Buccaneer State Park; Waveland, Mississippi

We had a relaxing day in the park today. We didn't go anywhere. Mike finished fixing his back-up camera. I spent some time stitching. This piece is about 2/3 finished now.

After that, I decided to give another try to the Tunnel of Fudge Cake for Two. You might recall I tried this back when we were passing the time on a rainy day at Great Smoky Mountains National Park. You can read about that attempt (and the reason for it) right here. It was less than okay last time I tried it, but I had in mind a modification I'd read about using a brownie mix.

Basically, one removes some of the dry cake ingredients and replaces them with some of the brownie mix. I simply added the dry cake ingredients back into the brownie mix, so nothing will go to waste. I'll bake the brownies up some other time. For now, I was only focused on the cake. Like before, half the recipe fit into my little fluted tube pan. It seemed a little bit lighter in color than when I baked it the first time.

It was also under baked last time, and so I gave it about 15 minutes extra baking time for this try. When it came out of the oven, it looked like this.

Some of the batter had risen up and spilled over the top of the cake pan onto the bottom of the oven. Fortunately, I had some tin foil there, so there was no mess. I just replaced the tin foil. For future reference, I might want to be less exuberant about scraping the mixing bowl clean into the baking pan.

The cake has to cool on a rack for 1 1/2 hours before it's removed from the pan. After about half an hour, it looked like this. This will end up on the bottom, and so I wasn't too worried about it.

When the time passed and I took it out of the pan, it looked like this. You can see it's a little gooey in the center, and that's kind of the point. Hard to know until we actually cut into it whether it will be the right consistency or still too wet. It needs another two hours to cool before I can cut into it, and it's cooling as I write this. I'll have to tell you tomorrow how it turned out. It's supposed to have a glaze, although the original recipe did not. This time I'm going to omit the glaze and serve it with a scoop of vanilla ice cream instead.

After that, we got out for a walk in the park. Here's some information about the park from the park website:

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina, at the time, the most devastating storm in the history of the United States, came ashore. Winds of over 160 MPH and a tidal surge of nearly 30 feet completely destroyed all of Buccaneer State Park's structures, waterpark and support facilities. The park was under varying stages of reconstruction until the final phase was completed in November of 2013. Today, Buccaneer has been beautifully restored.

Here's a picture of the Visitor Center. All the park structures are made of brick now.

All electrical equipment has been raised off the ground. Indeed most structures in the area are elevated onto pilings to protect them from future storm surge and flooding.

Those picnic tables are made of concrete, and those puppies are here to stay.

The park is located on the beach in Waveland,  a natural setting of large moss-draped oaks, marshlands and adjacent to the Gulf of Mexico. Use of this land was first recorded in history in the late 1700's when Jean Lafitte and his followers were active in smuggling and pirating along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The French Buccaneer, Lafitte, inhabited the old Pirate House located a short distance from what is now the park. The park site, also known as Jackson's Ridge, was used as a base of military operations by Andrew Jackson during the Battle of New Orleans. Jackson later returned to this area and built a house on land that is now Buccaneer State Park.

There are some beaches nearby, but mainly, the land edges right up to the water where there is a seawall. We drove into town yesterday to run some errands.

As I mentioned most structures in the area are elevated on pilings. This would add a whole new dimension to unloading groceries, wouldn't it?

Even St. Clare's Catholic Church is elevated at least ten feet.

We saw plenty of pilings with no homes atop them...presumably destroyed in the hurricane. Some are being rebuilt. Can you imagine what this kind of support structure adds to the cost of constructing a home? And what about insurance?

So that was kind of interesting.

As I'm writing this, we're still hopeful the government shut-down will be over in time for us to visit the nearby rocket test facility. Time will tell. If not, we'll just hang out here until Wednesday when it will be time to move on to New Orleans. The weather has been nice, and so we could do a whole lot worse. Tomorrow I'll report back about the cake.