waiting for my gooseberries to arrive I also spent time looking online for similar recipes, recipes that sounded similar to what Grandma had described, to see if I could fill in some of the gaps.  So by the time the gooseberries arrived I knew what else I was going to use and had it all ready to go.  The last step was to write it all out, like a regular recipe, because I'm that kind of cook - I like to have a recipe.

When I was ready to bake the cake I gathered all the ingredients together.  Gooseberries are smaller than I imagined.  Yes, I must confess that I don't remember ever having seen gooseberries before.  From the pictures I'd seen of them I thought they would be grape sized.

So anyway, I got the pan all greased and floured, and got the oven set to warm up.  Then I started tossing stuff in the bowl.  Grandma had said to add flour until you had enough to "to make a good cake dough, just a regular kind of cake dough." So I was trying to remember what normal cake batter looked like.  The last cake I made was for my son about five months ago. I did the cake but everything after that was a community effort.  Well, I had a very good helper and I was pretty much the supervisor.  Turned out pretty good.  That was a from scratch cake so I was trying to remember what the batter had looked like, since that isn't normally something you pay a lot of attention to, as long as it doesn't look terribly out of the ordinary.  So I added the flour and until it looked good to me, which ended up being just short of a cup.

Then it was ready to go in the oven.  Since Grandma said "the gooseberries were stirred into it just as it was put in the oven" I gently folded them into the batter at that point.

Then I turned the batter into the pan and slid it into the oven.  Of course I had to lick the spatula.  That wasn't too bad, though it was a little sweeter than the last cake I made.  But as an early indicator of how it was going to turn out, it was promising.

The recipe I had found that seemed most similar to what Grandma described said to cook it for 35 minutes so that's what I set the timer for.

While the cake was baking I made the Dip so it would be ready when the cake was done.  Grandma hadn't really said whether or not to zest the lemon but the recipe I was sorta patterning all this after said to so I did.  Grandma also hadn't said anything about portions for the sauce so I was using something along the lines of the pattern recipe for that, too.

I also squeezed all the lemon juice out of the lemon and put all of that in, too.  I was a little worried it might turn out to be too lemony but in the end it was okay.

When the timer went off I checked the cake.  I poked a knife into it and it came out clean but the cake still looked a little under done to me so I gave it an additional five minutes before pulling it out of the oven.  It sure smelled good.  And it looked pretty yummy, too.

I gave it a few minutes to cool and then was going to take the cake out of the pan but decided that might not work too well.  It looked done enough but it just didn't look like a normal, solid cake.  Grandma had described eating it in a bowl with the sauce, like a pudding.  I decided that might be the better choice so I cut a piece, put it in a bowl, and poured the dip on it.  It turned to to be pretty good!  I would call it a success!

So here's the recipe for the cake and sauce as I made it.

Cake
1 cup sugar
1 cup heavy whipping cream
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
4/5 cup flour
1 teaspoon vanilla
15 oz gooseberries

Sauce
grated zest and juice of 1 lemon
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Directions
Preheat oven to 350, grease and flour a 9.5" inch pan
Combine ingredients in the order listed, except the gooseberries.  Stir until smooth.
Gently fold in the gooseberries, then pour the mixture into the pan and place in the oven.
Bake for 40 minutes or until a knife inserted into the cake comes out clean.
Mix all the sauce ingredients and stir until smooth.
To serve, place a piece of cake in a bowl and pour the sauce over the cake.

Not too complicated, if I do say so myself,  Now here's what I'll change when I bake this in the future.

• I'd increase all the ingredients so that there it makes more cake. That may require additional cooking time.  It seemed to me that the final cake was pretty thin.  While that's not entirely bad, I just thought it ought to have been thicker.  No good reason, it just seems that way to me.
• I'd leave out the lemon zest and cut back a little on the lemon juice.  I like my flavors a little on the strong side but the lemon flavor was a little stronger than it needed to be.
• Grandma hadn't really said anything at all about the portions for the sauce so I was guessing on whether we'd end up with too little, too much, or just right.  We ended up with sauce left over when the cake was gone.  So maybe the whole sauce recipe could be cut by a third.
• If you'll remember, Grandma had said vanilla, whereas I would try it with almond extract.  That's just personal preference.  I like the flavor of almond better than vanilla.

It is also my plan to check with the local berry farm once summer rolls around to see if they have gooseberries.  If they do I am for sure trying this again with fresh gooseberries.  It'd be interesting to see how that affects the flavor.  My pattern recipe said the gooseberries needed to be "topped and tailed" but coming from a can, I didn't have to worry about that this time.

Grandma, 1933

From a family history perspective, I think it's cool that Grandma gave enough detail in her description of this favorite treat that I was able to "reconstruct" it.  I'm not sure I ever had it growing up.  And I certainly don't remember it ever being a tradition or even talked about.  There was another traditional favorite that Grandma did make.  She called them Easter Lillies and made them for Easter all the time.  We knew that if we ever had an Easter dinner or any kind of get-together at Easter time at Grandma's house there would be Easter Lillies.  And they were really good.  She was a remarkable woman, but that's a whole 'nother story.