A Real Bargain

161 Crawford Road
Downingtown, PA

This is our former home in Downingtown, PA.  It is located in East Brandywine Township, four miles outside of Downingtown, on 6.875 acres of a wooded hillside.  Bill and I brought the land in 1976 and had the house custom built to our specifications in 1980.  In the twenty-five years we lived there we added many additions, like the sun room (see picture above), brick terrace, and extensive landscaping and three ponds filled with goldfish.

Because I couldn't keep up with the ever increasing Pennsylvania school taxes and the other county taxes which were rising at the rate of 20 to 25% a year, I put the house up for sale in January of 2006 for $695,000.  Four days later I had an offer of $640,000 which I laughed at and refused much to my later regret because this was the beginning of the downtown of the housing market.

I eventually sold the house for $500,000 in November of 2006 and moved to our newly built house here in Delaware (where I am typing this blog from).

The new owners of our old home (a couple from Florida with two young daughters) bought our house at the great bargain of $500,000 and promptly refinanced it for $567,000, thus netting a tidy profit. I had sold the house for less than its value just to stop the pain of carrying two mortgages.

The new owner upgraded the house by putting in a new master bath and finished off the room above the garage for a home office.

For whatever reason, he could no longer keep up the monthly mortgage payment (I think there was a family discord but I don't know that for sure), so he simply abandoned the property in early 2009.  The property has been sitting vacant for almost two years now.

All of my lovingly planted shrubbery was left to grow and grow.  The ponds fell into stagnation.  I don't even want to think what happened to all the happy fish who used to reproduce in those ponds.  That was one of my problems, what to do with all the fish I was producing.

Last August the house went into foreclosure.  It was auctioned off.  I don't know who the new owners are but I do know they have been trying to sell it for the past six months.  They are selling it "as is."  Well, let me tell you the "as is" just means the grounds were let go.  No leaves were raked, no branches picked up, no shrubs trimmed.  The inside of the house is just as solid as we left it, even more so because I put in many upgrades, including $4,700 for all new top of the line granite counter tops in the kitchen (what was I thinking)?

The past few months Bill and I have been watching the price of our former paradise (which Bill still loves) go down and down.  Here is the latest price:

Folks,                         THIS IS A BARGAIN!

 $379,900?  ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

If I had the money (which I don't) I would buy this in a snap!  I'm playing the lottery.  Maybe lightening will strike and I'll win the BIG BUCKS!  Then I would make Bill's dream come true, he could go back home to the place he has never stopped loving.  

Bill sitting on the terrace he built late August 2006, a few months before we moved to Delaware

Buttermilk Chocolate Cake Recipe

Since I could hardly reach the kitchen counter, I always liked to cook. My Mother taught me how to make chocolate chip cookies at Christmastime. When I was only seven years old, I could whip up a batch of peanut butter cookies as good as Mom's. My Mother wasn't necessarily a good cook (sorry Mom) but she could make wonderful old fashion drop biscuits. I've never been able to match her skills biscuit making but I have surpassed her in most other areas of cooking food. Not that I'm a gourmet cook, I'm far from that. But I do have my favorite dishes that I prefer to anyone else's.

I remember so well how disappointed I was when I entered high school in 1954 and I wasn't allowed to take the Home Economics class. Remember this was back in the Eisenhower Fifties when boys were boys and girls were girls and never the twain should meet. What a shame. My first date, Bonnie, wanted to take shop and she wasn't allowed either because shop was for boys only just as "Home Ec" for the girls only. Thank goodness that way of thinking has changed (I assume it has anyway, I don't know for sure.)

I didn't start experimenting with cooking again until I moved in with my life partner Bill back in March of 1965. Since then I've tried all kinds of recipes. Some successful and some not so successful. Again, I'm not a gourmet cook but I do like to cook good food that taste good. My test of a good recipe is one that keeps you coming back for more.

In January of 2006 I put my house in Pennsylvania up for sale. I contracted to have a new house built in Delaware, confident that I would sell my Pennsylvania house in no time. How wrong I was. This was right at the beginning of the housing bust. For seven long months I carried two mortgages at a cost of $3,998 a month. I almost lost my new house to foreclosure. Through a bit of luck and taking on a new 30 year mortgage (which will be paid off when I'm 95 years old!), I sold my house in Pennsylvania and now live in my wonderful new home in Sussex County, Delaware near the Delaware Bay and Atlantic Ocean (2 miles east of where I live the waves roll in daily.) From January 2006 until just last week I had lost just about all interest in cooking. That is how traumatic the house selling and relocation to Delaware was to me. This experience for me was the worst thing next to a terminal illness . It was so traumatic for me that I couldn't even write about it in my blog. I may never write about it except the little snippets of information that I just wrote about in this paragraph.

But last week I felt like life was returning to normal for me. I have a renewed interest in cooking again. I've cooked cakes over the past two years but they were the prepackaged box cakes like Duncan Hines. While good, they aren't the same as homemade. Last week I wanted a good chocolate cake. A homemade, from scratch chocolate cake. A cake made with cake flour, not all purpose flour. A cake in which the ingredients are at room temperature, not cold straight out of the refrigerator. I saw this recipe for Buttermilk Chocolate Cake on the side of the Swans Down Cake Flour box. It looked like a major effort. Not quite as convenient as a box cake in which you just add oil, water and eggs. This one would require many bowls, scrappers, measuring cups, and pans. I took one the challenge. It was well worth it. The finished chocolate cake was the best I have ever had in my life and I made it. I froze some, gave some to my good neighbor and promptly made two more (so I would have enough before the weather got too hot to use the oven.) Below is my Buttermilk Chocolate Cake Recipe. It is not my original recipe but rather from the box of Swans Down Cake Flour. You make this cake and you may not go back to any other chocolate cake recipe. It certainly far surpasses any box cake.

Deluxe Devil's Food Cake

Preparation time: 45 minutes
Bake time: 30 minutes

Crisco No-Stick Cooking Spray with Flour
2 cups sugar
1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened
1 teaspoon clear vanilla
3/4 teaspoon almond extract
2 large eggs
2 1/2 cups Softasilk Cake Flour
1 cup Dutch-processed cocoa powder (alkalized) or unsweetened coca powder
2 teaspoons baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 1/4 cup buttermilk

Butter cream Frosting

1 1/4 cup (2 1/12 sticks), butter, room temperature
2 teaspoons clear vanilla
1 teaspoon almond extract 8-9 tablespoons milk
7 1/2 cups (2 pounds) powdered sugar

HEAT: oven to 350F. Spray three 9-inch round cake pans generously with no-stick cooking spray with flour.

BEAT: sugar, 1 cup butter, 1 teaspoon clear vanilla and 3/4 teaspoon almond extract in large bowl with electric mixer on medium speed until light and fluffy. Beat in eggs, one at a time. Mix cake flour, cocoa powder, baking soda and salt; beat into creamed mixture alternately with buttermilk on medium speed. Beat 1 minute longer. Pour into prepared pans.

BAKE: 26 to 30 minutes or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool 15 minutes; remove from pans to wire rack. Cool completely.

BEAT: 1 1/4 cups butter, 2 teaspoons clear vanilla and 1 teaspoon almond extracts in a medium bowl at medium speed until creamy. Gradually add milk and powdered sugar, scraping bowl as needed. Bet on high speed adding additional milk by the tablespoon until desired spreading consistency is achieved. Brush any loose crumbs from cooled layers. Place first layer, rounded side down, on plate. Spread with Butter cream Frosting to within 1/4 inch of edge. Level off top of second layer. Top with second layer, topside down. Sp;read with frosting. Top with third layer, top side up. Coat side of cake with thin layer of frosting to seal in crumbs. Frost side and top of cake. If desired, draw cake comb through frosting to make decorative designs and top with shaved chocolate curls. Refrigerate cake to set the frosting; allow cake to stand at room temperature 10 minutes before serving.
Makes 16 servings.

The buttermilk gives the cake a nice old fashion chocolate flavor. Enjoy!

Since then I had a hankering for that wonderful carrot cake I had at Cracker Barrel last year. I looked up the recipe on the Internet, made it and here is what is left after one day. Bill is crazy over carrot cake. My neighbor Bob Murphy loves it. My good friend Bob McCamley says it is his favorite cake. I love it. I'm back cooking again and I love it. Future postings will feature my one and only chicken salad recipe. One think I want to make clear to anyone who is thinking that I'm a gourmet cook. I am not. I don't cook seafood, lamb, or veal. I just like to cook food that taste good. I cook mostly chicken and some beef. I love to cook vegetables and I make the best mashed (we called them "squashed") potatoes around. Cooking is another relaxing past time I have in addition to my genealogy research, taking digital pictures, and posting to my blog and personal journal. This is what I do in my retirement and I love it.

Wild Ride

How about that stock market this week? Talk about a wild ride! Hopefully the free fall of the stock market is at an end with the promise of the emergency infusion of funds from the Federal government to save some companies that are too big to fail. My fear is that the worst is not over. I would like to think that we have hit the bottom but I think that is wishful thinking. I watched what few shares of stock that I have sink almost 50% in two days. So here in my lifetime I have seen my IRA value drop by over 90% during the bursting of the Internet Bubble of 2001. Then two years ago I got caught in the beginning of the Housing Market Bubble and was trapped into paying two mortgages for almost a year. I finally sold my house for a lot less than I had planned and as a result I now have a mortgage that will be paid off when I'm 95 years old. That's one reason I'm still working, to earn enough money to pay my monthly mortgage. That's not the only reason I'm working during my retirement. I enjoy my job working at a local small boutique hotel. My coworkers are interesting and fun to work with, and I enjoy meeting new people. But the wild ride of the market this week brought back to me how tenuous my security is. The terrorists have tried to bring this country down by ramming airplanes in the twin towers of the World Trade Center. However, the deregulation of Wall Street may have achieved what the terrorists couldn't achieve, bringing this country down. Can there still be any question about privatising Social Security and putting those funds in Wall Street?