I don't remember if the orange walls were my idea or his but I do remember that his bedroom even then reflected his many interests: science, model airplanes, Lego masterpieces, hermit crabs and guinea pigs. At two he was taking apart his robots and putting them together again.
Did he love orange or did I, which is a possibility as I still do. Here's a current picture of his old bedroom found on Zillow showing that the original Armstrong flooring I chose is still there on the floor over 50 years later. This was not a flat printed pattern; you could run your finger around each raised embossed circle.
He grew up to be my next-door neighbor at Valley View for sixteen years and repaired and mended anything I needed fixing and came down the hill for coffee almost every morning. You better believe I miss that!
Today his interests are still many and varied, from collecting and repairing vintage classic radios to his own geiger counter virtual museum channel on YouTube. Instead of hermit crabs, a passel of Chihuahuas share the home.
Every year for his birthday he asked for a Hershey Bar Cake, a dense chocolate cake that needs no icing other than a little powdered sugar.
The recipe is here, straight from Hershey land itself.
For some reason I made the cake this summer for him instead of waiting until his birthday and he came and picked it up.
This time I used a tube pan instead of my bundt pan.
Here's a family trivia note, over the years I collected vintage Hershey cocoa tins and one year I received a Hershey Christmas house from my dear neighbors that proudly was displayed each Christmas. When RH and I downsized and moved, we passed on all my Christmas houses to various family members and naturally all my Hershey collection went to my neighbors. We just don't have room for my Christmas villages here at Home Hill but I still miss arranging all of them.
When my firstborn's birthday came up this fall I wasn't in the mood to make another Hershey Bar Cake so I asked him what I could fix instead and the request was for Chicken Tetrazzini. I forgot to take a picture but I always make at least two from my old Southern Sideboard cookbook when I make it so here's a picture from another time.
And then the following week I decided I just had to bake some kind of cake for my boy and made a fall favorite, Mrs. Collins' Sweet Potato Cake from an old newspaper recipe. He generously shared half the cake with me and his dad.
No link for the delicious recipe but here's a picture of the recipe. I used my favorite Greek olive oil instead of the vegetable oil it called for and liked it even better.
I have to admit that even though the orange floor in our firstborn's bedroom remained through the years, the orange walls did not. I'll close by showing a picture of its change when he was a few years older.
It probably fitted in more with the current style then but looking back at it now it doesn't seem nearly as much fun as those orange walls.
That boy though? Now he and our daughter-in-law have grandchildren themselves and he still scores two F's.
Fun and Fascinating!
