Sunday Cake

This week's Sunday Cake is in honor of the 45th anniversary of Woodstock.  Magic that happened August 15, 16 and 17, 1969 in a field in the Catskills.  I have always wished I had been there, been a part of those three days of peace and music.

So in honor of a little music festival that is still stardust, still golden, we made a tie-dyed cake today!

I used a box mix, exchanging the egg whites, oil and water for whole eggs, butter and milk. 

I separated the batter into six bowls and colored each batch a different color.
 

Larry and I added our artistic touches!  I did the peace signs and he did the writing.

 I frosted it with white icing and lots of sprinkles!

And there you have it!  Our tie-dyed Woodstock cake.  It is beautiful, delicious and absolutely groovy.

Birthday Cake!

Yesterday afternoon, we had a birthday party lunch for Mama and Daddy.  Daddy's birthday was the 11th and Mama's will be on the 30th.  Daddy's favorite cake is chocolate so I decided I'd make them a chocolate birthday cake!  I chose Ree's Best Chocolate Sheet Cake. Ever. recipe but I changed it up a little and used two 9-inch round cake pans instead.  Then I placed it on my vintage Tupperware cake plate, just like the one Mama always had, and poured about a bazillion sprinkles on top.

By the way, I made up the delicious frosting and then I ate the whole bowl with a spoon so then I made another batch and frosted this cake.  I'm kidding!  It is ridiculously tasty and chocolatey fudgey, though!

Photography by Ami!

Ingredients

FOR THE CAKE:
2 cups Flour
2 cups Sugar
1/4 teaspoon Salt
4 Tablespoons (heaping) Cocoa
2 sticks Butter
1 cup Boiling Water
1/2 cup Buttermilk
2 whole Beaten Eggs
1 teaspoon Baking Soda
1 teaspoon Vanilla 
 
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FOR THE FROSTING:
1-3/4 stick Butter
4 Tablespoons (heaping) Cocoas
6 Tablespoons Milk
1 teaspoon Vanilla
1 pound (minus 1/2 Cup) Powdered Sugar

Preparation Instructions
  
In a mixing bowl, combine flour, sugar, and salt.

In a saucepan, melt butter. Add cocoa. Stir together.
Add boiling water, allow mixture to boil for 30 seconds, then turn off heat. Pour over flour mixture, and stir lightly to cool.
In a measuring cup, pour the buttermilk and add beaten eggs, baking soda, and vanilla. Stir buttermilk mixture into butter/chocolate mixture. Pour into two round cake pans and bake at 350 degrees for 20 minutes.
While cake is baking, make the icing.  Melt butter in a saucepan. Add cocoa, stir to combine, then turn off heat. Add the milk, vanilla, and powdered sugar.  Stir together and pour over warm cake.
Cut into slices, eat and totally wig out over the fact that you’ve just made the best chocolate cake. Ever.

Our latest finds

We skipped our usual Saturday morning full of yard sales yesterday and went up to an estate sale in Barnesville that Brian told us about last week.  We always search for the ones around Warner Robins but this one was listed under Macon so we would've missed it.  Thanks, Brian!  We didn't get very much (everything was way overpriced!) but we enjoyed looking at the enormous collection of 50's and 60's items that this family had!  They had a house, a garage apartment and a stand-alone apartment slap full of stuff.

I was able to get the pair of hippie orange mugs that I wanted, though!  I couldn't believe they were still there.  The blue lamp that I wanted wasn't.  :(  I just love these mugs!  They were marked both for $6 but yesterday everything was 25% off so I got 'em for $4.50!

 I got both of these adorable little coffee mugs for $1.50!
 

Larry got all this military stuff at a church sale and a yard sale in Macon!  We go in search of anything vintage, really, but we focus on the two P's --- Pyrex and patches!  :)  Larry has collected hundreds of military patches in the past several months.  He had a collection of thousands once upon a time and we're just trying to get some of them back.  We've been really amazed at the stuff we're finding out there!  For cheap!!
 

I still have a bit of a problem with pretty pillowcases.  :)

I got this pillow case for $5 on eBay to cover our memory foam body pillow.  I think it's a perfect match for our new quilt!

My new old tea glass that cost me all of 75 cents at a church sale!

I just can't resist a coffee mug!  Especially one with daisies on it.

And I found this little beauty when I walked out in the backyard this morning.  

Banjo's house

Larry and I decorated Banjo's doghouse today.  We glued wooden letters onto it spelling out things about Banjo (like LICK and the very first word he learned...POTTY.  Ha!), our names, our birthplaces, the towns we grew up in and every town Banjo has been to.  We even took seashells and spelled out JEKYLL.  I think it turned out so cute!

Larry wanted my new job on there, too.  F-15 VPP.  And John 3:16, of course, THE best verse in the Bible if you ask us!  Leesburg is all scrambled up because that's where we met and as Larry said, that's where I turned him all upside down.  Awwwww.  So there are a couple of letters in there that are upside down. :)

We like it!  We still need to work on the inside and I still want to paint little banjos on the outside.  And some peace signs, of course.

Sunday Cobbler

Today's Sunday Cake is brought to you by the mound of peaches in my kitchen.  I made SEVEN cobblers, one for us and six for neighbors.  Larry's been out this afternoon delivering them.  $18 for a box of peaches at Mr. Brown's place is gonna end up feeding a bunch of families, depending on what I decide to do with the 27 peaches we still have left.

My peach cobbler recipe is a combination of Paula Deen, my mama and me.  It's foolproof.  And you don't have to use Elberta peaches, Aimee!  :)

Larry peeled ALL those peaches for me.  Sweet thang.

4 cups peeled, sliced peaches

2 cups of sugar, divided

1/2 cup water

1 stick of butter

1 1/2 cups of Bisquick

1 1/2 cups of whole milk

Ground cinnamon and sugar, optional for the top

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Combine peaches, 1 cup of sugar and the water in a saucepan and mix well.  Bring to a boil and simmer for 10 minutes, until the peaches are good and soft.  Remove from the heat.

Put the butter in a baking dish and place in the oven to melt.

Mix remaining cup of sugar, Bisquick and milk slowly to prevent clumping.  Pour mixture over melted butter.  Do not stir.  Spoon the peaches on top, gently pouring in some of the syrup.  Sprinkle the top with ground cinnamon and sugar, if using.  The batter will rise to the top during baking.  Bake for 40 minutes.  

You can serve it with whipped cream or vanilla ice cream but seriously, this cobbler needs no garnishment.  It is delicious all by itself.

Paula's recipe calls for flour, my mama uses Bisquick.  So I use Bisquick.  I have a cinnamon sugar grinder that I use, too.  You can use just cinnamon if you want to or nothing on top at all.  I mean, it's that good.  Really.  Magic.  In yo' mouf.

Life's just peachy!

After spending the morning in fellowship with a couple of sweet families in our Family Promise program at church, Larry and I hit a couple of estate sales and yard sales.  At one estate sale, while I was in the kitchen finding Le Creuset pieces, Larry was out in the garage negotiating on an old Army footlocker.  They wanted $250 for the footlocker.  Larry talked to them for a few minutes and $25 later, we loaded that thing up on the truck!  We bought a footlocker last Saturday at a yard sale for $20, turned around and sold it on eBay to a guy in Australia for $149!  We couldn't believe it.  I hope this one does just as well!  I picked up a Le Creuset cast iron frying pan for $10 and a vintage Suzy's Zoo Christmas mug for $2.  And then it got hot as navy blue blazes so we decided we'd go on down to Montezuma to meet Mama and Daddy at Brown's Farm Market to get some of Georgia's famous Elberta peaches.  I seriously love these things, I wait all year for them and I keep bags of 'em in my freezer year-round so that I can make cobblers in the dead of winter.  They are sweet, they are juicy, they are pretty much God's gift to the state of Georgia.  And they are MINE come the end of July.  

 Here they are in all their velvety lusciousness

 

 Gorgeous zinnias!

 Beautiful zinnias just 10 cents a stem!

Since today was the first day of Elberta season and since everybody pretty much loses their dang minds when the Elbertas arrive, it was crowded.  Very crowded.  Like you-couldn't-hardly-turn-around-without-bumping-into-somebody crowded.  But that's all right when you're in Montezuma.  Whoever you bump into, you're probably kin to 'em anyway.  Or at least you know somebody kin to 'em. 

After we met up with Mama and Daddy, Larry went to get some peach ice cream while I grabbed peaches and purple hull peas and fresh brown eggs and peppers and we got out of there pretty quick.  As we were leaving, we ran into a Facebook friend we'd never met in real life and that was such a treat.  I know she reads my blog, so hey, Charlotte!  It was great seeing you today!

We went back to Mama and Daddy's house and Mama and I washed, picked and bagged the peas.  When I was a kid, summertime was the time to shell peas and snap beans on the front porch.  Nowadays, you usually buy 'em already shelled but you still have to pick the bad ones out.  Here are my sweet mama's hands bagging up my peas for me.  Don't y'all just love her beautiful ceramic Kohler sink??  I do!  I tease her about getting that sink AFTER I'd moved out.  I don't think I would have minded washing all those dishes if we'd had that sink.

We sat a while and visited and then came back home, bringing all that stuff we got at Mr. Brown's plus some Silver Queen corn Mama and Daddy picked up for us at Chase's Farm a couple of weeks ago.

My ladybug kitchen timer just went off.  You know what that means!  My cobbler is done.  :)  Summertime in Georgia --- a little peachy, a little corny and a whole lot of fun!

Another day in our life

Our yard salin' pretty much got rained out this morning so after we braved four or five, we headed up to Smiley's.  Larry checked on some military patches for his collection and I checked out DD Country Kitchen's little store.  They had all kinds of goodies!  I got a pound of blueberries (and I put some into some pancakes tonight for supper) and jars of pickled red cabbage, stewed tomatoes, spaghetti sauce and sweet corn.  We go to Smiley's in search of patches and old Pyrex and  sometimes we find something unexpected! Like my friend, Debbie, who we ran into today!  :)  We'd all gone to the same estate sale this weekend, too.  I picked up a bottle of super expensive Estee Lauder stuff for old lady eyes in a mixed bag of stuff for $3 and a handheld Shark vac for $5.  And I got the most adorable vintage handpainted serving tray at a church sale this morning.  I'll be adding it to my Etsy shop.

This past week was my first official week on my new job and we were busy, busy, busy getting our areas ready for the big inspection that's taking place next week.  I told 'em it'll be like a wedding.  The rehearsal is always total chaos but the wedding goes off without a hitch.  When it comes down to crunch time, folks are gonna do what they are supposed to do.  I think we'll do great on the inspection.  I love my new job.  I guess I've just gotten used to working in the heat because I nearly froze to death (....do you wanna build a snowman??) all week.  I actually had to step outside the office about a dozen times to warm up.  I'm sure I will get used to my new environment quick like and in a hurry when that humidity and heat return next week.  

We got a new Nikon camera last week and I set my Smiley's stuff on the counter and took a picture of it with the new camera.  I think it takes great pictures!  I can't wait to go on a trip!  We're talking about packing up a tent and a couple of sleeping bags and heading up to High Falls the first cool weekend we have.  I'm really looking forward to that.  And possibly another beach trip before the summer's gone.  This time down to Jacksonville to visit Larry's aunt and uncle.  

I bought a ceramic pumpkin and a Santa mug today, too.  It won't be long!