Just because you’re out of college and it’s the weekend doesn’t mean you have to be a complete bum. But just in case you were that bum this weekend, I guess I’ll share all my hard-earned knowledge with you so you can feel accomplished, too!

We went to a church barbecue this weekend, and I decided to make a cake, of course! (Bet you could have guessed that one). I saw the “ruffle” design in the May issue of Better Homes & Gardens, and thought I would give it a try. Weekend lesson #1: Better Homes and Gardens makes creating ruffles look a whole lot easier than it actually is. Their cake had “imperfectly perfect” cascading ruffles, and mine… well, mine was imperfectly imperfect. Ah well.

I’ll still call it a success just for my effort and for the fact that we didn’t bring home even one slice- it was devoured! It was actually a “pink lemonade”-flavored cake with my own homemade lemon buttercream. Mmm. Weekend lesson #2: Making up your own lemon buttercream recipe is actually pretty easy! I just used the standard formula for buttercream, plus lemon extract, plus lemon concentrate. So it ended up looking like this:

2 lbs confectioner’s sugar

1 cup butter

1 cup shortening

2 tsp lemon extract

2 TBSP lemon concentrate

Mix shortening and butter until creamy. Add the lemon extract. Add sugar slowly, constantly mixing. Add lemon concentrate and mix until smooth.

Weekend lesson #3 actually has nothing at all to do with this cake, and it almost seems gross to lump it together in the same post… But it is a hard fact of life and someone else out there might be yearning to know a solution to this problem.

One day, you might discover that your running/workout shoes smell.

Now, we ain’t talking about a smell like that nice new “fresh berries” air freshener I put in my living room. We’re talking about the wet-dog-who-rolled-in-a-pile-of-trash-dragging-in-a-dead-squirrel kind of smell.

Not saying that my shoes smelled that bad. I’m just saying that someone’s might.

Anyway, I figured out that pouring some baking soda in them (enough to cover the inside of the shoe, from toe to heel) and then pouring undiluted white vinegar on top of that and letting them sit overnight is MAGIC. In the morning, I threw them in the washer on cold, and they came out pretty much like new!

So there you go. You’re now one blog-post wiser. And if you can relate to that stinky dog smell… it might be time to give your best friend a bath! Just don’t use the same trick you used on your shoes.