Happy Friday everyone!! Also, Happy Mother’s Day (early) to all of you lovely mothers out there!! What a great job you’re doing, raising beautiful children 🙂 I know it’s not an easy job, and sometimes it’s thankless and you wonder if you’re making a difference. Trust me, you are!!
My daughter loves…I mean really LOVES the movie Frozen. We watch it (almost) daily. She and my son have even started watching it in Spanish & French. They think the words sound funny & mostly just sit back and laugh at it. I think my daughter is fluent in French now!
In the movie, there’s a scene where Elsa and Anna are observing their first party. As they stand awkwardly and watch everyone dance & enjoy themselves, they make small talk. I believe Anna (I could be wrong) wonders “what’s that amazing smell?” Then, both girls sigh together “CHOCOLATE!”
What is it about women and chocolate? It can pretty much make any day better. Earlier this week, we went over to a friend’s house for dinner. When invited over, you of course must offer to bring something, so I volunteered to bring dessert. I had recently found this yummy looking cake on Pinterest a few days earlier and I was dying to try it out!
I think I’ve mentioned before that my hubby gets nervous when I try new things on our friends. I guess he thinks I’ll mess it up and poison our friends or something. My thinking on this is, if you can’t practice on your friends, who can you practice on? And who better to try new things with?? If they’re really good friends, they’ll let you know if it’s terrible.
Well, to my delight, I found that the Cracker Barrel Coca Cola Chocolate Cake is our hostess’ favorite dessert at Cracker Barrel. I was happy, because she could offer a true taste test for the cake. I was also nervous, because she could offer a true taste test for the cake!!
Confession. This was my first time to make a homemade cake from scratch. Yes, if you’ve followed my blogs, you may occasionally see the cakes I decorate for friends and family. And now you know my dirty little secret…I always, always use cake mixes. They just seem so much easier and they taste pretty good (in my opinion), so I just never experimented with made from scratch cakes. I was interested and nervous to see how this one would turn out.
The cake wasn’t hard to make at all. Sure, it probably took 10 minutes instead of the 5 minutes a cake mix takes to whip up. Sure, I may have had to buy a few more ingredients (most I already had on hand). However, I was able to brag later on that the cake was MADE FROM SCRATCH!! The recipe was very easy to follow.
It was a huge hit!!! My friend who almost always gets this cake at Cracker Barrel said it was BETTER than their cake! I can’t think of any higher compliment! Well, maybe one more…my hubby got not one, but 2 slices of it!!! If you know him, you know he’s not as crazy about chocolate as I am. I figured he would say it was “too chocolate-y” (which in my mind is NOT possible). However, he loved it!!
The cake was a nice dense texture and not at all dry, which is what I was afraid of. My friend confessed to me later that she was having some of the leftover cake for breakfast…nothing wrong with that! It’s good hot, it’s good cold. It’s good on the first day and it’s good a few days later. It’s just good all around!
This cake will probably start showing up at a lot of church functions. It will most likely start showing up in “The Cake Lady’s” cakes soon. I love the icing, but it’s not one that I can decorate with, so I’ll use my tried and true Wilton buttercream icing to decorate with.
If you love chocolate, this cake is for you. If you are like me and have never made a cake from scratch, this would be a good one to start with. I think you’ll be impressed :).
On a completely unrelated note, my App, Mommy Matters, has gone through it’s first update. It is only available on iPhone, so if you don’t have it yet, just search under “Mommy Matters”, it should be the first one to pop up. You can also search under the developer, Tyler Brassfield. My phone updated it automatically, but some don’t, so check it out and just update it. There were some minor bug fixes and improvements. I believe there have been some font color changes, etc. While in the App store, check out other apps developed by Tyler Brassfield. He is a gifted app developer that is doing a lot of apps for churches and other religious organizations. He also happens to be my “little” brother 🙂
Happy Friday!!! Make it a good one and bake a cake!
Mommy Matters 