Sep. 4: A recipe what gots butter in it

It’s Day #4 of our September Blog Challenge and Sherilee’s over there sharing some delectable fancy-ass recipe. I decided to share a fancy-ass recipe too, admittedly LESS fancy-ass, and without apologies because Sherilee and I are not having a fancy-ass contest, right? RIGHT.

A few weeks ago “butter cake” was mentioned in my Facebook feed by at least three different people. I knew I had to investigate, because BUTTER is good and CAKE is also good but you could say that about fruitcake too and we all know how that abomination ended. Here’s what I found out about butter cake origins.

California Pizza Kitchen has a type of butter cake on its dessert menu, and the one time I tried it I thought it was pretty good. It wasn’t gooey, though, and according to the Wikipedia description, butter cake is more accurately called *gooey* butter cake.

GOOEY, like BUTTER and CAKE, is gooooood. This is a recipe for fruitcake the tastebuds!

And this is how dedicated I am to posting every day this month: I actually made this cake last night, just for the blog. For you, I mean. (And also me, because I did get to taste this nummy thing. I took one bite and then grabbed the whole pan and retreated to a corner, inhaling the cake while fighting off family members with my fork. If I hadn’t been sitting there next to my KitchenAid mixer, by the air conditioning vent, passersby might have thought I was a cave-woman. Instead they just thought, “Oink, Jen. Very oink.”)

I didn’t have to look very hard for a recipe. In fact, I stopped soon after I started because the first few I found were 1) almost identical, and 2) incredibly easy. Here’s the recipe I used, after some Jen tweaks:

St. Louis Gooey Butter Cake

• 1 box yellow cake mix with pudding in the mix
• 4 extra-large eggs (2 for each layer of cake)
• ½ cup butter
• ½ tsp. vanilla extract
• 8 oz. cream cheese, room temperature
• 3 cups confectioner’s sugar + a little extra for powdering the cake when cool
• Non-stick spray

This cake has two separate layers. First, the cake-y layer:

1. Put cake mix into a mixing bowl. DO NOT FOLLOW BAKING INSTRUCTIONS ON THE CAKE BOX!
2. Add 2 extra-large eggs to bowl
3. Add ½ cup (1 stick) melted butter to bowl
4. Add ½ teaspoon vanilla extract to bowl
5. Mix until smooth, using a stand or hand mixer. The batter will be thicker than a typical cake batter, but not as thick as cookie dough.
6. Grease a 9x13 pan and spread cake batter evenly. Set aside.

You can rinse off the beaters and bowl to use again to prepare the gooey layer:

1. Add the softened cream cheese to bowl
2. Add 3 cups confectioner’s sugar to bowl
3. Add 2 extra-large eggs to bowl
4. Mix until smooth. This batter will be more liquid-y than the first layer. You might even call this layer “gooey.” (Duh.)
5. Spread the gooey mixture smoothly over the bottom layer in the 9x13 pan

Bake at 350° for 40-45 minutes or until the top is lightly browned. The edges will brown more quickly and that’s okay (they’ll be totally chewy and yummy). The top does not harden, so toothpick testing won’t help.

Remove cake from oven and cool on a baking rack for at least an hour before serving. Sprinkle with powdered sugar. Slice servings like you would brownies.

I don’t normally go for the cake mix recipes, but I’m glad I made the exception for this one. Everyone in our house enjoyed it last night, once I decided to share. I recommend drinking a big glass of milk with a piece of this cake. Or serve it with vanilla ice cream! That’s a much better idea!

I almost forgot the most amazing part:

I TOOK PICTURES! I never remember to take pictures when I bake!

Note the top is cracked. It’s ‘posed to be like that. 
The cake absolutely could not contain its deliciousness and it burst forth.

Here’s what it looked like before I shoved it all up in my mouf.

If you’re a blogger and want to do our blog challenge with us, let me know and I’ll send you our list! Otherwise, tune in here (and on Sherilee’s happy little blog) every day in September!

Mar. 20: Jen’s obsessions this week

Later, doods.

Feb. 12: Katie’s 11th birthday celebration

For Katie’s birthday on Wednesday, we went out for dinner with the grandparents. The kids really like Gustav’s lately, and we grown-ups are just fine with that, because HELL-OOOO! Fondue is deeeelicious.

The celebration with her friends was last night. Three girls came over around dinnertime and finally stopped giggling at 5:00 this morning. I’d be tired and exasperated and swearing off all future sleepover parties, but I went to bed at 11. Smart, no?

Katie was in charge of most of the entertainment, but OK’d a few ideas I had to keep the girls busy when they first arrived. We had dinner and then made cupcake pops. I got the cupcake mold from My Little Cupcake (totally cute, huh?) and used their recommended recipe: a package of Oreo cookies, crushed, and mixed with a brick of softened cream cheese. I was thankful for my KitchenAid appliances to get that done with very little effort, to be sure. We then dipped the cupcakes in candy melts of different colors and decorated them with sprinkles, colored sugars, and candies.

Totally messy, and look who didn’t freak out? Me, that’s who! I know, I’ve totally matured.

Totally.

Ahem.

The finished product looked nothing like the pictures in the My Little Cupcake samples, but they were tasty nonetheless, and the girls had a blast. We’re definitely going to do these again sometime.

After the cupcakes, the girls puffy-painted cupcake aprons for themselves. They were cute and creatively done, until poor Amanda’s paint bottle burst all over her apron and now she has a puffy-Jackson-Pollack cupcake apron.

The last thing I was in charge of was the cake. I got one of those cupcake cake pans…

…and made a giant cupcake cake. Because it was my first time using the pan, I was unsure of how full the sections should be when I put it into the oven. Turns out they should have been fuller than I filled them. The batter really needs to almost completely fill the two sections because it rises in the middle but not so much on the edges. I have this cool cake cutter…

…so any over-height is totally fixable. With two separate sections in the pan, Katie opted for two different flavors of cake because I suggested two different flavors before I realized that I am an idiot for suggesting such a thing. It became a tremendous pain in my arse, and many messy bowls later, the cake was complete.

Not perfect, but passable. See, if the pan had been more full, there wouldn’t be such a big difference in the sizes of the two sections. This looked a little too mushroom-y for my hyper-critical eye, but whatevs.

 

Here’s the birthday girl surrounded by her friends Phoebe, Nikki, and Amanda. These are four very sweet girls, that’s for sure.

 

 

The top layer is cherry chip; the bottom one is red velvet. You can’t really tell how perfectly RED this red velvet was, but it was. It made for a very pretty inside of the cake.

(Hey, notice the busted light switch in the background? That’s my handiwork! I was moving a bookshelf and ran right into it. Yay!)

<cough> IDIOT! <cough>

 

Here’s what I found when I came downstairs this morning. I woke the girls up, served them a confetti pancake breakfast, and sent them home. Katie’s gotten dressed, but has otherwise spent a lot of time in this exact place all day. So have the rest of us, to be honest. Why are birthday parties so exhausting?

But they are definitely fun. So much fun.

Apr. 5: Cake pops

When we had an employee appreciation week at school a few weeks ago, Fancy Lori™ came up with the fancy idea of giving cake pops as gifts. She emailed the rest of us PTO-ers the link to the recipe, we all ooohed and aaahed and OK’d it, and then she got bizz-ay. I saw the finished product and they were totally cute and yummy looking. Lucky appreciated employees, they got ‘em all.

I saw a link to different styles of cake pops today, and they are simply too cute not to share. Take a look at these, and click on the photos to go to the recipe and directions for each. And then please send me some.

These are similar to the ones Fancy Lori™ made. Compared to the more decorative ones below, these are pretty simple but still a fun, unique idea and totally yummy. We bagged them in cellophane for gifts, tagged with notes that explained what they were—nothin’ like getting a mysterious confection, right? (Is it a ball? Is it edible? Is it a lollipop? A Pepto-Bismol sucker?)

Here’s another twist. Click the smiley guy to see the fun you can have making different faces on these things.

Puppy pops? Katie’s going to beg for these for her next party, I just know it.

These are the ones I saw on a blog today. I think they’re so cute and Easter-y, I might have to celebrate yesterday’s holiday again.

More reason to re-celebrate Easter:

The sheep picture also links to instructions to make adorable little bunnies with fluffy tails. This level of cuteness could kill a person, just so ya know.

I think this next style is a great idea for a Fourth of July celebration; they look so sparkly and festive and fun. The concept could be used for just about anything, with a change in the colors, ribbons, and tags. Use your imagination!

There’s obviously a little more work involved with mini wedding cakes, but look how cute they are! Totally worth the effort, right?

Fancy Lori™ will have to clarify, but I think I remember she said the cake pops weren’t very hard to make. File this one away as a fun idea for your next party! There are lots more cake pops posted at Bakerella, as well as tons of other fun and yummy baking ideas. Check ‘em out!

Nov. 15: The Boy’s party #8

Yesterday was Jack’s birthday party with his friends. His obsession du jour is LEGO, so that was his chosen party theme. I sure would like him to someday choose a theme that has party goods and games designed just for that theme so I have much, much less work to do. But no, for this party I had to do weeks of research to find LEGO-y games suitable for a group of eight-year-olds, then figure out what supplies would be needed, what prizes were appropriate, and have those ready for party time.

Is it any wonder I have high blood pressure and anxiety issues?

To make the LEGO heading for the invitations, I arranged LEGO pieces into letters and photographed them on a white background and okay, I’m totally kidding because I didn’t do that at all. I have a very cool program (check out Lettering Delights if you want to kiss every one of your spare pennies goodbye) that has a LEGO-like alphabet. I used that. It’s awesome.

The games we played:

• Guess the number of LEGOs in the jar: I emptied a new box of 221 LEGOs into a big vase, and I didn’t have to count them. Yay, smart-thinking me! The guesses were pretty funny, though—the boys all estimated there were less than 100, so no one even came close to the right number. Prizes went to the closest three guesses.
• LEGO tic-tac-toe tournament: I drew lines on the plastic tablecloth with a Sharpie and we had two games going at a time. We gave several 2x2 LEGOs in a single color to each player. As each kid lost a game, they chose a prize. The final champion got two prizes. The boys really liked this game, and played at least two tournaments. By the way, I got the funniest reaction when I drew on the tablecloth—the boys all freaked out, and kept asking, “Why’d you ruin the tablecloth? What a waste!” I’m all, IT COST 99 CENTS, GUYS. Later I noticed one end of the tablecloth had been shredded, and I was making a big deal about WHO RUINED MY EXPENSIVE TABLECLOTH? which freaked them out a little at first and then, remembering the cheapskate I am, they just thought I was a big weirdo.
• Building contest: I bought another box of plain LEGOs for the party, and we dumped them, along with the ones in the big vase, out on the table. The boys teamed up and built whatever they wanted for three minutes. Prizes went to the tallest, coolest, and ugliest creations. Victor and I were the totally unbiased judges.
• Brickmaster says (Simon says): I wrote up a list of commands in advance (my favorite was “for Jack only—Brickmaster says give Auntie Lori a kiss!”—Jack dived into the couch cushions, so Loveliest Lori had to pull him out to kiss him, much to his embarrassment). We ended with “Brickmaster says SAY ‘IT’S TIME FOR JACK TO OPEN PRESENTS!’”

For prizes, I made up little trading cards of LEGO scenes. The photos were easy to find on the Internet, and I had them printed four to a 4x6 photo sheet. There were about 12 different ones; here are examples:

   

It kind of surprised me that these trading cards were a hit. Short of giving handfuls of random LEGOs (booooring!), I wasn’t sure what other LEGO-themed prize the boys would be excited to get. Glad I thought of this one.

After opening gifts, the boys gathered around the table to sing and eat cake. The cake was another fun party element. We placed LEGO characters around it, along with candy LEGO pieces along the top and sides.

I love this picture, how Cameron (far left) is helping to blow out the candles and Theo (next to him) looks like he’s telling him he shouldn’t. (BTW, that’s half of a Darth Vader helmet on Jack’s head, not shiny, long hair.)

The real surprise came when we cut into the cake.

I stole this rainbow cake idea from Sherilee, who stole it from this blogger. It was surprisingly easy. Rather than a plain white cake, I got golden vanilla mixes, which were a little bit off-white and didn’t really affect the colors, but tasted better (in my opinion) than white cake. I used icing color paste to get the vibrant colors. While the whole thing was a bit labor-intensive, it wasn’t any more difficult than any other layer cake. Also, it might look a little lopsided here, but I assure you it’s just the angle of the cut, or at least I’m pretty sure it is. The whole thing actually turned out quite straight, thanks to my very cool $3 cake-cutting tool.

After the cake was served to the party guests, what was left was getting wobbly, so I knocked it over before it fell. I like the stripes on the knife here:

For the next party agenda item, the boys gathered in the family room to watch Up on DVD. We served hot dogs and chips to those who were still hungry. Within 15 minutes, half the group went up to the playroom to play the Wii, and by the end of the movie there was just one boy left watching. We’re showing Up at the school for next weekend’s movie night, and it will be more likely to hold their attention without new toys and a Wii nearby.

Once the boys were occupied with these less noisy activities, we grown-ups settled down for our own party. John and Loveliest Lori came up from Salem, and Scott and Christina joined us too. I made my tortilla soup—another very labor-intensive food, but totally worth it—and we enjoyed delightful conversation in the semi-quiet dining room. It was nice that the day was fun for us too. The rum wasn’t so bad either.

Everyone was gone by about 6 p.m., and I went straight upstairs for a nap. It was an exhausting day, but a very, very good one. Happy birthday, Jack! Thank you for giving us a reason to clean the house and have people over. We kinda love ya.

Jul. 31: Happy birthday, Kath!

It’s too hot to think up a super-duper clever way to wish my sister a happy birthday. I know, you all think this makes me just about the worst sister ever. Sorry. Here is my very sincere and un-clever birthday wish for Kathy:

I hope you live long enough to light a disgusting little death stick cigarette with the candles on your 100th birthday cake. That’d be an awesome thing to see. Just don’t follow it with a coughing fit all over the cake because that would gross me out and I totally want a piece of that cake. In fact, if you could put some fade cream on those age spots I’d be able to look at you without gagging and that would help too. And is it too much to ask you to try a little Botox? ‘Cuz, um, dooooood! Sheesh.

Happy Birthday, Kathy! I hope it’s one of your most memorable ones ever!

I love you best of all, seester of mine, no matter what your BFF Lori says. Girl, you know it’s true.

Feel free to share your birthday message for Kathy in a comment. And please don’t make it cleverer than mine, because that’ll just make me look worse. Thanks.

Mar. 21: Red Velvet Cake. Why?

Maybe some of you foodie types can answer this question for me. What is so special about Red Velvet Cake? California Pizza Kitchen has it on their dessert menu now, and I’ve tried to order it a few times but they’re always out. Yesterday I ordered a slice to go after a yummy pasta lunch, and when I got around to eating it yesterday afternoon, it was underwhelming. Nothing bad about it, just nothing spectacular. With the raves I’ve read about in several places, I expected a little more.

Moist? Yes, very. Pretty? Soooo pretty, especially with the vanilla bean cream cheese frosting and white chocolate curls. Edible? Definitely, but please don’t ask me to identify a specific flavor. Because was it out of this world? Not so much.

I’m embarrassed to admit that I had never even heard of Red Velvet Cake until just before Katie’s second birthday. I was looking for fun cake ideas and ran across a recipe for Red Velvet Cake—sounded perfect to go with the hearts party theme. I had half the ingredients in my shopping cart at Albertsons when I got to the baking aisle and found a Red Velvet Cake mix. Just add oil, eggs and water? Much easier than all that buttermilk and shortening and beets.

The cupcakes turned out cute, sure, but they weren’t anything special; I blamed my use of a cake mix shortcut. But after eating that so-so cake from CPK yesterday, I think maybe I just don’t get it. Here, let me Google some recipes for you (not to be a smartass; it’s my excuse to use LMGTFY): Red Velvet Cake Recipes.

I read on Wikipedia that Red Velvet Cake is a favorite in the southern US and that’s it’s known for being rich and sweet. The CPK cake had rich and sweet frosting, but the cake itself was blah in comparison. I call shenanigans.