I ate ice cream three times today, but I also ran for 16 minutes this morning (Couch to 5k Week 5!). I'm hoping the two balance each other out. They were small scoops of ice cream, at least.

You see, I've been doing some baking with rhubarb lately, and rhubarb and vanilla ice cream go so nicely together. There was the rhubarb cake I told you about last time, and then I made Strawberry-Rhubarb Cobbler with our next batch of farmers' market rhubarb. It turned out very nicely, though it wasn't as good as the blackberry cobbler we had a while ago.

I reserved a little bit of rhubarb so that I could make a Pig's Bum, a rhubarb steamed pudding that I had seen in Nigella Lawson's How to Eat a few years ago. I loved the name and the idea of a pretty pink rhubarb cake. This was my first time making a steamed pudding, but luckily I had everything I needed to create a makeshift pudding bowl. Based on other pictures I've found, I think it turned out how it was supposed to, except that it wasn't at all pink, which was kind of disappointing. The recipe said that it should be served with custard, but I served it with melted ice cream, which I figured was close enough for my American palate.

I have mixed feelings about how it turned out. It's a dense and simple cake and strangely comforting to eat, but it's also kind of boring. I can think of a lot of other cakes I'd rather be eating. Maybe if I had eaten steamed puddings in my childhood, I would be more excited about it. Plenty of other people are!

Unrelated to rhubarb and ice cream, for a recent playoff get-together I baked a batch of cream cheese brownies, which I decorated with the Blazers logo. Those are some good brownies, let me tell you, especially if you eat them chilled. So fudgy!

We have been making progress in our garden (raised beds are ready, and seeds are going in!), but I'll save that for a future post. Instead, here are some pictures of flowers from around our garden and neighborhood.

Our crabapple made it through the winter and is blooming!

Our tulips are nearing their end, but we enjoyed them greatly while they were around (there are lots more in the front yard). Also, Patches says hi!

Our backyard is ringed with bluebells. From far away, I don't find them as exciting as some of the other spring flowers, but I think they're pretty close up.

Our neighborhood is full of dogwoods in bloom right now. This one is a few blocks from our house. During the winter, I noticed trees with pale purple pods and thought they looked interesting, but I didn't know that they were dogwoods until spring came. So pretty!

And here's Patrick standing next to a cool fence sign that I like. We walk by it almost every week on our way to trivia.

P.S. After 6 months, the ladybugs appear to have left our house. All through the winter, we'd find them crawling on our bathroom ceiling or hiding in the medicine cabinet. It was a little unsettling. Patrick freed many of them with his ladybug-catching apparatus (composed of an empty pudding container and a business card). Some of the stragglers were starting to get mossy, so it was probably about time for them to get some fresh air.

Maybe we can seal our stairwell window a little better this fall so we don't have to share the bathroom with ladybugs again. Of course, the window is over 100 years old, so a few gaps are to be expected.