Easy Butterscotch Cake

I've been buying cookbooks in thrift stores for a few years. One of the first ones I bought had a recipe for a butterscotch tea cake, and when I first tried to make this, I just took out the nuts and followed the recipe as close as I could. It still counts as my own recipe if that's all I did to change it, right?

I think so, and it's a good cake that even my dad likes, so it's going on the blog.

RECIPE:
- 1 box yellow cake mix
- 1 box instant butterscotch pudding
- 3 eggs
- 1/2 cup oil
- 1 cup water
- Cinnamon sugar

Combine first 5 ingredients in a mixer

Pour batter into a greased tube pan

Sprinkle cinnamon sugar all around the top and swirl it with a knife

Bake at 350 for 55-60 minutes

Yes, we use a Dairy Queen cake holder.

This cake is decorated with powdered sugar, but it doesn't need it. It can also be made into cupcakes instead.

Ginger Chicken

This kind of food is my favorite kind, even beating sweet stuff and McDonalds fries. Since I usually stick to the same thing when we order it, worried that I won't like something new and my parents would have wasted their money, I marked a lot of stir-fry recipes in all of the cookbooks in the house, just to find something that I'd like to try.

This came from a Taste of Home magazine, where it was originally a pork tenderloin recipe for two. It's good with pork, but my dad and I made it even better, and to feed our family. It isn't as good as what I order when we go out, but it's good enough that my brother, who is as much of a picky eater as I am, eats the chicken bits.

RECIPE:
- 1 or 2 tablespoons cooking oil
- 2 pounds of meat, chicken or pork tenderloin, cut into cubes
- 2 teaspoons minced garlic cloves
- 6 tablespoons soy sauce
- 1 teaspoon sugar
- 1/2 teaspoon ginger
- 2 cups water
- 6 teaspoons cornstarch
- Lots of white rice

Heat the oil in a skillet on medium-high heat.

Add meat and garlic. Stir-fry until the chicken is no longer pink.

Combine soy sauce, sugar, and ginger in a bowl, and add it to the skillet. Lower the heat to medium.

Combine water and cornstarch and add it to the skillet.

Cook for another 1 or 2 minutes.

Serve with hot cooked rice.

We usually put about half a bag of frozen carrots in this, but that's optional.

For those of you who only need one or two servings, I copied the recipe from the magazine so you didn't have to do math. Follow the same recipe with these numbers:

- 1 tablespoon oil
- 1/2 pound meat
- 1/2 teaspoon garlic
- 2 tablespoons soy sauce
- 1/4 teaspoon sugar
- 1/8 teaspoon ginger
- 1/2 cup water
- 1 1/2 teaspoons cornstarch

Eggnog Bread

Christmas is stressful for a lot of people. Since I am constantly stressed for no reason, giving me a reason is just a meltdown waiting to happen. My dislike of Christmas music and cold weather doesn't help.

But even with the stress, and the cold, and the music, and the inevitable breakdown, I don't hate Christmas. I just hate the Christmas season. On Christmas day, my stress goes back down to normal levels, and I can enjoy my family and the lights and the food.

Until then, I have to come up with coping mechanisms. Last year, it was distracting myself with video games. This year, it's eggnog. So I found a recipe using eggnog, changed it, and my test subjects loved it.

RECIPE

- 2 1/2 cups flour
- 3/4 cup sugar
- 1 tablespoon baking powder
- 1 teaspoon nutmeg
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 beaten egg
- 1 1/4 cups eggnog
- 1/3 cup oil

Mix the flour, sugar, baking powder, nutmeg, and salt.

Mix the egg, oil, and eggnog.

Combine the two mixes and pour into 2 greased loaf pans. The book I got the original recipe from says "8x4x2-inch" loaf pans. I am terrible at judging pan measurements, so I used the easiest ones to reach and it turned out fine.

Bake at 350* for 40 or 50 minutes

Don't eat it without a plate or a napkin, because it leaves a lot of crumbs. This bread tastes even better with butter, just like a lot of breads.

Nutmeg Sugar Cookies

This is Christmas time, and it has been since Halloween, but with Thanksgiving behind us I thought I should start off the Christmas cookie collection with my own Christmas cookie recipe.

Nutmeg is one of my favorite spices. I put it in my tea, my pies, and when I found the recipe this one is based on, I decided I needed to put it in my cookies. Then I saw that that recipe was supposed to be rolled out and cut, and decided not to.

When I was first trying this recipe, I forgot how much flour I put in. As it turns out, not as much as I needed. So I changed the amount of flour from the original recipe and called it mine.

RECIPE
- 1/2 cup softened butter
- 1/2 cup shortening
- 1 1/2 cups sugar
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 teaspoon nutmeg
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1 cup sour cream
- 1 egg
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 3 1/2 cups flour
- A small bowl, a spoon, and extra sugar

Mix the butter and shortening until they're combined. Add the sugar, nutmeg, baking soda, and salt. When it's all combined, add the sour cream, egg, and vanilla. Add the flour last.

Scoop out the cookie dough and roll each ball in the bowl of extra sugar.

Bake at 350* for 10 minutes, and then they should look like this:

Raspberry Pear Pie

Since I started this blog, I have slowly realized that I prefer to use paper instead of the internet for my recipes. It's more fun to rip old papers and use them as bookmarks than to bookmark internet pages and search all your saved links for the one recipe you have all the ingredients for. I'll still do Pinterest recipes, but I have more fun with books.

Now, time to talk about the first recipe that I can call mine.

I'm not a pie eater, but I like to make them. I found this one in a book my mom picked up years ago, and altered it a little to make it easier to make. Since Thanksgiving usually has pie, I say that this is technically season-appropriate.

RECIPE

- 3 pears, skinned and chopped. Canned pears won't work.
- 1 tablespoon lemon juice
- 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1/2 cup sugar (3/4 cup for extra sweet pie)
- 3 tablespoons flour
- 1/2 tablespoon cornstarch
- 1 cup partially-thawed frozen raspberries
- 1 deep dish pie crust

Cover the pears with the lemon juice and vanilla. Add the flour, sugar, and cornstarch, and mix it as much as you can while keeping the pears as solid as possible. Pour half of the mixture into pie crust. Add the raspberries, then the second half of the pear mix.

For the top crust, mix 1 cup of brown sugar, 1 cup of flour, and 1/4 cup of butter in a mixer and cover the pie with that. Bake the pie at 400*F for 45 or 50 minutes, or until the crust browns. This pie gets better after a day or so, or at least that's what my mom tells me.

When the pie is finished baking, it should look like this:

And on the inside, it should look like this:

It took me a while to not make the pie runny, or too sweet, but I got it right this time. I have more recipes that I've altered from books and magazines, so there should be more that I'm going to post here. I even have recipes that aren't desserts.

Updates will probably be a little more frequent now. I'll finally deserve to have a food blog.

Blueberry Cream Cheese Pound Cake

It's been years since I did anything for this blog. I haven't stopped baking, I just switched to cookbooks instead of the internet. More importantly, I've been looking for jobs, and while I am still unemployed, I took a proofreading course on UniversalClass and am working for a certificate through ACES.

But, since no one wants to hear about proofreading on a baking blog, I'll just post the recipe now.

Blueberry Cream Cheese Pound Cake, from justataste.com

My mom says that this is the best cake I've ever made. I say that I'm glad the effort was worth it.

The cake took a lot of time to prepare, and it would have been easier if I had someone to help with the ingredients. It took about 2 hours to be done, and only 50 minutes was in the oven.

But the end result looked great, and it made my mom happy.



I would have liked this cake, but I'm not a fan of most things involving lemon juice. I had a few bites and then got a mouth full of lemon. I'll replace the lemon juice with water next time, and hope that the lemon peel will have enough lemon flavor that we can taste it without it being too lemony.