Cooking with Dannon

Tonite's meal is called dessert. I decided to skip dinner and make a yellow cake with chocolate frosting and then blend it into a milkshake with Andes Mint ice cream!

What to do:

purchase these items:
yellow cake mix
chocolate frosting
Andes Mint ice cream


Make the cake mix as instructed on the box but replace the oil with apple sauce. You cannot taste the difference and don't need the extra calories.


Cook it as directed on the box. When it's done, let it cool-also take out the ice cream so it can begin to soften (multi-task!).


Let it cool as long as you can handle to wait and then cut a piece out. Put frosting on that piece alone-it will not go neatly as the piece will still be warm. (we only frost one piece because the rest of the cake will still be too hot to frost-you're not very patient either.)



Put your piece of cake into a blender with some ice cream and alittle milk. Add sprinkles for prettiness.


Put into a cup and eat with a spoon-or just drink it... if you're really impatient, the cake will have melted the ice cream to make a more liguidy texture.


Don't leave the kitchen a mess..

After you've enjoyed your shake, frost the rest of the cake once it cools and then freeze it. Once it's frozen, cut it into cubes and throw it into a bag so you can get out mini cakes as often as you want!

Thanksgiving

Well, yesterday was Thanksgiving and it was alot more fun than I expected it to be. We woke up (me about 9:30am and Mike about 11:30pm) to a fresh blanket of wetness. It snowed and snowed but the ground is too warm for it to stick. Yea, that won't last long... High today is like 30. Either way, I took a picture using a different color mode on my camera. The only colors are red, the rest is grayscale. Guess that's what happens when Mike sleeps in, I'm bored, and it's too cold to do anything. :)




Oh, and here's a pic of my street with the same sort of effect. The leaves finially fell last/this week and it's so pretty!



We went over to Jim and Barb Castro's house and there were about 20 other people. Oh, we brought Jarrod with us.

Jarrod was kind enough to take some pictures of Mike and I before we left to drive out to their house (40 miles/75 minutes). Out of about 20, here are the best ones... Note that Mike isn't very good at having a "normal" expression.






The drive out wasn't awful but we didn't expect it to take as long as it took. Once we got there, we were welcomed with hugs and kisses (they're Italian, guess it's normal) and then we hung out for a couple hours in eager anticipation for the wonderful food that was being provided.

After dinner, all of the guys jumped up to do the dishes. It was very sweet of them but soon after everything had been collected Barb told them they were welcome to do something else. I think that she was worried that the china would be broken. :)



We went downstairs and played ping pong. I enjoyed playing against Mike and almost beat him once. When more competition came downstairs, though, I retired to a nearby chair to laugh at everyone else.

Mike had been anticipating taking on Tony Falco at ping pong all week.(not to be confused with his son Anthony or grandson little Anthony) Tony won and Mike will not be able to hear the end of it!


They also played Bingo. Barb's dad calls out Bingo at the local McDonalds so it sounded like a real game. It was very funny.



Before we left, Jarrod chose to show off his artistic abilities and draw a picture of David (yes, on the wall) without looking. I was surprised that everything was in the right place--it didn't really look like David though.


It was a great night. We left about 9:00pm to take the long trek home. We expected it to take longer to get back into the city but it only took an hour. Don't really know how that happened because the traffic was very slow.



We played Christmas/Oldies music and the guys sang dumb and were entertaining.

After the long trip home, we rented Pan's Labyrinth and had Jarrod over to watch it. Interesting movie. Doing things with an artist is always interesting because they think so differently... He brought a whole different perspective to the movie and I was like "what?". I guess they think differently... more abstract... odd.

Oh, the blurry pics were taken by my phone... The nice ones were my camera-though my phone doesn't do too bad.

Fun Week

This was a fun week.

Work is going very well. Lots of areas where I'm growing but alot areas where I can look back at how I handled situations and see how the Lord has grown me. It's been encouraging.

I went to Supper Solutions yesterday. I was nervous about how it would be an it was fun. --In case you don't know what that is, it is a place where you go make a certain number of meals. They have all the ingredients and recipes and you just cook. They even clean up! I'm not sure whether it's as cost effective but it will help us have actual meals instead of just ground beef with cheese on it or something. :)

I played soccer with the Moody Women's Soccer Club yesterday. I've been playing with them on Saturday afternoons all semester and it's fun. Not very "high intensity" but enjoyable. We did my favorite drill: me kick corner kicks and everyone else try to get them into the goal

Since soccer brings me such joy, I will allow it 2 paragraphs. I played again today on my city team. It was our last game and we only had 8 players. Luckily, I had invited a friend from Moody to play with us and that put us at 9 people-which is the minimum you can play with. I think that I played well, considering the circumstances. I can always see areas where I need to grow though.

After soccer I rollerbladed to Moody (because it was a BEAUTIFUL day) and hung out with my friend Beki for a couple hours.

Came home and ate some chocolate (not just chocolate, but chocolate with caramel and brownies) ice cream for dinner.

Life is good. :)