For Judah’s recent birthday party I decided to make 4 cake mix boxes worth of cake for the unknown amount of people coming to the party {turns out 47 people came, and this, along with 3 quarts of ice cream pre-cut was plenty!}
I started out with these four cake mix boxes {bought on sale for $1.25 each};
Devil’s Food
Strawberry
Funfetti
White
I doctored up each cake mix as follows;
Devil’s Food Cake Mix
We added a couple handfuls of whole Hershey Kisses into the batter and topped the cake with M&Ms right before putting in the oven. Once cooled it was topped with chocolate icing.
Strawberry Cake Mix
We added some True Lemon powder to the cake mix to make it a strawberry lemon cake. It was topped with lemon icing with grated lemon peel on top.
{sign on this one read: Nerdy}
Funfetti Cake Mix
We added half a pack of 6 oz nerds to the Funfetti cake mix prior to baking. Once cooled and iced we topped it with the remaining nerds. Certainly the most fun and colorful of the cakes, hence the extra pictures of this one!
White Cake Mix
This one was left pretty classic, we added a bit of vanilla and iced without garnish.
Two hours before company arrived I decided to try a new icing recipe Paul had seen online, it was light and delicious – and so unique as it takes flour to make it! You can see the full icing recipe here.
And… because this moment pulls on my heart string every time I look at it, Judah soaking in the love from a house full of people singing him Happy Birthday {he chose the nerdy cake to hold his candles!}
I love this icing recipe! I doubled it and it was just enough to cover the 4 cake mix cakes I made for the party – if you like loads of icing on your cakes you may want to make more. I found the original recipe here and it is noted below, along with the varieties I came up with to go with my fixed up cake mix cakes.
Best Icing Recipe
You need:
- 5 Tablespoons Flour
- 1 cup Milk
- 1 teaspoon Vanilla
- 1 cup Butter
- 1 cup Granulated Sugar (not Powdered Sugar!)
Then you:
- Whisk the flour into the milk in a small saucepan over medium heat. Stir constantly until it thickens. (recipe says you want it brownie mix thickness) Once done pull off heat and let cool to room temperature then add vanilla. As per the recipes recommendation I sat my pan in a bowl of ice to speed up this process. *Also of note; I had some tiny flour bits that did not whisk up smoothly, I left them as it soon gets well beaten and I correctly assumed the beating would take care of those little flour balls.
- While the flour and milk mixture cools down cream the butter and sugar together until smooth. Make sure there is no graininess left from the sugar! {this will be several minutes worth of beating!}
- Add the cooled flour and milk mixture to the butter and sugar mixture. Beat well until it resembles whipped cream. {several more minutes of beating!}
There – now you have a basic, delicious icing for all your cake needs! Since I had 4 cakes to decorate I thought I would play with the icing flavors a bit. I had doubled the above recipe for my 4 cake mixes, so I started out by dividing my icing into 4 parts.
Plain Ol’ Vanilla Icing Recipe - used as made above
Nerdy Icing Recipe – used as made above with nerds sprinkled on top
Lemon Icing Recipe - added a few shakes of True Lemon and a couple drops of liquid stevia to taste. Once iced I grated fresh lemon peel on top. {this went on the Strawberry Lemon cake}
Chocolate Icing Recipe – melted 4 oz quality bittersweet chocolate, let slightly cool so as not to effect the icing and then mixed with the above icing recipe. This was my favorite of the icings! A perfect light yet rich chocolate icing.
We survived our first month of intentional habit building focusing on the habit of thankfulness. This first month went really well – I am thankful for the daily plan I had laid out for myself; I am quite certain I would have given up after a week if I didn’t have a simple activity laid out for each day well ahead of time!
There were some days we skipped – such as eating rice all day long. We ended up having company come over for meals on the days I was planning to eat rice and I decided it wasn’t the best idea to make our company eat that! We also have some thank you cards that haven’t made it to the mail, and our neighbors never did get cookies after I burned the first batch!
But, overall, our focus this month was on being intentional about being thankful and looking at what that meant in various situations and it was good for us all.
I am realizing the value in these habits is important both in teaching them to my children and in modeling it for them.
The teaching of the habits is important; that is, making obvious to them that which we want them to learn.
There are many, many things vying for our children’s attention and it takes a deep understanding of our children’s learning style to effectively teach them that which we want them to know. I think there is great value in laying out for our children what we want them to be grasping.
But then we must be careful to not live counter to that which we are wanting to raise them to be, which is deeply convicting to me.
I’m not pretending to have achieved either; I am a constant student of my children and I am not as consistent in my character as I would like to be.
Sally Clarkson sums it up rather well; “My aspirations and what I can idealize oftentimes far exceed my ability to live up to them in reality. Yet it is in being able to visualize the dreams of my heart and beauty of God’s design that I have found a standard of maturity to move towards.” {from The Mission of Motherhood: Touching Your Child’s Heart for Eternity - highly recommend!}
So, as we wrap up our first month of habit building and look forward to the next 11 months I am encouraged, because even though we missed some days, even though there are still ungrateful attitudes at times there has been progress made in the past 31 days.
February’s habit is the habit of listening to what is being said. The monthly plan will be up in the next day or two and I hope that it will offer inspiration and encouragement to you!
For Judah’s birthday this year we did something a little different – he decided that instead of getting gifts for himself he would ask his friends coming to his party to bring items like socks and underwear for missionary kids. There is a clothing center we know of that provides clothing items for missionaries on furlough and this is where we decided to send the items.
Thanks to our sweet, generous friends we now have a HUGE pile of socks and underwear to mail up to the clothing center. Judah {and Wesley!} are both so excited to be sending these to other little boys and girls and one day this week we’ll be making a special trip to the post office for the boys to mail this off with love.
{A friend of mine does something similar with her girls and I so appreciate her sharing her idea as it inspired my thoughts in this area. So thank you Tracie!}
Happy Birthday my dear Judah!
Your big day has arrived and I am delighted to be able to spend the day celebrating YOU and the masterful Creator who put you together. The last few weeks have been such fun as you have highly anticipated and skillfully counted down the days til this one – the day you turn 5.
This past year with you has been incredible; you have owned our family traditions, you eagerly anticipate milestones and enthusiastically encourage us to celebrate midst the mundane rituals of daily life.
You thoroughly enjoy life and want those around you to enjoy it too.
I have watched you mature this year in a way that is so precious and so convicting to my heart … the most recent example of this maturity was the other night when Wesley’s bed had broken and he had to have his mattress moved to the floor. You asked if your mattress could also go on the floor. Without giving it much thought I said no and while your eyes flooded with tears you sweetly said, “Ok mommy.”
That touched my heart so deeply – you graciously and obediently accepted a ‘no’ answer despite the fact that it very obviously hurt your heart.
I sent you off to get your pajamas from my room and set about working in your bedroom making room for your mattress to fit on the floor too. When you came back expecting to sleep in your bed you were overjoyed to find your mattress on the floor and tightly hugged me.
Sweet boy, I make mistakes as a mom. I speak too harshly, too quickly, too much and sometimes too little. I haven’t, nor shall I ever, master the balance of doing it all well. But regardless of where I do things right or where I fall completely short – the Lord is working in your heart and in your life and it is exciting to witness.
That night as we said our bedtime prayers you prayed and thanked God that your mattress was moved to the floor. After you finished praying you whispered to me; “Mommy, I know you are the one who let me sleep on the floor, but I thought it should be God that I said thank you to. It says in that song ‘In everything give thanks to God’ so that’s why I thought I should thank Him for this. Is that ok?”
I hope you never lose those simple yet profound truths; that every good and perfect gift is from above and in everything give thanks to God.
I love you to the park, to Myrtle Beach, to Chicago, to Canada, to Nigeria, to the moon, to the sun and back my precious newly turned 5 year old. I am so excited to get to know you.
xoxo
Mommy
{The after is still a work in progress!}
We have a rather large bonus room in our house that has doubled as my office/craft space and the guest room and off of that room is a cozy walk in closet with floor to ceiling shelves along one wall.
I wanted to share my closet before and after pictures and while the above before is a bit exaggerated, it is fair to say that the closet has always held my crafting, decorating, writing and gift wrapping supplies in a rather inefficient manner. And the that huge, large room that was once my office/craft space was just SO big that it was never efficiently used.
So one day last week I had the idea of converting the closet into my own office/craft space – thank you pinterest! I love it and have found that I work so much better in tiny little nooks! All of my favorite tools are right within arms reach – Bible study materials, collection of favorite pens, stickers, double sided tape, paints and paint brushes, paper punches, favorite cookbooks – it’s amazing! It’s all right beside a work surface and all neatly tucked behind closet doors.
Eventually I will paint the closet, maybe get a little rug inside it and perhaps a few other minor changes but for now I am very happy with the change!
Eggplant Parmesan
Eggplant was on sale last week so I picked up a large one to create one of our favorite dishes – Eggplant Parmesan. This is my favorite way to eat eggplant {not that I have a world of experience with the gorgeous skinned veggie…} But this dish is superb – eggplant in a sea of cheese?! Yes please! The kiddos loved it too, and the s.l.o.w. eating 3 year old was one of the first one finished! This made enough for our family of 4 to have for dinner and lunch leftovers the next day.
- 1 large eggplant, peeled and sliced
- 2 eggs, beaten*
- 2 cups Italian seasoned bread crumbs*
- 2 cups spaghetti sauce, divided
- 1 lb shredded mozzarella cheese, divided
- 1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese, divided
* I needed extra for coating and breading the sliced eggplant, but it will depend entirely upon the size of your eggplant, so you may not need extra.
** We don’t like sauce and I probably did a little less than 2 cups. Adjust to your family preferences.
- Preheat oven to 350 F
- Dip sliced eggplant in egg, then in bread crumbs and lay on a baking sheet in a single layer. Bake 5 minutes, flip and bake for an additional 5 minutes.
- Spread spaghetti sauce across the bottom of a 9×13 baking dish. Lay eggplant slices in the sauce and top with the two types of cheese. Add more sauce on top of the cheese layer and continue layering ingredients, ending with cheese.
- Bake at 350F for 35 minutes, or until golden brown.
Sharing;
I have been encouraged with our focus on developing the habit of thankfulness through this month. There is much joy in the home when there is thankfulness in the hearts and spending focused time and prayer cultivating thankfulness has impressed upon me the importance – the need – for parents and children to be thankful.
We had a rough week this past week; several major things broke down and will require costly repairs, three trays of cookies intended for our neighbors burned {ironically, to say “thanks for being our neighbor”}, we were sick and several other little things happened – all which served to remind me how desperately we need to cultivate thankfulness.
It is easy to be thankful when someone hands you a beautiful package full of delightful gifts, or when all the traffic lights are green when you’re running late or when your husband makes you the perfect cup of coffee; complete with cinnamon and frothy milk.
But when situations become hard, when the tasks become mundane, when things break down are we then still thankful?
Those challenging times do not immediately inspire feelings of thanks – in fact in my own life I am more prone to blame, get upset or complain in the face of a challenge than I am to stop and give thanks.
But if giving thanks or having an attitude of thankfulness was my response rather than complaining there would be such peacefulness in my life and home and my children would have a much easier time being thankful in all things.
I am thankful that I saw this modeled well in my mother. She had polio as a child and through my early teens suffered several different broken bones as a result of falling. It wasn’t that she was thankful for falling or thankful for another trip to the hospital or another round of physio therapy. But through out her life she had cultivated an attitude of thankfulness that when met with those trials she accepted them with grace and without bitterness or complaint.
It has been an encouragement to me over the years to have had that example and convicting to me as what ideas I will leave my own children with when they think of being thankful.
I want them to see that being a thankful person isn’t something that changes with circumstances. It is a matter of choosing “to give thanks in all things” {1 Thess 5:18}.
As we go forward this week, whether or not you are following along with the monthly habits, I would encourage you to reflect on examples in your life that have exemplified thankfulness and if you cannot think of an example consider becoming that person so that others may look at you and be encouraged.
Sharing on;
Making Your Home Sing
Join us for Gratituesday at Heavenly Homemakers
Above Rubies
“Even after all this time the sun never says to the earth, “you owe me.”
Look what happens with a love like that.
It lights the whole sky.”
Quote by: Hafiz
Over the past several months I have been thinking about the words in Deuteronomy 6;
“These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts.
Impress them on your children.
Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.
Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.
Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.”
{from Deuteronomy 6:6-9 NIV}
It is a serious charge to parents, both encouraging and deeply convicting as to how we ought to be prioritizing our own lives in order to impress God’s commands on our own children.
And then this week I was reading through Hebrews and I got to chapter 8 I stopped and mulled over what I read for ages. Here’s what stood out to me;
“I will put My laws in their mind and write them on their hearts;
and I will be their God, and they shall be My people.”
{last half of Hebrews 8:10 NIV}
I can’t even fully explain how beautifully those two completely different pieces of scripture morphed together in my mind to complement each other and encourage me.
I know the verse in Hebrews is not speaking to parents, in fact it was being spoken of the Israelite people, but it was, to me, such a beautiful and clear picture that while yes we are to be diligent and impress them upon our children it is He that will do the work in them.
It’s not about me. It’s about Him.
And me living like I believe that.
Because me living is me impressing.
But He will do the writing – and the work – on their hearts.
“Therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, put on tender mercies, kindness, humility, meekness, longsuffering; bearing with one another, and forgiving one another, if anyone has a complaint against another; even as Christ forgave you, so you also must do.
But above all these things put on love, which is the bond of perfection. And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to which also you were called in one body; and be thankful.
Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord. And whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him.”
{ our current memory work, found in Colossians 3:12-17 NIV}
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