Fall Break Fun

I'm sitting here this morning still in my pajamas, hot cup of coffee in my hand. It's so quiet today. Last week our house was full. Two of our granddaughters were on fall break and they spent the week with us. They are old enough now that they don't require constant supervision so it's pretty easy having them here. But it does change the flow of our day. 

We talked about a few things we could do and places we could go but their favorite thing is staying right here at the farm. Hoola hoops, bikes, tree swings still hold appeal for them 

And they love playing pickleball in our driveway. The weather cooperated and most days were perfect outdoor days. We did venture out a few times for lunch and shopping in our cute little small town square and a trip to the nearby big town for lunch and bookstore shopping.

 

Then it was back to the farm for music practice, baking, and explaining technology to the grandparents. Thanks to Baby Girl, I now know how to use google translate. They tried to explain the latest Gen Alpha phrases to the elderlies—without much luck. 

My favorite part of the week? Dinner on our porch each night. No television. Devices inside. Jazz music playing low in the background. And we listened. How much fun to hear them tell about starting their first year at high school and middle school. They laughed at stories of our high school days back in the dark ages. 

We kept our meals simple but each granddaughter made a dessert during the week. Little Sister (the one in high school) made apple dumplings early in the week and we enjoyed them for several days. (Check the recipe index here.) I have not made those in so long. It's a perfect dessert for fall. Baby Girl (our middle schooler) is dairy free so she couldn't have the apple dumplings. I made her a quick substitute in my new air fryer.

Cut up an apple and zap it in the microwave for about a minute until the apple is tender. Spoon cooked apple in the center of a flour tortilla. Roll it up and tuck in the ends. Spray lightly with cooking spray, sprinkle with cinnamon sugar and air fry until it's hot and lightly browned.

This was an excellent dessert sub for her.  I'll make this for us one night soon. She said it was delicious.

But later in the week she wanted to make a dessert she could eat. Lemon might be her favorite flavor so she made a quick and easy lemon cake. I'm sure you've seen this recipe hack before. I have made "birthday cake boxes" for our food pantry with the two ingredients, but I had never baked one before.

Two-Ingredient Cake

I've linked an article from Southern Living that tells more about the cake and suggests many flavor combinations.

TWO-INGREDIENT SODA CAKE

1 box cake mix (we used lemon cake mix)

1 (12-oz) can soda (we used a can of Sprite)

Frosting of your choice (we used a canned frosting)

Preheat oven to 350º. Grease 9x13 baking dish. Empty cake mix into a bowl. Add soda and stir with a spoon until well mixed, about one minute. Pour cake into baking dish and bake according to directions on the box. 

That's it! Keep in mind that this recipe has no dairy AND no eggs. If you need a dessert for those with those food allergies, this is an easy option. I'd like to experiment with other flavor combinations. We don't usually keep soda in the house, but I guess I could buy a single can from a vending machine. 

 And while I'm sharing kid-friendly two ingredient desserts, here is one baked by the 5-year-old granddaughter when she was here earlier in the summer. Pumpkin doughnuts! She added chocolate chips to the recipe and skipped the powdered sugar.

Keep in mind that this recipe mixes best with a hand mixer. Your little baker might need help. The Two-Ingredient Cake can be mixed with a spoon. Super kid friendly.

PUMPKIN SPICE DOUGHNUTS

1 box spice cake mix (or yellow or chocolate cake mix—your choice)
1 (15-oz) can pumpkin (not pumpkin pie mix)

Mix dry cake mix and canned pumpkin in a large bowl until thoroughly blended. Batter will be very thick. Spoon batter into a gallon ziplock bag. Snip off a corner of the bag. Squeeze to pipe batter into the greased doughnut pan. (I sprayed it with Baker's Joy.)

Bake at 350 degrees for 13 to 17 minutes, until done. (The size of your doughnut "cups" and amount of batter you add will determine the baking time.) To test, press the top of a doughnut gently with your fingertip. It will spring back when it's done. Remove doughnuts to a cooling rack.

Put about a half cup of powdered sugar in another bag. Add cooled doughnuts, a few at a time and shake to coat. Remove from bag and tap gently to remove excess sugar. 

Let the small baker eat a doughnut. Turn on Nick Jr. or Disney Channel and let the littles watch TV while you clean up the kitchen.


 For us, this recipe yielded 12 doughnuts and four muffins.

Hey Cookie!

Chocolate Chip Cookies

We headed down the interstate over the weekend. It was a holiday, the end of school and a dance recital all rolled into one. All things to be celebrated. It was a delightful surprise to walk in the front door and find that Little Sister was in the middle of baking cookies as a welcome treat.

She has become quite the cook. She bakes. She makes entire meals now. How good it has been to watch her kitchen skills increase. You'll have to ask her mom how good her kitchen cleaning abilities are.

Baby Girl has been working hard on her tumbling skills. How she bends, flips and twists like that is beyond me! I tell her she must be made of rubber. We enjoyed the entire recital. From the tiniest ballet dancers to the graduating seniors who have studied dance for 15+ years. As a former dance mom, let me say this was the best organized recital I've ever attended. One number flowed right into the next. The program lasted about 90 minutes but it felt much shorter. It takes masterful planning for that to happen.

And we had the added pleasure of sitting in the new performing arts center that is part of the county school district. It is truly first class. Thankfully (for us) Baby Girl's recital was in the morning (there were 3 recitals that day) so we were able to go out for lunch afterward.

Then we headed home to enjoy these special cookies. There are many good recipes for chocolate cookies. This one is as good as any I've ever had. Little Girl asked for a cookbook for Christmas last December. I gave her the White Lily cookbook and she has been steadily working her way through it. I have sampled a few of her creations. Everything has been delicious.

This recipe says it make 36 cookies. Little Sister went for bigger cookies and made 24. I love that she's gaining the confidence to make a recipe her own. And I completely approve of her adjustment. These were big cookies, but not giant. They were just right. They were crisp on the edges, tender on the inside. Exactly how I like them.

Chocolate chip cookies made into ice cream sandwich.

I didn't think about a photo until I reached into the bag for a second cookie.

CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES (from White Lily)

1 cup unsalted butter, softened

1 cup firmly packed light brown sugar

1/2 cup granulated sugar

2 eggs, lightly beaten, room temp

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

3 cups White Lily all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 (12-oz) bag chocolate chips

In a large mixing bowl, beat butter and sugars with a mixer at medium speed until fluffy, 3 or 4 minutes, stopping to scrape sides of bowl. Beat in eggs and vanilla until light and fluffy.

In a medium bowl, stir together flour, baking soda and salt. Add flour mixture to butter mixture all at once. Stir in chocolate chips. Refrigerate for at least 1 hour.

Preheat oven to 375º. Line baking sheets with parchment paper. Using 2-tablespoon scoop, scoop dough and place 3-inches parts on prepared pans.

Bake until bottoms are golden brown, 8-10 minutes. Let cool on pans for 5 minutes. Remove from pans to wire racks and let cool completely.

Makes 36 cookies.

NOTE:  Little Sister used the next larger size scoop and made 24 cookies and adjusted the baking time accordingly.

The Kitchen Tip in the cookbook says you can freeze the scooped dough balls for up to 3 months and then bake them a few at a time when you want warm cookies.

 

Vintage Dessert

I’m on grandmother duty but I wrote this post before I left home. 

Chocolate Eclair Cake

Here's another vintage recipe. This is the dessert I served to my book club pals. The recipe can be made ahead and it's really easy. The recipe has been around a long time but this was the first time I've made it.  It isn't really a cake at all. And it's not baked. It's assembled. It was very popular a few decades ago and it still shows up at church dinners from time to time. So I've enjoyed it at those occasions.

But there's another reason this recipe holds a special memory for me. When my girls were about middle school age, a dear friend called me one day and said, "I've made your dinner for tonight. Stop by and pick it up when you're out." Now, I live in an area where taking a meal is common when there is an illness, a death or a new baby. But I'd never heard of anyone sending you supper "just because." There should be more people like my friend.

She was older than I and she knew all about those crazy years of driving kids back and forth to school and the after school activities. I practically lived in my car. Putting dinner on the table was one more thing on my long to-do list. On this one wonderful day we had a home cooked dinner and I didn't have to make it.

I cannot remember what the meal was but I've never forgotten the dessert. And after all the years I made it myself. 

You can find newer versions of this no bake cake that use a homemade chocolate ganache instead of canned frosting. But let's be honest. We've already used instant pudding and Cool Whip for this dessert, so the recipe isn't going to be "real" or "whole" food anyway. Canned frosting surely was easy. I had never microwaved it to make it pourable. But it worked really well. Tastes good, too.

CHOCOLATE ECLAIR CAKE

1 (14.4-oz) box graham crackers

3 cups milk

2 (3-oz) packages of instant French vanilla pudding mix

1 (8-oz) Cool Whip, thawed

1 (16-oz) can chocolate fudge frosting

Spray a 9x13-inch pan with cooking spray. Place a single layer of graham crackers in the bottom of dish. Break some cookies, if necessary, to fill in spaces. 

In a large bowl, whisk together the milk and two packages of pudding mix. Mix until smooth. Let sit for 5 minutes. The fold in whipped topping.

Spread half the pudding mixture over the crackers. Top with another layer of crackers, then spread the remaining pudding mix over. Top with a third layer of crackers.

Remove the lid and foil liner from can of frosting. (Be sure to remove all the foil.) Microwave the canoe frosting for 20-30 seconds, or until frosting is pourable. 

Pour frosting over the top layer of graham cracker and spread to cover with offset spatula.

Cover and refrigerate until ready to serve. Best made 8 to 24 hours ahead to let crackers soften. (I used a 9x13-inch dish with a lid instead of covering with plastic wrap. If the plastic touches the frosting, it won’t be smooth.)

Any leftovers can be frozen for up to 3 months. Which reminds me.....there is a little left in our freezer!
 

The Best Kind Of Friends

There is nothing like having good friends. Good friends who've known you for a long time. A couple of these friends hosted a bridal brunch recently. There were two quiches left over, along with an extra loaf of zucchini bread. "Come on! Let's finish up the quiche." That's the kind of invitation that goes only goes out to really good friends. And five of us gathered around the table to enjoy this feast.

I do wish I had made a photo of the plate. It was as beautiful as the original brunch plate. And every bit as delicious. These ladies all are fabulous cooks. And I was happy to get a chance to enjoy the bounty. Their menu was ham and broccoli quiche, fruit salad "boats" and zucchini bread. The plate was colorful with the perfect variety of textures. Every morsel was scrumptious.

Two small romaine leaves were fitted together to make a "boat" to hold the fruit. The assorted fresh fruit that filled the boats was diced and then sprinkled with pomegranate seeds. All those colors! Again. I should have made a photo. But I was starving and didn't think about it until after we finished.

Lemon Daffodil Dessert

Joanne said, "I can make you another dessert plate. Then you can take a picture of that."  Of course I said yes. Then  I took that extra plate home for Daddy-O. He loves that all of my friends are good cooks.

Out of curiosity I googled "lemon daffodil dessert." Oh my goodness. There are several ways to make this. There are lemon daffodils cakes, too. But it looked like most of the recipes are from three or four decades ago. It was interesting that most of them called for "commercial" angel food cake. Makes me think there was one original recipe that got passed all over the south. They all used that word "commercial." I think I would have said "bought." 

This version is from one of those community cookbooks that has the best recipes. And you can look at this page and tell it's a favorite cookbook. I don't have this one in my collection (it belongs to Joanne) but I'm curious to know what the rest of their menu was. 

Old cookbooks often are vague with their instructions. *New cooks...know that everything here is fine to eat as is, so you can vary the amounts if you want to. Or need to.* Here is the lemon dessert the way Joanne makes it.

LEMON DAFFODIL DESSERT

Juice of 4 lemons

1/2 cup sugar

1 (14-oz) can condensed milk, such as Eagle Brand

most of a large container of Cool Whip

purchased angel food cake, enough to cover bottom of pan

Combine juice, sugar, milk. Fold in Cool Whip. Tear cake into small pieces and cover the bottom of a 9x13-inch pan. Pour lemon mixture over cake pieces and mix together a little. Save enough Cool Whip mixture to spread over the top to make it smooth. Cover and chill for 24 hours before serving. 

And now you want to know about that cute dish towel at the top? Some of these ladies had made a trip to the mountains to buy apples last week while I was away. I couldn't go with them but they bought me a treat.Yep. Friends. The good kind.

PS....We have a house full of grandbabies all week, so no new blog posts until they head home. And I recuperate.

Doing Nothing? Hardly

Do Nothing Cake 

My blog breaks keep getting longer and longer, don't they? What can I say. I'm getting older and older. We have had a strange month here but things are getting back to normal. So I was back in the kitchen today. It's my turn to take dessert to book club. 

Easy Skillet Apple Pie

I planned to take somthing easy--like the Easy Skillet Apple Pie. It's always a winner. And it's a little bit of a show off recipe when you walk in with a cast iron pan. Easy to make, but I needed a trip to the store for apples and pie crust and ice cream.  Then my day didn't start like I thought it would. 

Brownie Pudding

Not to worry. I decided I would make a Brownie Pudding like the granddaughters baked this summer. Even easier to make than the apple pie. We have never had it at book club and I had all the ingredients here. It's so good. But it's so much better with ice cream. That still meant a trip to the grocery store. Time to change gears one more time.

Do Nothing Cake

Do Nothing Cake!!! Even the name suited my situation. A quick check in the pantry yielded both cans of crushed pineapple–a 15-oz can for the cake and an 8-oz can for the frosting. The only other ingredients are self-rising flour*, sugar, eggs and vanilla. It is a rare day when I don't have those basics on hand. Best of all...I didn't need ice cream! NO shopping needed today.

If you google "do nothing cake" the traditional recipes have a coconut-pecan topping. Life is better for Daddy-O when he avoids nuts so when I saw this recipe in our rural electric co-op magazine years ago, I knew we needed to switch it up. I found this pineapple topping online and it worked so well that I can't imagine this cake any other way now.

It has been 10 years since this recipe has been here on the blog. It is definitely time to re-introduce it. 

DO NOTHING CAKE

2 cups self-rising flour
2 cups granulated sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 large can (15-oz.) crushed pineapple

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Blend all ingredients together with a spoon. Pour into a greased and floured 9x13-inch baking pan. Bake for 25-35 minutes, or until golden brown and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.

Icing:
1/2 stick butter
1-1/2 cups powdered sugar
1 cup crushed pineapple, drained

Combine ingredients in a bowl. Blend well. Pour over hot cake.

PS...the cake was even better the next day. More moist.

All of the desserts linked above are delicious. All are pretty simple to make. But this cake is hands down the easiest to make and the easiest to take. One dish. No ice cream to keep frozen on someone else's kitchen. And it is every bit as delicious as the others. This is a moist, tender cake that we have loved for years.

*If you do not keep self-rising flour on hand, you can also google "do nothing cake" and find recipes that use plain flour, baking powder and salt. 

Mimi Camp Has Come And Gone

Mimi Camp this year started as soon as we got home from the lake. And unlike all the other years it started without a plan because we had been busy with the family at the lake and with the lake renovations before that. But because we had skipped two Covid years we were determined to do something. This is just a peek at a few of the things we did. And we had two recipes worth sharing. 

I crawled into bed the first night home from the lake after tucking the girls into their beds and I laid there wondering what on earth we could do in the morning. And what was I going to put in ''the box." I was hoping they wouldn't remember that we usually start our camp day by opening the official Mimi Camp box to see the clues for the day's activity. (They remembered.) I couldn't even find the actual box but thankfully had an empty box with a lid that hadn't made it to the trash dump yet. 

Early that first morning I filled it with an assortment of fruits and vegetables from the fridge. Some were wilted and about to be tossed anyway. But they were a great for creating food art. They added herbs from the garden. The girls worked all afternoon making food paintings. We talked about different ways to see ordinary things.

I can't even begin to put the rest of the week in order, but there was fishing at the pond behind the house. And a picnic. On a blanket. On the ground. 

According to Baby Girl that's the definition of a real picnic. It has to be on a blanket on the ground. We came home with no fish but it was all great fun.

Another morning they found my gallon jar of buttons in the box along with an old flannel shirt that Daddy-O sacrificed to the cause. We cut off the sleeves and cut off the cuff button and learned to sew that button back on. I wanted them to be able to button it back up. Button sewing turned out to be the sleeper hit of the week. They kept sewing buttons. Both girls agreed the hardest part was tying the knot in the thread.

I thought we would have fun going through an old cookbook of mine that has a chapter of recipes for each decade from the 1930s to the 1970s. The plan was to find a recipe from each decade. We started off with a bang and made ice cream from the 1930s the first night. This is the 1930s recipe. 

PEPPERMINT ICE CREAM

2/3 cup sweetened condensed milk

1/2 cup water

1/2 teaspoon peppermint extract

3 drops red food coloring (I was out of red, so we used green)

1 cup whipping cream

Combine the condensed milk, water, extract and food coloring. Whip cream until thick and custard like and fold into the peppermint mixture. Pour mixture into a 3-cup refrigerator tray. Freeze until partially frozen. Break mixture into chunks into a chilled mixer bowl. Beat until smooth. Return to cold refrigerator tray. Freeze until firm. Makes 3 cups.

Since our ice cream had to be green, Baby Girl said, "Isn't it supposed to have chocolate chips in it?" So we added those. And Little Sister asked, "Why can't we use your little churn?"  I explained about refrigerator freezer desserts from way back. (My mother made a great frozen lemon dessert in a metal ice cube tray.) But then thought she might be on to something. So we skipped the "beat the cream" part and mixed it all together and poured into my countertop churn. 1930s meets 2022. Worked like a charm.

When the girls got up another morning, they found a five pound bag of flour in the box. And each girl separately made a loaf of no-knead bread. The only thing I did was move the heavy Dutch oven in and out of the hot oven. If Mimi Camp had badges, both of them would have earned the bread baking badge.

The next night Little Sister made caprese skewers for a late afternoon snack on our patio and we added some bread wedges to our tray.

And Daddy-O used the very last of the bread for French toast on Saturday morning. We didn't want to waste a crumb of their delicious bread.

Our "foods from the decades" exploration had one more success when they made brownie pudding from the 1940s. After that, they looked at the 1950s recipes and decided to abandon this project when they saw shrimp in jello. EVERYTHING was in jello in the fifties! 

BROWNIE PUDDING

1 cup all-purpose flour

3/4 cup granulated sugar

2 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup milk

2 tablespoons cooking oil

1 teaspoon vanilla

3/4 cups packed brown sugar

1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

1-3/4 cup hot water

Stir together flour, sugar, 2 tbsp cocoa, baking powder and salt. Mix in milk, oil and vanilla. Pour into greases 8x8-inch baking pan. Combine brown sugar, 1/4 cup cocoa and hot water; pour over batter. Bake at 350º for about 40 minutes. Serves 6 to 8. 

The chocolate sauce layer on the bottom gets thicker as it cools. We liked ours warm, not hot.

So much more happened. But this hits the highlights. If I'm a smart Mimi I'll start collecting ideas for another camp right now. Baby Girl informed me that she planned to come to Mim Camp until she finished high school. Maybe college. "By then I'll have learned all that Mimi knows." 

2022 - The Year Of Low Expectations

Quick & Easy Cake w/One Minute Chocolate Frosting

We are leaving 2021 in the dust and stepping into 2022. The best words I've heard about the new year is to make this the year of low expectations. (Look for @sarcasticlutheran post on Instagram for her full New Year blessing.) Yep. You read it right. Low expectations. We've had two years of things not going as planned and disappointment on top of disappointment and having hopes dashed. So this year, let's start out expecting so little of the world, of ourselves and of others, that when anything at all goes right, it is a reason for delight. I am okay with that.

But we did start our year as we always do. With the traditional black eyed peas and collards meal on New Year's Day. We eat peas to insure we have plenty of coins jingling in our pockets and the collards are for dollar bills—folding money. There were fewer of us around the table this time, so I made fewer side dishes. And we survived.

And again, as always, we celebrated Mommy's birthday. They so often are traveling home on her actual birthday that is has become our tradition to combine the New Year's Day meal with her birthday cake.

I spent a good bit of time yesterday trying to find this chocolate frosting recipe here on my blog. I've made it many times and just assumed (you know what they say about "assuming") that I had posted it here. It was nowhere to be found.

I finally looked in a couple of other places and found a old printed copy, complete with butter stains on the page. This is an old, old recipe that makes a fudge frosting that hardens about as quickly as you put it on the cake. That makes it a perfect match for a 9x13-inch sheet cake. I pour it on and spread it as fast as I can. I didn't even stop to push "cancel" on the timer. 

I found this recipe years ago when I didn't have the ingredients for some other favorite frostings. This uses the most basic of ingredients that I always have on hand. And now the recipe is safely tucked away here in the recipe index where I can find it next time.

ONE-MINUTE CHOCOLATE FROSTING

1 cup sugar granulated sugar

1/4 cup cocoa

1/4 cup butter

1/4 cup milk

1 teaspoon vanilla

Melt butter in saucepan. Add sugar, cocoa, and milk to pan and stir. Bring to a full rolling boil and boil for 1 minute. Add vanilla. Remove from heat. Cool partially (not very long) and then beat with a mixer for 3 minutes or until spreadable consistency. Spread (or pour) on cake while the icing is still warm. It will get firm when it cools. 

I pour this over the 9x13 cake and work as quickly as possible. Next time I'll beat mine a little less than 3 minutes. 

Here is the cake I make most often. It never fails. 

QUICK AND EASY CAKE

2 cups self-rising flour 
1-1/2 cups sugar
1 cup oil
1 cup milk
3 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla 

Mix all ingredients together in a large bowl. Beat until well mixed. This can be baked in layers or a 9x13-inch pan. (Greased and floured, of course. Or, use baking spray.) Bake at 350 degrees for 30 to 40 minutes, until golden brown and the top springs back when lightly touched.

There are a couple of other easy chocolate icing recipes here on the blog. And we also love the caramel frosting on this cake. We make the cake in layers for the caramel frosting.

I do not consider myself a cake baker, but with this basic cake recipe and these frosting recipes, I can get by.