I’ve come to the conclusion that I will never have a free sick day: a day where all I ever have to worry about is sleeping and occasionally taking a quick break from sleeping to dose up on meds or get some nourishment.

No. Once you’ve become a housewife, you have no singular problems. You have multitask-able problems. You learn to be sick and do the things that are expected of you the best you can under the circumstances.

Sadly, I started getting ill Saturday morning. Worked al day Saturday and Sunday morning feeling like death. Then finally I went to the surgery Monday morning to see what was wrong with me. Nothing that antibiotics could fix, but I still felt dreadful enough to call in sick at work Monday afternoon. 

But even without an ACTUAL going-out-of-the-house job to worry about, I still found myself being the caretaker of my household and still working my housewife duties as normal.

Through having a swollen throat(to the point of having difficulty breathing), stuffy/running nose, cold sores, watering eyes, sneezing, persistent coughing, drowsiness from heavy medication, and to top it all of, period pains…..I have been:

1. Doing my fair share of dishes.

2. Cleaning up broken china from one of said dishes that had been dropped and broken because of my sheer half-assery of doing dishes while highly medicated.

3. Feeding/taking care of our 4 month old Kitten…including cleaning out it’s litter box, picking up after it, and cleaning up it’s puke after it had a little upset stomach, twice (which I’m beginning to realize this is how it’s going to be when I’m sick and have children to take care of).

4. Going to the supermarket, in the snow, to pick up highly needed items because the husband was at work and wouldn’t get home until after the shops shut.

5. (I’ve been…)Expected to make appearances in places because the hubby merely wants me there and doesn’t stop to think it’d be better for me to be at home resting than to make HIM feel better by being around him.

6. (I’ve been…) Asked to cook pancakes, because I’m the only one who knows how to make decent American style pancakes.

7. Doing my fair share of laundry.

8. And my personal favourite, and my reason for this blog(the thing I was doing when I came up with this little epiphany) ….Being the phantom shirt ironer.

This is the face of a girl who is sick, feels and looks like utter shite and continues to iron her husband’s work uniform because this is the way it is = not happy, but soldiering on.

When I was in college, being sick meant a friend would come over, bring you some DVDs and OJ, and sit there talking with you making sure you were okay and if you needed anything. I didn’t have to worry about anything but getting better and someone would always be there to help take care of me.

But now those days are over. As a housewife, i sympathize with all the other housewives/mums that have to still carry on with their day to day lives as best they can when they’re sick because their husbands/children don’t realize that being sick means someone gets to look after YOU for a change.

This post is brought to you by:

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This is “Cali”, the Cool California Calico Cat and Mascot for Cali Cat Cupcakes.

I just bought her from Build A Bear recently. So, when I do get the money to open up my own weeky market stall, She’ll be kepping me company and hopefully helping to sell those cupcakes.

In other news, I’ve perfected my Chocolate Cake recipe. I’ve always grown up having cakes made from those Betty Crocker Cake Box Mixes and I LOVE them, but somehow I couldn’t get my cakes anywhere close to that sort fo texture/consistency, So I sat down, read the ingredients in the Betty Crocker Mix, and compared them to my ingredients…did a little tweaking, tested the new recipes on my in-laws and Voila! …Perfected Chocolate Cake recipe that tastes better than the Betty Crocker version.  Success!

My first commissioned Cake–a gambler cake for a birthday. Made a grown man cry–it was that good.

  

After testing out a normal market day(back in June), I have decided that doing a weekly market would be great exposure for me to build my business and expand my clientel.

But there’s alot that goes into holding a stall on the weekly market in town. You must have/pay for:

– Table/Canopy/Stall. Cost: roughly £200
-The pitch; mandatory payment for the actually plot of ground you’re stall will be set up on, paid to the council every day you hold a market stall. Cost: £15/day
–Liability Insurance; mandatory for all stall holders. Cost: roughly £50/year

…and then there’s general costs for my type of stall…baking supplies, display cases for cupcakes, a mass capacity cupcake courier to transport good, etc.

I calculated that if I were to do a market one day a week for one year, I would need roughly around £2,000. …And as a broke housewife, £2,000 is not something I can easily afford. So, about a week or so ago I set up an Indiegogo acount.

http://igg.me/p/166060?a=841605

Indigogo is a kick starter sort of website that allows people to plead their case the the world wide web and offer people the chance to contribute to a cause, with possible rewards/incentives for donating to that cause.

Getting this money would help me immensely. It will give me that extra push to be able to go out and do some more marketing for my business, and let the people in Ross know that I am here and ready to bake wonderful things for them.

I’ve already had a few funders, but i still have a long way to go. If you feel so inclinded to give a little, i would appreciate it very much…and check out the perks that you can earn for donating!

This past Sunday has been the 1st anniversary of my husband’s and my wedding. We’ve offically been marrried 1 year, and been a couple for 3 years. A short time, but it’s been a great journey. People say that the first year is the hardest…and if this year has been hard, the years to come are going to be a breeze.

For our anniversary we went to a Seaside Welsh town called Mumbles. Beautiful place, and lovely company. 🙂 We exchanged presents before our actual anniversary. I got my husband the first 4 books in The “A Song of Fire and Ice” series(also known as Game of Thrones), and he got me a few things for my cupcake business.

First, he got me a ‘cupcake plunger’ which essencially is inserted into the middle of the cake, pulls out a chuck of cake so you can insert a filling then replace the top of the corked cake piece. 

And then he got me a cupcake tree, that holds about 2 dozen cupcakes. 🙂

As well as the presents, we found a few knick knacks in the shops of Mumbles that I can use as decorations for my future market stall days. I still have loads to figure out before then, but eventually I will have the means to do what I want…which is (for now) hold a weekly market stall for my cupcakes and other sweet treats. 🙂

Keep Calm and Eat Cupcakes Tea Mug and matching Tin.

And Various Cupcake/Baked Good Posters. Very American Style Prop. photos which I think will suit my stall:

 

I’m very excited to use all my new Cupcake things. 🙂

As a newly wed stranger in the UK, finding a job was not an easy task. Living off a part time job is almost as hard. The company I work for is a high street clothing store, and it is not without it’s fair share of crazy people.

Just today, I had a woman scream at me and blame me for her bad hearing or poor interpretation of what was actually said to her. Long story short, I said what I was supposed to, she got pissed off and called me a liar to my manager. ….Retail’s not all peaches and cream, but there’s something about being a young looking 22 year old that makes middle aged women think they’re in the right, even when they’re in the wrong, just because their age supersedes mine.

Even though I’m grateful for this job it’s still hard living off of 12 hours a week on minimum wage, when I’ve got bills and marriage-y things to pay for. So, because of this lack of abundant cash flow, I started my own baking business out of our flat in March. So far, I’ve done one huge fair in May and it wasn’t too successful because I was stationed in a bad position, in a town where people don’t know my name yet.

In small English towns, getting a business off the ground is like getting a good acting gig in LA….you need connections. Sure i can open up my own store on the high street, but no one would come in to buy anything because no one knows who I am. People are more likely to shop where they know someone, rather than try someplace new….which makes it very difficult for me to get my baking business off the ground.

Still I continue to put my name out there, pass out my business cards to people and local establishments, and sell a sample of what I can do at local fairs.

Tommorrow I am participating in another Market, where hopefully I will be positioned at a good stall location,and be able to generate more interest in the future. Because honestly…..if they knew how delicious these are, who wouldn’t want to buy them:

I’ve been baking for a while, leisurely, but this year I founded my own baking business, Cali Cat Cupcakes. I say business….it’s more like I make cupcakes and such and try to flog them to anyone who will buy them at local markets.

I’ve noticed that when I bake something for family/friends….there’s little to no time limit, I’m more relaxed and there’s no pressure to ‘succeed’. But, when I’m doing an ‘event’ or thinking about doing a recipe to look more professional or more unique, it…kind of goes to shit.

Tonight was a combination of the two. Tomorrow is my mother in law’s birthday so I decided to bake her a victoria sponge cake (minus the jam in the middle). I decided to use my own cake recipe, but doubled, and use my 2 round cake tins that I’ve never used before. Well, a combination of things went aray(batter too think, heat too low, tins not greased enough, etc) and when my cakes were finally done….it was near impossible to remove them from the tins. When I got them out they crumbled.

So…what’s a baker to do? You’re creation has been ruined. You have a deadline to finish this cake.  And you don’t feel like wasting the supplies to see this disaster happen again.

So, I think to myself, “How can I spin this wreak into a new creative treat for to showcase my baking abilities?” The answer….add liqour! And thus….Cake Shots were born:

A Happy little accident. Take the crumbled vanilla cake and shove it into a shot glass. Take regular butter cream icing and add Bailey’s Irish Cream in leu of the liquid in the recipe. Add a layer of bailey’s infused icing on top of the cake crumble mix and continue to add layers until shot glass(or pint glass, if you’re using the sharable version) is full. VOLIA! Crisis Averted!

“The Real Housewives are back, only this time….from Ross on Wye, England.”

 

My name is Jenny Vidler. I am A Real Housewife of Ross on Wye. I’m not as dumb and superficial as the housewives(or scousewives, if you’re from England) of New York, Orange County, or Atlanta, but I can be just as entertaining.

Let me clarify….I do NOT indulge in watching The Real Housewives of [INSERT LOCATION HERE]. In fact, as entertaining as it may be, most reality television I tend to avoid like the plauge. I find it difficult to watch people demean themselves on television just to get a good rating or to make some cash. Sometimes I wonder why the dumbest people appear on reality tv, and then I remember, ‘It’s beacuse most of them are not intellegent enough to see the how stupid tv makes them out to be. They are the producers’ puppets, here to dance for the masses.’ The happiness people get from watching reality tv is schadenfreude: happiness from the misfortune of others. But I’m getting ahead of myself….

The reason why I titled this blog The Real Housewives of Ross on Wye, is to offer an alternative to the show it satirizes. Step into the world of a real housewife, but a more intellegent one than you will find on tv.

In this blog I plan on sharing my thoughts, opinions, frustrations, anxieties, stories, anecdotes, etc about being a housewife, living abroad, baking/cooking, the differences between the US and the UK and anything and everything else that may be amusing along those lines.

If that’s something you’d like to hear, awesome. If not, I’m afraid you’re in the wrong place.