Chocolate Cake with Chocolate Fudge Frosting and Strawberry Ice Cream Recipes

I've been in the process of going through my blog posts and rounding up all my recipes so I can make a recipe section for the blog. I've realized that I really haven't posted a lot of recipes! This is for several reasons, 1) A lot of the things I make don't actually have recipes- it is me throwing a bunch of stuff into a pan and calling it dinner (this is especially true with pasta) 2) I use lots of recipes from other blogs or allrecipes 3) now that I'm living at home again and my mom is off school for the summer she has retaken over her kitchen and is doing more of the cooking than I am and 3) by the time I get around to blogging about it I'm too lazy to look up my recipe or in more recent cases my mom's recipe. Well I'm going to try to change that and I have 3 recipes for you today! My mom's birthday was last week and my grandma's birthday is next week so we had a combined celebration for them today so I have a cake, icing, and ice cream recipe (a birthday is not a birthday in my family without home made ice cream!).

But before we get to that let's back up some! As I mentioned before we brought home an apple pie from Costco. I was very disappointed in it! The slices of apples were way too big and not even close to being cooked enough, even after we cooked the pie even longer in our oven. I think my dad is right in the idea that there will never be a store bought apple pie that comes even close to my mom's homemade apple pie.
Another fun thing that we got at Costco that I didn't write about in my last post was Larabars! I was so excited because I have never seen a huge box of Larabars at Costco before, especially with 3 awesome flavors in it.
Saturday I really wanted a Green Monster for breakfast but everyone else in my house was sleeping, so I didn't want to turn on the blender and wake everyone else up. So instead I settled for a piece of Cinnamon Raisin Toast with PB&Co Cinnamon Raisin Bread.
Then a little later I snacked on some Strawberry Banana Brothers All Natural Fruit Crisps (also from Costco). The Fruit Crisps are essentially freeze dried fruit and I love love love the freeze dried pears and apples, and was so excited to try the new strawberry banana ones. The bananas were really really good, but the strawberries were not at all. They were really tart and just overall not very appetizing. I also saw on the box that they have freeze dried pineapples? I have never seen these things anywhere except Costco in mass bags of apples and pears (and now strawberry banana), but I am going to have to find these pineapples ones because I love all things pineapple.I don't know why this picture is so blurry but this is what the freeze dried strawberries and bananas look like.
Then a disaster happened- our cable and internet went out! Ahhhhh! My dad got on 2 phones calling the Comcast internet people on one line and the cable on the other. The cable people answered first and said they didn't know what was going on and then the internet people came on and said it was "scheduled maintenance that would last for 3 hours." Who schedules maintenance that leaves everyone without cable and internet on a Saturday afternoon?

Anyways the lack of tv and internet certainly helped motivate all of us to get showered and ready unlike we usually do on a Saturday morning/ afternoon! I then went in search of a quick lunch so my dad and I could go shopping for my mom and grandma's birthday presents. I decided on an Amy's Spinach and Feta Pockt
Amy's never fails me!
I actually got called for a last minute babysitting job for parents that ended up getting free Rascall Flatts concert tickets for that night. So after shopping I ended up eating a quick dinner at 5 so I could head over to babysit. I made an egg sandwich with cheddar cheese on oatmeal bread.
I ended up babysitting until midnight and then came straight home and crashed so I could wake up early for church today. I ate an Odwalla Berries GoMega bar on the way to church.
Then after church my grandparents came over for crab legs! Charlotte patiently waited under the table for us to come eat, and hopefully drop some for her.
We like to fill ourselves up with crab so we only had a small salad to go with them.
My first of several bunches of crab!
You should notice that we eat crabs enough to change into 'crab shirts' after ruining many shirts by butter dripping on them.
And for dessert I made a chocolate cake, but ran out of time before babysitting last night to frost it. So my mom frosted it, she said the ice cream was for her and the cake was for grandma. She made my grandma's chocolate fudge frosting, which essentially tastes and is thick like chocolate fudge. It works really well on one layer 9x13 cakes, and we used it on the layered cake but you have to put it on at the right time because it comes out of the pan melty and really spreadable, so it can slide off the cake, but as it sits it starts to 'harden' and gets to be a more fudge like texture.

Chocolate Cake

3/4 cup butter, softened
1 2/3 cup sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla
2/3 cup cocoa powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
2 1/4 cups flour
1 1/4 cups water

1. Preheat the oven to 350 and grease and flour 2 9 inch pans.
2. Beat the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.
3. Beat in the eggs and vanilla until fully combined.
4. Add the cocoa powder, salt, baking soda, and baking powder and mix well.
5. Add the flour and water a little at a time, alternating between the two until everything is combined well together.
6. Pour the batter into the prepared pans and bake for about 40 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean.

Chocolate Fudge Frosting

3/4 cup or butter
1/2 cup cocoa powder
1/3 cup milk
1 1/2 pounds powdered sugar (most boxes are 1 pound)
1 tablespoon vanilla

1. In a saucepan combine the butter, cocoa powder, and milk and bring to a boil.
2. Boil for about a minute (it might look separated but that's okay)
3. Add the powdered sugar and vanilla.
4. If you are frosting a 9x13 cake in the pan just pour it on and spread it out and you are done! It will cool and 'harden.' If you are doing a layered cake you might let it sit a little before you start trying to do the middle and sides of the cake so it doesn't just ooze off as soon as you put it on.

Of course what is a birthday cake with out ice cream to go along side! My dad made the strawberry ice cream last night! We make ice cream for every birthday, my grandpa has the best vanilla ice cream recipe that is delicious all by itself but also is a great base for any kind of ice cream! I'll go ahead and give you guys the vanilla recipe and then you can make just about anything from that!
Papa's Country Vanilla Ice Cream
4 eggs beaten
2 ¼ cups sugar
3 cups whipping cream
6 cups half and half
4 ½ tsp vanilla
½ tsp salt

1.Gradually add and beat sugar to the eggs
2.Beat until mixture is very stiff
3.Add remaining ingredients and mix thoroughly
4.Pour into gallon freezer and freeze as directed

For Fresh Fruit Ice Cream
-Substitute 4 cups puree sweetened fresh fruit or 3-12 oz packages frozen fruit, thawed and mashed for 4 cups of half and half in recipe. Reduce sugar in the recipe to 1 ¾ cups and use only one tsp vanilla.

I am babysitting tomorrow, Tuesday, and Wednesday so it will be a kind of busy next couple of days, I hope everyone has had a great weekend and has a great upcoming week!

Back from Ohio

So I got back from Ohio last night! It was really fun and I'm glad that I got to go. The week was filled with lots of junk food- tons of birthday cakes and pies along with chips and brownies haha. For the most part I just chilled with my cousins and my family. We had mass birthday celebrations, starting with Braden's birthday party on Saturday night. He had a Cars themed party and had an awesome Lightning McQueen cake.


Here are my cousins and I chilling at Braden's b-day bash! A pretty awful picture but the only one I managed to get of me, Coleen, and Jenna!Then on Sunday we had another birthday celebration for everyone else who had birthday's previously or coming up soon! We had some awesome strawberry pie made by my great aunt.
And of course another birthday cake for my cousins and my grandpa! It was pretty delicious- half was vanilla and half was chocolate and I had some of both throughout the week.
On Monday Leesa, Jenna, and Coleen all had to leave to go back to school and work. Poor Coleen is still in school for another month for her spring semester classes!

Tuesday we drove across the river to West Virginia to go to Hillbilly Hot Dogs. Apparently it was on the Food Network on Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives. It was definitely an experience! It is decorated like a rundown hillbilly shack in West Virginia (which is kind of exactly what it is!) You order your food and then you can take it on one of these 2 old school buses that they have converted into a "dining area"
As for the food- you could get almost anything you could imagine on your hot dog. I got a West Virginia dog which had their special sauce, mustard, onions, and coleslaw.My grandpa's was more interesting- he got a junkyard dog. I don't even know what was on there but it at least sauerkraut, coleslaw, bbq sauce, jalapenos, and who knows what else. He tried to get it without the jalapenos but the guy told him he had to try it with a couple because once you eat them all together it tastes different then you might think- so he stuck 2 on one of the ends hahaha. The guy that owns the place is so nice and he talked to us for a while when we were trying to figure out what to order. I'm really not a big hot dog person but this was totally worth going to for the experience, if you are ever up in the Gallipolis, Ohio area or Huntington/ Point Pleasant, WV area you should definitely check it out.
After our hot dogs we drove down to Point Pleasant to see the Mothman statue! My family has lots of stories of people that were just about to get on or just got off the Silver Bridge before it collapsed so it was fun to go see the Mothman! I got my picture taken with the statue.
And Braden got his taken in the cut out thing. It was so bright outside when you tried to take a picture you couldn't see the screen and really didn't know what you were taking a picture of. My grandpa was taking pictures and took one of me in here too but it isn't on my camera so either it didn't get taken because he couldn't see it or maybe the mothman deleted it!We went into a little souvenir shop thing and got to talking to the owner for a while. He told us that people still see the mothman in the area occasionally and mothman sightings have been reported in other places too (like right before the second plane crashed into the towers on 9-11 and right before that other bridge collapsed up in Minnesota). If you haven't seen the movie or don't know the story behind the mothman check out Mothman Lives. It is pretty interesting even though it is probably all totally made up.

Anyways yesterday we headed back to Virginia and after a long 2 hour stop at Bob Evans (I use to think Bob Evans was just an old people thing but apparently its an Ohio and old people thing and considering my grandparents are both old and from Ohio its their favorite restaurant lol) with the grandparents I finally made it home. I spent all of last night and most of this morning catching up on the internet! Having no internet for a week has really left me behind on everything- I'm all caught up on my all but one of my e-mail accounts, facebook, and twitter, but I don't think I'll ever catch up on all the blogs so I'm just going to skim through the pictures and see if there looks like there is anything interesting! Then I'm going to unpack and do some laundry and clean out a closet downstairs to move some of my stuff into that has just been sitting in the dining room.