I think my favorite rainy day song is Norah Jones’s Don’t Know Why.  Everytime I hear it I just think of raindrops falling from a tin roof (don’t ask me why I chose tin, I’m not sure myself, but just go with it) and dripping down to a puddle outside connected to a small stream trickling down the sidewalk.  And the “I” in the song…well, she’s inside watching this and thinking of someone, life, etc.  But mostly thinking of that someone she let go of in the song.  Her heart is drenched in wine, but he’ll be on her mind forever…

Oh the morning musings of…well, me.

When I woke up this morning, one by one, thoughts of today’s brunch with my friend and the cooking and baking I need to do started trickling into mind, much like the raindrops I talk about previously.  I started composing the list of things to get from the grocery, still debating in my mind what I’m going to finally do.  And here and there thoughts of the 50th birthday cake I’ll be making try to jump in like antsy little children, vying for their mother’s attention.  You see, the difficulty in making a cake is not so much in the baking, but in the decorating.  I toyed with the idea of making a fondant ribbon to place on top of the cake and piping a small fondant “gift card” with the “Happy Birthday!” message and placing it next to the ribbon.  And as I typed that last sentence, an idea popped into my head to pipe little white dots all over the cake itself to make a pattern.  All well and good, but can I pull it off?  Well, one way to find out…

As for the cooking and baking that have happened this weekend already, on Friday I finally tried making that pasta dish I was talking about in a previous post.  It’s a pasta dish with butter, scrambled eggs, garlic and parsley.  Since then I’ve managed to recall the restaurant in West Hollywood that serves this dish and it’s Hugo’s, and again, the dish is called “Pasta Mama” on their menu.  I put my own spin on it by adding bacon and sundried tomatoes.  My test subject enjoyed the dish and said that it was pretty good.  Having never worked with fresh pasta (I used Buitoni’s linguine) before, I wasn’t sure what difference it would make to use fresh pasta, but as it turns out it was much better than the dried pasta I normally go with.  There wasn’t a specific recipe that I followed when making the dish.  I figured I would just throw in the ingredients mentioned plus some of my own and season it all to taste.  I used fresh parmesan cheese that I grated myself — next time I think I’ll add more of this.  The sundried tomatoes really gave it a nicely subtle tangy kick.  It was pretty easy to make, except a little messy due to my very tiny kitchen.  But things don’t always go like clockwork especially when you make a dish for the first time.