Showing posts with label birthday cake. Show all posts
Showing posts with label birthday cake. Show all posts

10 Degrees and Getting Colder

Friday, November 15, 2013
Can we just take a moment to note what a disaster this week was when it came to getting actual work done. Seriously - so awful. There. I feel better just having said it.

It wouldn't have been so frustrating except last week was the first week in a while where I felt like I gained some traction with work projects and life in general. But no sooner was I all like, "Finally, I've got my groove back" before the groove was gone. Then again, I'm starting to wonder if "my groove" is kind of like my sense of rhythm: nonexistent. 

Andy was home a good portion of the week, although the majority of his waking hours were either spent in a deer stand or scouting deer on foot. It's been all for naught so far, which feels a little strange considering how quickly last year's deer season was buttoned up. There's still another week left in the season and plenty of deer in the woods.

It's been a cold, snowy week. Running is officially hit or miss. I'm not sure I like it.
  
Despite getting next to nothing done this week, my Etsy shop took off like a rocket this past week. Sales galore, custom orders, oh my.  I thought I was ready for the holiday rush, but apparently not, especially since I was somehow sweet-talked into knitting five pairs of birdesmaid mittens for a wedding the second weekend of December. If you need me between now and the end of the month, I hope you don't mind my knitting needles tagging alone. Cripes.

Despite a little Etsy holiday stress, I'm feeling rather festive, which probably has to do with the fact that I spent yesterday afternoon perusing the local shops for gift ideas for the annual gift guide I compile. I have so many gift ideas swirling through my head at the moment and am inspired to do the vast majority of my holiday shopping locally this year. (Says the girl who says that every year and then ends up buying the majority of her presents from Amazon.)

I'm also thinking about doing all of my Christmas shopping with cash, to give local merchants a break on credit card fees and keep the pesky holiday credit card bill at bay. In other news, I'm completely debt-free at the moment. I finished off my student loans last week and vanquished my credit card bill this morning. Although I've never carried a balance on my credit card, it's rather exciting to have the total amount I owe anyone at the moment be $0.00.

I spent yesterday morning volunteering at our community Empty Bowls event, which raises funds for the local food shelf. (That's the bowl I took home, up above. If I'd photographed it in better light, you'd see what a beautiful sapphire blue it is.)  My summer schedule prevents me from getting involved with pretty much anything in the greater community, so it felt so nice to be able to give some time to a good cause, meet some new people, and reconnect with a lot of familiar faces. I contributed some treats to the bake sale component of the event and as I was cutting up my batch of Scotcharoos, it struck me that I may hem and haw about not getting any "work" done, but that those bars will probably do more good in the community than anything I would have produced at my computer. Consequently, I'm coming to believe that you can learn everything you need to know to get through life in a church basement (I'm not even talking about Sunday School here), but that's another post for another day. 

Today is Andy's birthday and I am not baking him a cake. After five years of trying to foist my family's tradition of birthday sweets on the poor man, I'm starting to realize he doesn't really give a fig if he gets a birthday cake, or pie. Perhaps a pan of cinnamon rolls are in the works, but we'll just see how this day goes, shall we. 
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The Poke Cake of Glory

Sunday, November 18, 2012
I've always been a proponent of homemade food. I deeply believe that homemade food tastes better than anything pre-made or pre-mixed that you can buy. My pantry shelves are free of cake and brownie mixes. There's no tube of cookie dough in the fridge. And heaven's forbid that a can of frosting cross over the cabin threshold. That stuff'll kill you.

But we all have our weaknesses. There's almost always a can of cherry pie filling in my pantry, in case I have to whip up one of my nearly-famous cherry cranberry pies. And I try to have some "emergency" Jell-O on hand because honestly, when I have the stomach flu, all I want is a bowl of Jell-O and a glass of flat ginger ale. (Andy does not get this, but that's what I was given during my annual bout of stomach flu as a child.)

And Poke Cake. I have a weakness for poke cakes.  

You know the recipe, right? You take a white cake mix, bake it up in two layer pans, then poke the cake all over with forks and pour a Jell-O mixture over the cake. Once the Jell-O's set, you slap the cake together with a heavy layer of Cool-Whip. It's corporate recipe writing at its finest. In fact, besides the Rice Krispy Bar, I'm not sure any other corporate recipe has taken such a hold on America's kitchens.

My brother loved poke cake so much that for many years during his adolescence, he requested it for his birthday. Not just any poke cake (which you can make with any combination of Jell-O flavors, like orange and lemon or berry blue and raspberry, or . . ..), but the Christmas poke cake, where one layer is lime flavored and the other is raspberry flavored. His birthday is in July. 

I don't know why, but my mother and I were talking about the merits of poke cake the other day. (I would argue that the pure trashiness of poke cake is one of its virtues.) "What's poke cake?" the ever curious Andy asked. My mother and I stared at each other in horror. I wasn't sure that you could call yourself a Midwesterner if you'd never consumed a slice or two poke cake.

So Andy requested a poke cake for his birthday last week. Strawberry, if you please.

"Oh, but I want a homemade cake," he said.

Well, okay. 

While I was somewhat suspicious that a homemade cake would be sacrilege when it came to poke cake, I decided to try out this funfetti cake recipe which I pinned a while back. Except I left out the funfetti - what with Jell-O and Cool-Whip being key ingredients, I figured that the last thing the cake need was sprinkles. (Feel free to argue this point, but I actually don't like sprinkles much. Sure they're adorable, but they taste terrible and are texturally unpleasing on top of . . . brownies, cupcakes, ice cream, whipped cream, anything.)

My mother also suggested I try frosting it with actual whipped cream, but I poo-pooed that as "too rich." (And trust me, I never poo-poo whipped cream.)

Here's the final result in all of its (mostly) artificial glory:


What I learned:

I may not actually like strawberry jello that much.

I do however like this recipe for homemade cake quite a bit. I will make it again, complete with the 3/4 cup of multi-colored sprinkles.

When you pair strawberry jello with a lemony flavored cake, you get a cake that kind of tastes like strawberry lemonade and that is by no means a bad thing.

A homemade cake does not compromise the integrity of a poke cake, but it will dry out faster than a box mix cake. 

Cool-Whip may disgust me as a substance (Whipped vegetable oil! Whipped corn syrup!) but it is a tasty, tasty, easy-peasy frosting.



Have you ever had poke cake?

 
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