Back to school!!!!

Back to school is in full swing!

Our kids went back to school here the end of August. They love and hate it.
Love seeing thier friends, getting new supplies, new clothes, new books,new classroom,
new desks oh you get the idea. NEW stuff in general. They hate going back to school because they can no longer stay up late at night, they must be up early, they have a schedule, less free time and free play, more structure and of course the dreaded HOMEWORK!!!! Dun dun duuuuuuuhhhhhh

What back to school means to me is an empty nest. All of my children are in school so I am all alone. sniff sniff. It also means an annoyingly too quiet house, no middle of the day dance parties with my girls, no rough housing with my boys. No hugs or spontaneous I love you's. No "MOM I'M BORED!", belly chuckles or fighting with siblings. A chocked full schedule and chauffeur duties.

Mostly back to school, brings me a lot of baking. Fresh homemade bread for school lunch every week, muffins and granola for breakfasts, cookies and treats for lunches and after school.With allergies abounding in our family we have to be very cautious of baked goods. In general we steer clear of potlucks, buffets, and store bought goodies. We did find a bread that I grew up on that had none of the allergens but now that the discount store carrying this bread has closed we are back to baking. I really can't buy bread at any grocery or discount store now any cheaper than I can make it. More on bread in another post.

To ring in the school year with some color and fun I chose to make cookies in our school colors. Purple and Gold! 
For the recipe it is a simple tried and true one. Everyone loves these soft delicious entirely too easy to make (and eat a dozen by yourself) cake cookies.

Cake cookies!! 

Yep you heard me right. These cookies use a basic cake recipe right out of the box. Some of you probably have heard of these and devoured at least a trillion in your lifetime. For those who have not heard of them well, first buy some stretchy pants your gonna need 'em, they are just so good.
I do not use cake mix in cakes as a rule, they are too unpredictable. I make an exception for these cookies, in fact ok, ok, in my opinion, it is the only reason to have a boxed cake mix in the house.
These cookies whip up and bake in under 20 minutes. You can fix dinner, set the table (yes in our family we still do that), mix the dough, through them on a cookie sheet, serve dinner and put the cookies in to bake. By the time your done serving the main dish the cookies are done and ready to serve for dessert or cool for tomorrows lunches. Do the dishes for supper and dessert all at once. Love that.

Ok enough blah blah lets get going to the good stuff!

I know they aren't perfect circles but seriously do perfectly shaped cookies taste any better? I mean, seriously! Just eat the golly gosh darned things. (Pardon my rant)

Ingredients:

Preheat oven to 350

1 cake mix
2 eggs
3/4 c. oil sometimes I use melted butter

If you like you can play for weeks with all of the flavor combinations that are possible when you start adding flavored chips. Try adding 1 c. chocolate chips to a butter cake mix, or cinnamon chips to a spice cake mix.  Whatever combination you try add 1 cup of chips or coconut. Just a cup. Inexpensive yumminess.

In this recipe I divided the dough in half and added gel food coloring until I reached the right shade of purple and gold for our school colors. Then you take about a walnut sized ball and slap it on a cookie sheet that you either line with parchment or spray with cooking spray, space them because they spread. 

 

Then bake at 350 for approx. ten minutes, not one second longer!  As soon as they are done take them out and resist the urge to remove them from the pan. Wait one minute. Yes wait. This allows the cookie to sort of settle and firm up. This will allow them to pull away from the pan and not glob up as you try to remove them.

They are ready. Yep use a metal spatula and remove them from the pan. You can eat them all right then or share with the kids. I promise whichever you try you will LOVE THEM! 

If there are any leftover they will keep for about a week in a plastic container with a lid, not airtight but lidded will help keep them from getting hard. These cookies are soft and scrumptious. 

 

Thank you for visiting with me. I would love to hear what your favorite combination is and how your cookies turned out. 

LET ME KNOW : )

Chocolate Southern Style & Real Men

Let them Real Men, eat Chocolate Cake....y'all

This is my hubster aka hubby aka Montana Red aka the father of our 4 children....

OOPS that's Yosemite Sam

Here is my husband.....R.

 A few great and interesting things about him:
He is a really good Daddy.
He has a great sense of humor.
He has a wicked sense of humor. (SIDE STORY- he once painted a faint red line on a pregnancy test. Yep he is lucky to be alive!)
He is a very hard worker.
As our provider he is great, we don't go without.
He is hilarious once he gets warmed up.
You might think at first he is shy, but WOW once he gets to know ya..... he can YAKKKKITY, YAK, YAK with the best of them.
He is a man of deep faith.
He loves Soduku (which I think is for lunatics!)
He is married to someone who cannot understand his addiction to Soduku.
He is super handy. Great out remodeling the house, fixing a truck, well he fixes just about everything that is broken.
He likes oreo's,  to work with his hands, woodworking, manual labor, packing around a sweet, sleepy baby.
Did I mention he changed our babies diapers? Well he did!
With one of our children he would wake up at 3am to feed the baby a bottle as I was working.
He not only watches the kids, he cares for them. He will wrestle with them, run around the house, play hide n seek, have Nerf gun wars.
He is an excellent cook.
He takes the time to take care of his aging Grandparents and is very kind to mine.
He knows a man is his wife's partner not master or owner.
He is not a chauvinist, he does like to tease by coming in after work and yelling, "Woman, make me something to eat!"  Remember that grin I mentioned , uh huh he is wearing that when saying it.
Kids love him. 
He knows how to clean, although I try very hard to be sure he doesn't have to do any of it.
He has a mischievous grin that totally melts me.

His birthday is in July and to mark the occasion I made him a Chocolate Mayo Cake.    

 

Chocolate Mayo Cake is a Southern tradition that has been adapted in even the Yankee-est of neighborhood. Why you might say? Well honey, I tell you, it is that good! The Chocolate Mayo cake was a southern solution to hard times. Mayo was substituted when eggs and oleo, oil or butter were in short supply or not on hand.  Mayo is after all just a super saturated emulsification of oil and eggs. That's fancy, schmancy talk for eggs whipped with oil till they get all thick and don't separate after you stop whippin' 'em.

Cake recipe is Nancie McDermott's.
Ingredients:
1/2 cup cocoa ( I prefer Hershey's Special Dark for a deep chocolate flavor)
1 cup boiling water
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup sugar
2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup mayo
1 teaspoon vanilla

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease two 8 or 9 inch round pans generously. Then line with parchment paper on the bottom. The parchment paper is a step you really shouldn't skip here. If you don't have parchment, wax paper works great too. 

Put the cocoa in a medium bowl add water and stir with a fork or whisk to dissolve all the lumps. Allow to cool.
Combine well the dry ingredients; flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt in a medium bowl.
When coca is cool all the mayo and vanilla mixing with whisk until combined.
Then add a little of the dry ingredients to the cocoa/mayo mix and whisk well, repeat until all dry ingredients are added.
Quickly divide the batter between the two pans.
Bake at 350 degrees F for 25 to 30 minutes and begin to pull away from the sides of pan.
Your house will smell wonderful and you will be so tempted but DON'T EAT IT YET! Let that chocolate yumminess cool completely on a wire rack. Remove from pans when cool.

Now I am partial to my Nanny's Chocolate frosting but it is her recipe to share not mine so I am not posting that here. What I can tell ya is a Divinity Icing is yummy on here and so is a great homemade chocolate buttercream or a cream cheese icing. Really you could grate an old tire on this cake and it would be delicious!!!  WARNING: The tire idea is not a suggestions nor should it be tried.

Now that you have a wonderful piece of cake to dive headlong into, all you need is a wonderful real man to share it with. Which brings me back to real men. Not the men depicted in books or movies or TV but real life, living breathing GOOD GUYS!

Ladies, if you have one treasure them, guys if you are one and are single I have a few ladies I want you to meet : )
These fellas are few and far between and I want to be sure mine knows how much I appreciate him, in his entirety. I love him not for just his exterior but for his soul and his spirit.

Not long ago a friend of mine shared a lovely blog post on Facebook. I read it and it summed up my hubby to a T,  the author shared her feelings about what a TRUE MAN is.
I am very pleased to share a bit of her blog with you here.

"So if you’ll indulge me, I would love to help remind my female sisters what “sexy” and “manly” really looks like…

A man who communes with his Creator daily and strives to live a life that glorifies God.

A man who works long hours and spends his hard-earned wages to care for his family and occasionally treat them to fun things like Cherry Limeades and Redbox rentals.

A man who reaches down to pick up his little girl when she trips and falls and holds her close until her tears are gone.

A man who gathers his children around him at night to tell them a story, no matter how late he got in from work.

A man who would never go see a movie about a group of female strippers, no matter how many people were saying it was okay.

A man who researches recipes on the internet and makes a huge and messy meal in the kitchen so his beloved doesn’t have to make supper one night.

A man who treats the elderly with respect and dignity by patiently listening to them tell stories about their glory days.

A man who tends to the azalea bushes by the front porch, clipping them down when they need it and watering them morning after morning after morning.

A man who hops up from his reading when he hears you doing the dishes and gives you a hand.

A man who thoughtfully answers every question his little boy has about “why?” and “how?” the world and everything in it works.

A man who leaves whatever he is doing to help you when your car breaks down.

A man who monitors his free time and plans his schedule wisely and fairly. If he gets a night out with his friends, you get one, too.

A man who gets up at night to fix the baby a bottle while you lay drooling on your pillow.

A man who gives up an unneeded PhD so he can spend more time with his family.

A man who comes home with the new book you’ve been wanting, and its not even your birthday.

A man who has trained his eyes to look away from other women, even when they look better than you do.

A man who is humble enough to grow, long after he has become an adult.

A man who wants you and finds his satisfaction in you, and you alone, after many years of marriage and fidelity.

A man with happy wrinkles around his eyes that prove how many times he has smiled at you.

A man who sets up controls on his computer to avoid even the temptation to look at pornography.

A man who has dignity and modesty and self-control.

A man who would give his life for you and the children, in a heartbeat.

A man who says “I do”…for better or for worse…for richer or poorer…in sickness and in health…forever.

Men like this don’t exist, you say?

Oh yes, they do..............."

To read more you can check out her great blog at Mrs. Gore's diary .

Thank you for stopping in and spending a few minutes with me. I hope that you can come back soon!