Friday Food Fun

One darling twin gave me a few blog instructions before she headed back to college. Her 2 specific requests were:

1) Don’t blog about DWTS
2) No food or recipes

Seems she finds these two topics B-O-R-I-N-G. I love unsolicited advice. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate her readership. I’m touched that she and her darling twin sister enjoy the blog and even share it with some of their friends.

It also does not go unnoticed that they easily provide about 50% of the blog fodder here. Family life is the springboard for most of my blog content. But she is not the boss of me.

So, Roger Leroy can get her own blog or suffer through the food fun Scary Baby and I had while they were in Arizona.

With all that said and my quarterly disclaimer that this is not a food blog, the simple fact is that we love, love, love to eat. And I’m a pretty good cook in spite of what you may have been led to believe.

The sugar addiction is still a problem as you will soon see.

I have taught all the kids to cook figuring it is an important life skill and comes in handy every once in a while. We jump started our Home Ec classes with that insanely good Lemon Cake in the spring. I became a bit obsessed and made it 3 different times.

The last 2 times I combined and tweaked 2 different recipes in my personal quest to simplify the cake. I’m never really drawn to complicated recipes. Making homemade lemon curd was a giant stretch for me. But I love lemons and love this particular cake so much that I wanted to get the recipe recorded for next spring when I might turn the oven on again.

This cake is worth adding to your recipe collection. File under fabulous desserts to make especially for company and special occasions or to just impress yourself! You can download and print the recipe by clicking the link:

Printable Perfect Lemon Cake Recipe

Scary Baby soon tired of lemons and we moved on to other desserts.

She also became a self-appointed food stylist volunteering to take a picture 20 pictures of everything we made saying “You really need to put this on the blog, momma.”

After making Honey Lime Fruit Salad for lunch one day, she announced that she knew a way to make it even better…

If we only had some “whupped cream.” (She also added graham crackers and made herself a fruit s’more.)

Imagine her amazement when I showed her how we could make homemade whupped cream with heavy whipping cream that we had in the fridge. It’s easier to dazzle kids in the kitchen than you think.

We made all these things in May and June. Some sort of weird cooking frenzy before the darling twins came home I guess.

No offense to my food stylist but you will find much more appealing photos with each recipe by clicking on the links below the pictures.

1. Blackberry Cobbler ~ My new favorite, easiest cobbler ever. Added Blue Bell ® Summer Berries ice cream. Yee haw!
2. Blackberry Jam Almond Bars ~ 3 of my favorite things: shortbread, almond flavoring and blackberry jam — so delicious!
3. Lemon Cheesecake ~ Yes, I slipped in another lemon recipe mostly because it was NO BAKE and I had extra lemon curd I wanted to use!
4. Caramel Pecan Brownie Cake ~ Ridiculously rich even for chocoholic PhilBillPaul. I could never have predicted I would say “too much caramel” on anything but I would reduce the caramels in this one by half!

No pictures but we also made a few other fun things…

Fruit Salsa with Cinnamon Chips ~ Perfection – I ate pretty much the whole batch by myself. Remember PhilBillPaul has fruit issues. Oven time could be eliminated with graham cracker sticks or using small tortillas in toaster oven.
Maple Pound Cake ~ This cake is so good I made it twice and we’re adding it to the holiday menu. I made it without walnuts and with the icing she recommended. PhilBillPaul’s new favorite cake.
Buttermilk Cake with fresh strawberries ~ Yum! Light and sweet. Big plus–it’s one layer so it can be made in toaster oven.

I haven’t been able to turn on the oven since June. This summer has felt like we live on the actual face of the sun and I know many parts of the country have felt the same way – not just here in the South!

I’d love to hear what your favorite summer dessert is. Share it in the comments and I’ll be sure to make it this winter when I can use my oven again. Any day below 80 degrees now feels cool.

Special note to Roger Leroy: Aren’t you glad I condensed these into one post instead of dragging it out and posting them one at a time? Thanks for enduring the food post, sweet daughter of mine.

Happy Labor Day weekend to all!