Have Yourself an Imperfect Little Christmas...

I'm in a bit of a funk today.  It's only December 4th, and I feel like I've hit the pre-Christmas freak out already.  Not a good sign.  (As my family can vouch, the pre-Christmas freak out does not usually arrive until December 20th.) Too much to do, too little time, not enough money, too much stuff to buy. Ugh.  Stuff.  Gotta buy the stuff, wrap the stuff, hide the stuff, pack the stuff in the van and drive it 6 hours to the relatives' houses.  I'm feeling a bit bah-humbug about it all.

And to be honest, I'm feeling a bit bah-humbug about all the Christmas traditions that usually make me so happy.  We spent the past 2 nights decorating the house for Christmas, and it seems like each night it's ended up being the same peppermint-covered stressball we have to choke down with a glass of crappy eggnog: Kids spazz because they're SOOOOOO EXCITED and I stress because there's a lot of fragile stuff in the Christmas decoration boxes and I don't need another mess and puh-leeze don't get that out yet.  And then someone ends up getting on someone else's nerves and fighting breaks out, the baby Jesus goes flying though the air and the Phineas & Ferb ornament gets broken, and then I flip out and we all end up crying.

Merry Christmas.

I'm sure that anybody walking past our house and looking upon this scene through our large living room windows is less likely to think "Norman Rockwell holiday scene" are more likely to think "On the next episode of 'Cops'...").  And so I end up feeling guilty about tingeing the kids' holiday memories with freak-outs.  I should be the epitome of motherly calm, right?  I mean, it's the holidays.  And they're only young once.  I shouldn't be robbing them of this magic.

And then the cat decides to climb the tree and knock some of the ornaments off.  And I wonder if I should just take the tree down and forget about it for this year.  I look at one of my nativity sets.  Mary is always so calm and so serene.  I envy her.  Here she is, just having given birth among the cows and donkeys and lambs, entertaining magi and shepherd boys and angels, living in a barn for gosh-sakes, and she's just smiling.  She's so full of joy and peace.  But it's her serenity that I envy.  It's just absent from my life right now.

In place of serenity, I have stress.  I have the normal stress of daily living and meeting commitments, and then I have the holiday stress.  I have the "my teen doesn't want anything for Christmas that costs less than $200" stress.  I have the "my middle child hardly wants anything for Christmas, which you think would be great, but then how do you make Christmas morning fair?" stress.  I have the "my youngest child wants expensive and inexpensive gifts for Christmas and understands that Mommy and Daddy can't afford expensive gifts, but doesn't understand why Santa can't and so I need to work carefully at couching her expectations" stress.  And I haven't even begun to deal with extended family stress, or baking stress, or traveling stress. Oh gosh, I just remembered the "I gotta clean the van so we can pack the van so we can travel" stress.  I'm not even ready to deal with that stress yet.

So I sit here in my pajamas with my coffee cup and the couch and I try to avoid the stress, but I know it's out there and it won't get better with time.  I think about selling some plasma so that we have a bit more cash to spread around.  I look at the Nativity again and try to focus, focus, focus on the reason for the season.  

And then I unload my holiday funk onto my blog and unleash it all on the internet because I know that there are so many other moms out there feeling similarly (dads seem to be largely immune from the bulk of holiday stress for some reason, at least in my circle of friends).  I have mom friends who are doing this all as single parents.  Friends who are grappling with grief and the holidays.  Friends who are struggling with illness, or job loss, or money problems.  And I want to say to the people trying to get through the holidays with a big mountain of stress on their backs that you are not alone.  We're all just muddling through.  We look at the picture perfect Christmas cards our friends send and feel inferior because our kids couldn't smile and get along for the time it took to take one picture.  We see Facebook posts of sparkling trees that look like Martha Stewart flew in and decorated it personally while our trees are listing slightly and covered with clothespin reindeer and glittered-macaroni snowflakes.  We hear about the super-expensive or extravagant gifts someone is buying their child or spouse and feel guilty that we can't make our loved ones' Christmas dreams come entirely true.  We see pictures of happy family gatherings, and miss the people who aren't gathered at our table.

 It should come as no surprise that "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" is one of my favorite Christmas songs, precisely because it's not about perfect Christmases, but about hoping to have family near and hoping that all the small problems of life fly away, while at the same time yearning for the golden Christmases of our past.  But if you think about it, were those Christmases perfect?  Or have we just gilded them with fondness and nostalgia so that they seem to be?  Do we forget the freak-outs eventually and just remember the family and the fun? I don't recall my mom ever stressing over holidays, and yet she must have, being a single parent and working full time as a nurse and always having to work on either Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, if not both.

So maybe for today I'll set aside the guilt.  I'm not a perfect mom on a Tuesday afternoon in mid-April, nor on a busy Thursday morning in early-October, so why should I expect myself to be a better version of myself simply because it's the holidays?  Santa stopped watching me years ago. And I'm going to try my hardest to let go of some of the expectations.  Maybe someone on my list doesn't need a perfect gift.  Maybe it's okay if they just know that I was thinking of them. (I just saw a commercial for a Chia Uncle Si.  Anyone interested?  Nothing says "I've given up on shopping for you" quite like a Chia Pet, but a Chia Uncle Si?  That's like saying "I remembered that you like Duck Dynasty while I was buying milk at CVS.")  Maybe the wrapping paper doesn't have to be perfect.  Maybe I won't adjust where the kids hung the ornaments and if the cat knocks the low-hanging ornaments off, I'll just hang them back up again and go about my day.  (Although if the cat knocks the tree down one more time, all bets are off and it is full-on Mommy vs. Cat War.  Seriously.)  I'll try to be more a bit more like Mary and try to capture more of her serenity.  And I'll try so very hard to keep my focus on her son.  Once I fish his manger out of the depths of the Christmas tree, that is.

Happy Bundt Day! (A story told in memes)

The celebration of Bundt Day has become something of a regular event around here.  (Past blog posts on the subject can be found here and here.)

A few weeks ago I started browsing Pinterest for Bundt recipes.  I was gonna knock it out of the park this year.  It was gonna be a full-fledged Bundtpalooza.  I found a recipe for a Samoa Bundt cake (recipe here).  Samoa cookies are my favorite Girl Scout cookie.  Making a Bundt form of my favorite once-a-year cookie seemed like a fantastic idea.

Fast forward to yesterday (I made my cake yesterday so I could tell you about it today).

Here's me heading out the door to the grocery store: Oooh.  Don't forget the recipe for the Samoa Bundt Cake.  Yes, that's a great idea.  But I don't have time.  I'll just check the recipe from my phone at the store.

Here's me driving to the store: Local radio stations stink. Katy Perry's "Roar" is not such a great song that it needs to be on 24-7, people.  Local drivers don't know how to navigate a 4 way stop.  YOU CALL THAT A STOP!?!

Here's me at the store: Let's check that recipe.  Hmm...note from the recipe creator that says "This cake took nearly all day to make."

Hold the phone.  A cake that takes ALL DAY to make?  And it's already noon?  And I still have a week's worth of groceries to buy, cart home, and put away before I can get my bake on?  

So here's me in the baking aisle, basically trying to figure out a Bundt recipe idea on the fly: I want it to be chocolate.  And caramel.  And nuts.  Ooooh...a turtle Bundt!  Great idea.  I know I have a chocolate cake mix at home.  I can make caramel from scratch.  I need some pecans and we'll be all set.  I can make this happen, recipe or no.

So I make it home.  I get to baking.  I decided to make my caramel first.  I used Pioneer Woman's Caramel Sauce recipe.  Say what you will about the Pioneer Woman, but girlfriend can cook.  I've never had a recipe of hers that I haven't liked.  Her caramel sauce recipe is basic, but it's easy, fast, and versatile.  It's great on ice cream.  If you cook it for a little less time, it's great for dipping apple slices for a snack.  If you cook it longer, it gets thicker, and that's the state I was going for in this Bundt.  A nice, thick, ropy caramel sauce.

Caramel sauce ingredients are in the pan, melting and getting nice and gooey.  I decide to start on the cake mix.  I've been buying up cake mixes lately when they're on sale for a dollar (don't judge - it's cheap, it's easy, and my family cannot tell the difference between "from scratch" and "from box").  I know I've got at least one chocolate cake mix in the pantry.  Possibly a devil's food cake too.  I just know I want a nice chocolate cake to be the base of this Bundt.   Go over to the pantry.  Guess what? No. Chocolate. Cake. Mix.

Wait!  There in the back!  What is it?  German Chocolate Cake mix.  Hmm.  Better than nothin'.

So I get the cake mix going.  My caramel sauce is bubbling away nicely.  I've got approximately 20 minutes before Middle and Youngest Child come home from school.  I'll be able to get the cake into the oven by then, and we can rake some leaves while the cake bakes.

Phone rings.  It's Middle Child.  "Um...Hello?  Mom?  I missed the bus. Can you come to school and get me?"

So I'm rapidly greasing a Bundt pan, and rushing everything else so that I can get the cake in the oven and rush off to school.  I turn off the heat on the caramel sauce before it's quite ready.  It's not as thick as I'd like and I don't have time to cool it, but you've all figured out by now that I'm a real mom and not a professional blogger (my cheap photography was probably your first clue; second clue is probably the fact that I only blog once in a blue moon because I have no time).  I have to get the kid, the cake can be rushed and less than perfect.

So, pour one half of the cake batter into the very well greased Bundt pan.   Then pour 1/2 of the less-than-thick, not-so-much-cooled caramel sauce on top of the batter.  Sprinkle with pecans.  (In my dream world where kids don't miss buses, this was going to be an amazing caramel-pecan tunnel in the middle of the Bundt.)  Top with remaining cake batter.  Pop into oven.  As you're popping it into the oven, hear the front door open.  Hey, it's Middle Child, who found a ride home with the neighbor girl.  Count to ten and take a deep breath.

So we wait for Youngest child to get home, then we go rake leaves with a timer stuck into my pocket so I can take the cake out in time.  Rake, rake, rake.  Realize that raking with kids is just about as effective as raking with puppies.  Timer goes off.  Back inside, test the cake for doneness.  Let it cool on the counter for a bit before taking out of the pan.  Finish raking.  Drag Youngest Child out of the leaf pile in the street.  Take Youngest Child in the house.  Attempt to release cake from Bundt pan.

Anybody who has ever made a Bundt will understand The Moment.  It's the moment of truth in Bundt cake baking.  When you unmold your cake, it will either come out in one smooth whoosh, or it won't. The Moment is the success/fail moment of the last hour.  You get a pretty, nicely molded Bundt, or you get a semi-nicely molded Bundt on the bottom with the rest stuck into the pan.  Guess which one I got?

Yeah.  Sigh.

Here's what I think happened.  The caramel was too thin, and too hot.  It very quickly meandered to the bottom of the pan, and took the pecans with it.  Once at the bottom of the pan, the caramel continued to cook until it became toffee.  (A nice, delicious, nutty toffee that I later scraped out of the pan with a spoon and consoled myself with as I looked at my sad, disfigured Bundt.)  Some of the cake stuck to the toffee and the rest released nicely.  Hence, Ugly-Not-Really-a-Turtle-Bundt.

But frosting!  Frosting fixes everything!  And I still have some leftover caramel sauce to use as a garnish on top.  I'm gonna frost and garnish the snot out of this cake! It's still salvageable!  Yes!

I microwaved some canned frosting to make it liquid-y.  (If I were a professional blogger, it would be ganache, but again, I'm a mom who is running out of time before supper prep needs to begin.)  Poured about 3/4 of it over the cake, letting it pool at the bottom.  Then I started drizzling the caramel sauce over the top.  Again, it was too thin and pretty much just rolled off the cake.  At this point, I really didn't even care and just laughed.  Threw some more pecans on top, and called it done.

Do you want to see what it looked like in the end?

Here you go:

A little lumpy, a little bumpy, and I'm not sure I'd serve it to company or take it to a pot luck, but it's okay.

Taste verdict?  It was good.  Caramel really suits German Chocolate cakes, so those flavors blended nicely.  But the caramel tended to pool away from the cake and frosting.   Overall, however, it was a perfectly good cake and everyone at the table gave it a thumbs up.

The final take-away?  It's cake.  Cake is good.  However you celebrate Bundt Day, enjoy - and may your Bundt not stick to the pan.

Apologies

I've been awful at blogging lately.  It's not for lack of ideas.  It's for lack of time.  Summer is a really hard time to find the time to blog, especially with kids underfoot.

I've also had numerous irons in the fire.  Our basement flooded in June, and the entire summer has been one slow slog to bring it back to normal.  Demolition, then reconstruction, drywall, paint, carpet.  The carpet is the last step; we're almost in the home stretch.

We spent a week in Wisconsin in August.  My husband and I ran a race together, we attended my (gulp) 20th class reunion, and we took the kids to a number of tourist destinations that we remembered fondly from our childhoods.

And last, but not least, I decided to train for my first half-marathon.  I'm following a 16-week plan and have 6 weeks left to go.  I run four days each week with my mileage going up gradually each week.  My long runs started at 3 miles.  Now I'm up to 9-10 miles.  I think training is going well, but I go back and forth on whether or not this will be my first and only half, or if I'll run another one after this.  I gotta say, I really like 5 and 10 K races.  We'll see how the first half marathon goes, but training really takes up a huge chunk of time.

I'll try to be better at blogging in the next few weeks.  I've got a few projects to share, a few recipes I want to blog about, and many, many thoughts going through my head.  Stay tuned.

Dresser Makeover

Greetings from the internet's least prolific blogger.

I've just been busy with mundane life stuff and not able to form thoughts into cohesive enough chunks to blog lately.  Plus I haven't done anything really interesting, haven't made anything really interesting, haven't gone anywhere interesting.  Or at least not interesting enough to blog about.  I mean, if you the blog-reading public want a post on cleaning litter boxes or brushing teeth, I'd be happy to oblige, but I just don't think there's a reading audience for it.  I may be wrong; feel free to correct me.

Anyhow, now that springtime has finally reached us here in Minnesota, I've been able to tackle a project I've been meaning to get done for a while, but I kinda needed to be outdoors to work on it.  What project is that?  Making over a small old dresser into a place to store our cold weather gear.  (Currently we use an old lidded basket that is overwhelmingly too small for a family of 5.  The cats enjoy using it to scratch their paws, so it's in fabulous shape, besides - if by fabulous you mean "falling apart at the seams.")

However, this thing

would make a great place to stash outerwear.  It's been sitting in our garage for the last two years.  Prior to that, it stored my husband's running gear in the basement of our old house.  Prior to that, one of the kids used it for a dresser.  I used it when I was a kid for a dresser, and when I asked my mom how old it was, she guessed that she got it in 1972, before I was even born.

Make no mistakes, this thing is old.  It's shabby (and not in a shabby-chic kind of way).  It's falling apart.  The hardware has oxidized.  And it wasn't even made out of high quality materials in the first place (particle board, staples, and glue for the most part).

But it was still useful, and rather than tossing it in the landfill, why not try to re-use it?

First I sanded down all the surfaces.

Removed the old, oxidized hardware.  Because the new hardware I was installing (more on that later) didn't fit the holes from the old hardware, I filled the holes with wood putty, let it dry, then sanded.

I put the dresser up on kitty litter buckets to make it easier to paint.  Speaking of making things easier to paint, if you're gonna do any spray painting, get yourself one of these:

That little trigger makes painting with spray paint so much easier.  It just snaps on to the top of your spray can and away you go.  It's reusable from can to can and only costs about $5.  

I didn't take any pictures of the painting process, but it was pretty straightforward.  Spray, let dry. Spray again, let dry. Done.

After the paint was dry, it was time to go to work on the new hardware.  At our old house, we had our kitchen cabinets resurfaced to make them more appealing for the sale.  We bought new fixtures, but never got around to installing them before we moved out.  Then they got lost in a box for a good 9 months before being rediscovered.  Unfortunately, that meant it was much too late to return them to the store.  I wanted to use them in our new house's kitchen, but because the drawer pulls don't line up, I'd have to redo the cabinets in this house too.  Just to install new hardware.  No thanks.  But now I've got a bag of hardware and no place to use it.  Lightbulb moment.

Here's the new stuff:

Kinda old-world and yet updated.

Like I said, the new hardware wouldn't work in the old hardware holes, so this wasn't a simple swap, but having a drill handy meant that it wasn't too difficult either.  In retrospect, I probably should have drilled the holes before I painted, but I was eager to paint.  I'm lucky that the drilling didn't wreck the paint, but again, we're talking about a cheap-o makeover here.  Buying another can of spray paint to fix an "oops" wouldn't have been a budget breaker.

So, dresser freshly painted, new hardware installed...we're done, right?  Not quite.  While digging for the drill, I found a can of chalkboard paint leftover from the previous owners.  It was unused, but since it had been sitting in the garage for 2 years or more, I tested it on some scrap wood first to see if it was still of good quality.  It was.  I decided that I would turn the side panels of the dresser (again, particle board with a very cheap veneer - we're not talking high quality wood here, folks) into chalkboards for the kids.

 
I covered the painted surfaces of the dresser with newspaper and taped off the edges, then spray painted away.  It took about 3 coats to get a nice, even finish.   (Helpful hint: when you create a chalkboard with chalkboard paint, wait until the paint is completely dry (usually 24 hours), then cover the entire surface with a smooth covering of chalk, then erase it all, before drawing on it for the first time.)

Wanna see the finished project:?
Voila:

Decorated with kid artwork, less than an hour later:

Side-by-side comparison:

At the end of the day, it's not perfect.  There's a few spots where I didn't apply paint evenly on the front, and there's a drawer pull that isn't level.  But overall, I'm happy with how it turned out.  It's plenty of well-hidden storage for our cold-weather gear, it's a nice surface just inside the door to on which to set things down, and it's added art space for the kids.

St. Patrick's Day Wrap-Up

I had a really good introduction to this post thought out.  But then I unloaded and reloaded the dishwasher.  And ate a brownie.  And then I grabbed my camera so that I could post pictures in this post.  And by the time I sat down at the computer, the good introduction to this post was lost.  Boo.  The brownie was good, at least.  More on that later.

So yesterday was St. Patrick's Day.  It's a fairly big holiday here at our house.  In fact, last week Young One was asking my husband what he thought my favorite holidays were.  He said "Christmas is her favorite.  Probably Easter or St. Patrick's Day are her next favorites."  He's not too far off the mark.  Thanksgiving ranks up there too.  I like food holidays.  Big surprise.

Back to St. Patrick's Day.  Are we Irish?  Yes.  Some of us more than others.  I'm about a quarter Irish owing to my maternal grandmother's line.  My husband is about zero Irish.  So our kids get to claim 1/8 Irish ancestry.  Was it a big deal for my family growing up?  Not that I can remember.  Of course we ate corned beef and cabbage on March 17th, but beyond that, I can't recall much in the way of celebrations.  So why do I make a big deal out of St. Patrick's Day?  Part of it is because I make a big deal out of ancestry.  I think it's important for my kids to know where they came from and who their ancestors are.  (To that extent, I'm creating a family history gallery in my dining room.  It's just in the early stages, but I'm excited about it and will post more about it when it's further along.)  But the other part of celebrating St. Patrick's Day is just for fun.

So here's how we celebrated yesterday:

I was awoken at 7:00 on a dark Sunday morning.  "Mommy!  MOOOOOmmmy!  Mom!  Mom! MomMomMomMomMom!!!  Come on!  You gotta get out of bed.  The leprechauns came and they made a huge mess and you just gotta see what they did this year!"  And with that, I was pulled from my nice warm bed, my eyeglasses were handed to me by little hands, and we went out into the hall.

Leprechauns.  Ugh.  Little monsters made my trip down the stairs interesting, to say the least:

They wrapped some type of green mesh tape over the stairs.  So groggy, pre-caffeinated me had to descend the stairs in the always popular booty-bump fashion.  The leprechauns also strung up metallic streamers everywhere (you can kind of see the streamers in the top of the photo), filled the living room floor with green and white balloons, and generally left all sorts of mischief in their wake.  Wait til you see what they did to my kitchen:

Not only did those little men in green manage to haul out my donut maker, but they also somehow found all the ingredients in the pantry necessary to make green donuts.  They must have made close to 3 dozen mini donuts, but then they left the mess to be cleaned up by someone else.  Salt spilled on the counter top, ingredients left on the counter, and (worst of all in my book) they didn't rise out their batter bowl or even put it to soak.  (This is how my kids know that I'm not the leprechaun.  They know I'd never leave a messy bowl on the counter.)

After the leprechauns made donuts, they decided they needed to take a coffee break.  They got my miniature  Irish tea set down out of the china cabinet and poured some coffee and had a few donuts.  I guess mischief making is hard work.

This is how my kids know that leprechauns are truly naughty.  Because nobody is allowed to play with my miniature Irish teapot set, let alone take something out of the china cabinet.

But at least the leprechauns were nice and left us lots of green donuts to eat for breakfast, which the kids would have done immediately if the leprechauns had not also left them golden chocolates (along with all sorts of other goodies):

Slap bracelets, green beads, pencils, twisty straws - all in a green pot the kids can plant something in later on this spring.  (Did you notice the water bottle in the background? One of the kids left that on the table the night before.  The leprechauns turned the water green.)  Typically our leprechauns leave little treats for the kids each year, ostensibly to make up for the mess they leave in the house.  Why they never leave ME any presents when I'm the one who gets to clean up 75% of the mess is beyond me.  Maybe leprechauns have mommy issues.

So my morning went well - excited children amped up on green donuts and chocolate.  Major sugar crash right before we left for church.  Awesome.  But it's a holiday.  We play by different rules on holidays.

The rest of our St. Patrick's Day celebration takes place mostly around the evening meal, which I do enjoy preparing and, well, eating.  The St. Patrick's Day meal is comfort food.  Warm.  Filling.  And no matter where you go, most corned beef and cabbage dinners don't vary much in taste.  You know you're going to get pretty much the same flavors no matter where you eat your corned beef.  In fact, I remember my first St. Patrick's meal after I became a mom.  I'd given birth just a week before and I was so sleep deprived that I could not remember my first name, let alone cook a big meal.  My husband went to the local grocery and bought me some corned been and cabbage from the deli counter.  It was awesome.  Because it tasted just like mine and -best part- I could just sit on the couch in my pajamas, sleeping baby in my arms, and eat.

So here's what we had last night for our St. Patrick's Day meal:

The main part of the meal is simple to prepare: throw your corned beef into the crock pot.  Peel and halve potatoes and put them on top of the beef.  Peel carrots, leave them whole, and put on top of the potatoes.  Pour some water (enough to have about 2-3" of water at the bottom of your crock pot) over it all.  Cover and cook on low for about 8 hours.  Two hours before your meal is done, cut a cabbage into 6 wedges.  Put them in the crock pot and re-cover, and let the cabbage cook for the last 2 hours of the cooking time.  If you put your cabbage in at the beginning, it'll be mush by the end of the cook time.  Two hours of slow cooking is just enough.

At the top of the photo, you can also see the Irish soda bread I made last night.  In the past, I've made a far more complicated recipe (both in terms of ingredients called for and steps involved).  But I stumbled across a recipe on Pinterest that was only 4 ingredients and sounded simple.  I like simple.  Especially when I'm dealing with kids who refueled themselves after lunch with more leprechaun chocolate.  The recipe is on Let's Dish and can be found here.  It was a super simple bread to toss together (for the record, I don't keep buttermilk on hand so I just used skim milk soured with a bit of vinegar), knead a few times, and toss in a pan to bake right before our meal so that we'd have warm bread with our Irish feast.  It's a less complex bread than my usual recipe, but that doesn't mean it wasn't tasty.  My son ate 3 or 4 slices and declared it the best part of the meal.  I will cop to eating 2 slices with dinner.  And another one as a late night snack.  And another piece this morning after I shoveled snow.

For dessert, I made mint chocolate brownies.  

Why?  Because I could tint the frosting green to match the day's festivities.  And because mint and chocolate go so well together.  And goodness knows we can't ever get enough chocolate around here.  Again, this wasn't a super complicated recipe.  I used a boxed brownie mix, but I subbed fat-free Greek yogurt for the oil.  (See note below.)  The brownies turned out just as moist and tasty as they would have with oil, but now they have less fat and more protein.  I mixed regular white frosting from a can (softened in a glass bowl in the microwave) with some peppermint extract and green food coloring and frosted the brownies, then topped with chopped Andes mints.  And yes, I know topping the brownies with frosting and chopped chocolate kind of negates the healthy step of using Greek yogurt to cut down on fat.  Just let me live in my dream world, okay?  We have frosted brownies here.  They're magically delicious.  Wait, that's frosted Lucky Charms, isn't it?  Huh.  Well the frosted brownies are magically...good. 

Naturally, celebrating an ethnic-ish meal leads to conversation around the table, and my kids asked really good questions about who in our family was Irish, and how much Irish they were, and they asked questions about Irish history and traditions, and that makes all some of the craziness of preparing a holiday worthwhile.  Then they got into a discussion about our German heritage (there is a lot more of that type of water in their gene pool) and my son said "I don't want to be German because Hitler was German and he was evil." And I tried steering the conversation to good Germans and their contributions to society, but I got stuck and just offered them more brownies.  

Happy St. Patrick's Day to you all.  May the luck of the Irish be with you.

Oh, and the side note on Greek yogurt and baking:  I'm going to be doing more of this substitution in the days ahead and try to blog about it.  If you want to try doing it yourself, here's a handy conversion chart that Chobani has on their website.  I need to make a magnet with the conversion so that I can keep it handy on my fridge.  Which, I hope you have a magnet like this one on your fridge to help you figure out the math/measurement part of those conversions:

It saves my math-challenged brain on a daily basis in the kitchen.  And it's incredibly helpful when you have to calculate how to figure out what 3/4 of a 3/4 cup is.  Because I'm not mathy like that.

Stream of Consciousness, Little One styel

This was Little One's 10 minute or so verbal ramble this morning, nearly verbatim:

I want to do the Monster Dash race with you this year.  I'm gonna wear a costume, but I'm not sure which one.  I really want to get another gold medal.  If I do the Kids K and the Monster Dash, then I'll have THREE GOLD MEDALS.  Do you think Daddy would wear his costume?  I think he should wear his gorilla costume.  But he should wear one of your old swimsuits over it so he doesn't look like a naked gorilla.  I wonder if he will mind the mommy cooties on the swimsuit.  I guess you can just wash it.  I wonder where the cooties go when you wash them off in the washing machine?  And then he can wear your swimsuit, and a long hair wig, and you can paint his face like a clown.  So he can be a girl gorilla clown.  Will you do my hair?  Two braids.  Who was on the phone?  Wrong number?  What's a wrong number?  Why did they want to talk to someone named Wayne?  My name isn't Wayne.  Your name isn't Wayne.  Daddy's name isn't Wayne.  Huh.  Maybe they have a friend named Wayne.  I'm gonna go in your shower and get my feet wet from your shower water.  Whoa!  Whoa!  No, I will not fall.  Okay, maybe I will fall a little.  But I didn't get hurt.  See?  Now look at me, I'm disco jogging!  Oh say can you see?  By the dawn's early light, What so proudly we hailed as the twi-lies last geeming.  Whose broad stripes and bright stars...Huh.  Look at that.  Now watch me!  Mom!  You are not watching me!  Watch me!  Whoa!  Whoa!  Look it's a magic trick!  Now I'm gonna disappear!  Bet you can't see me!  No you can't!  Nuh-uh!  Mom, what earrings are you wearing today?  What shape are your earrings?  Ovals?  They're really not ovals, Mommy.  They're kind of squarish ovals.  Hey, I've got a chipmunk voice.  Mom, can I see the rest of your earrings?  Pleeeeeeease????  Next time you and Daddy have a date night, I want to pick out your earrings for you.  Now I'm going to go make you a burrito, Mommy.

Happy National Chocolate Cake Day!

It just occurred to me that this is my first post in over a month.  Yikes.  I stink at blogging.  But I'm really good at baking when there's a national holiday involved, evidently.  

Today is National Chocolate Cake Day.  I was unaware of this fact until sometime late this morning.  We also happen to be dealing with a big ice storm today, so I found myself in a bit of a situation: (1) sudden desire for chocolate cake, and (2) a rather pathetic pantry where chocolate cake baking is concerned, and (3) icy roads that made a quick trip to the grocery store a bit of a fool's errand.

After a bit of digging around on the internet, I found a recipe for cake that would work with what I had on hand, and a different recipe for frosting that would work.

First: The Cake

I found a recipe for chocolate cake using Greek yogurt on this blog, Chocolate and Carrots.  I made a couple of tiny adaptations based upon what I had on hand.

Easy Chocolate Greek Yogurt Cake

You need:

1 Cup sugar

2 Cups flour

4 Tablespoons cocoa powder

2 teaspoons baking soda

1 Cup plain non-fat Greek yogurt

1 Cup skim milk

1 teaspoon vanilla

Preheat oven to 350 degrees and spray a 9" pan (square or round) with cooking spray.

Mix your dry ingredients in one bowl.  Whisk the yogurt, skim milk, and vanilla together in a different bowl. Pour the wet ingredients in with the dry ingredients and stir well.  Pour cake batter into prepared pan, bake for 35-45 minutes; use a toothpick to test for done-ness. (The original recipe called for 35 minutes; mine wasn't done at that point and took an additional 7 minutes.) Allow to cool in pan for about 15 minutes, then turn out onto serving plate.

Best part about making this cake? No eggs.  You get to lick the beaters without worrying about getting food poisoning.  Also?  It's easy and you don't have to haul out a mixer to make it.

Now on to the frosting:

I found this recipe along with a cake recipe on Never Homemaker, but didn't have the right stuff to make the cake.  The frosting looked easy and do-able though.

Peanut Butter Greek Yogurt Frosting

You will need:

3/4 Cup plain, non-fat Greek yogurt

1 Tablespoon vanilla

1/2 Cup creamy peanut butter (Nutella would also be awesome here)

3/4 Cup powdered sugar

Mix the yogurt, vanilla and peanut butter together and stir until well combined.  Add the powdered sugar, 1/4 cup at a time, stirring well after each addition.  (I used my Kitchen Aid with the whisk attachment for this frosting and it turned out very smooth, but I also think you could easily do this by hand or with a hand mixer.)  Spread frosting on cooled cake.  Store frosted cake in refrigerator.

(You'll notice from the picture up above that we also scattered some chocolate chips on top.  My youngest was absolutely indignant that I didn't put any sprinkles on the cake. I mollified her with chocolate chips.) 

So, how was it?

Pretty good, actually.  The cake is more dense than your typical boxed-cake-mix cake and it has a nice chocolate flavor.  It would take additions really well, so if you want to add some chocolate chips or nuts, go ahead.  And while the cake got thumbs-up from everyone at the table, the reaction to the frosting was a bit more mixed.  Personally, I loved the frosting.  But I'll admit, the slightly sour taste of the Greek yogurt does come through pretty strongly.  I think that is balanced out by the sugar, and I think that it goes well the the peanut butter.  My husband and kids weren't all that crazy about it though.  I think a more traditional peanut butter frosting would be good on this cake, but I also think it'd taste fantastic with traditional chocolate frosting.  I also kind of want to try it with some cherries and whipped cream - it would make an awesome Black Forest-type cake, I think.

All in all, it was a nice way to celebrate National Chocolate Cake Day, even when your cake-making ingredients are limited.