Muddy Dirt Cake *EDITED!*

Several years ago, I made a chocolate cake for my daughter’s birthday. Nothing special, really - just a chocolate cake that I was intending to frost with chocolate frosting.

You know what they say about intentions and the road to hell, right?

I’m not sure how it happened, but the cake would not come out of the pans. YES, I greased and floured the pans; I’m a Goddess in the Kitchen, remember? For whatever reason - whether the oven temperature was off or the humidity was wrong or the moon was in retrograde - those cakes dug in and hung on, and the only way I could get them out of the pans was in pieces.

There I was with a recipe’s worth of cake bits. Frustrated, but entirely undaunted (by then, I’d learned to look at challenges as just that - challenges - and to not let myself get too worked up), I came up with a plan. I further crumbled the bits and put them in a glass dish. Then I put together a couple of batches of chocolate pudding; the cook-and-serve kind because, really? Instant? Not so much. (And yes, I use pudding mixes. Like brownies, the stuff from the box just comes out consistently better.) Once the pudding had chilled, I folded it into the cake bits, blopped a little bit of whipped cream on top and voilla! Muddy Dirt Cake. Though it wasn’t PRETTY, the dirt cake went over HUGE with the under-five set. The grown-ups seemed to like it pretty well, too.

I’ve made this cake on purpose several times since then. Sometimes I use boxed cake mix, sometimes I start from scratch, but I always use Jello or Royal cook and serve chocolate pudding for the “mud” component. My family doesn’t require theatrics, but if they did, I would pretty this up by serving it in a clean (preferably glazed) flower pot and sticking either sugared or silk flowers in. You could make it more kid-friendly (as if it’s not enough already!) by mixing in some gummy worms and putting some candy bugs on the top. Either way, this is stupid-easy yumminess at its finest.

Edited to include this photo of Punkin’ Pie’s 11th birthday cake, complete with silk flowers and gummy worms.  The girls came to the table and didn’t know where the cake was until I pointed it out to them.  It was a HUGE hit:

Salad Days

I’m trying to be more mindful about what I eat. Since my work schedule is really interfering with my exercise routine, and since I’m currently exerting about 25 more pounds of force on the Earth than I’m comfortable with, I’ve decided to start being far more discriminating about what I do or do not eat. To that end, I’ve started eating a lot more greens.

Now, I have been - in the past, mind you - the kind of person who’s ALWAYS been happy to eat salad because I used all those lovely veggies merely as vehicles for dressing: usually Italian dressing, and usually a lot of it. Of course, that paradigm isn’t going to do anything about helping me meet my healthy eating goals, so I’ve had to come up with a way to change the way I approach a bowl of lettuce. What I need is a dressing that can be drizzled sparingly, but that packs a wallop of flavor.

Enter my dear friend, Organic Mama. She and I share not only a passion for language, but a passion for cooking, as well. She’s been inviting me to her Passover Seders for years now, and every year she indulges me by serving this dressing with the salads. It’s SERIOUS yumminess, it’s kicky enough to get me through a field of greens with as little as a tablespoon or so of dressing, and it really needs to be shared.

1/2 cup olive oil
1/6 Balsamic vinegar
1/6 apple cider vinegar
3 tablespoons maple syrup
1 tablespoon stone ground mustard
1 clove crushed garlic
1/8 teaspoon black pepper
salt to taste

Mix all ingredients together in a carafe or jar with a tight fitting lid and shake it well. I alter the recipe both by doubling it (it’s easier to pour out 1/3 of a cup of the vinegars than to figure out how much 1/6 would look like) and by grating the garlic cloves instead of crushing them; I’m overly fond of garlic, and I find that grating it allows the garlic to more uniformly float in the suspension. I often forget the salt and pepper, too, but I’ve not found that to diminish the yumminess in any way, shape, or fashion.

Enjoy!!