Hey everyone, I hope you are having a great day today, getting back into “normal.” Whats normal?!?!?! Normal for you and normal for me may be two different things. One thing I have noticed over the years is that we are all Mom’s. We are ALL striving to do the same thing…raise our families as best we know how.
Diverse mom’s….same kind of crazy:)
No matter what we do…whether we have one child or ten children…life is crazy. Crazy and busy. We all have different levels of things going on. Mine may be like or unlike yours but we share the same struggles, the same things to overcome, the same day to day activities…its all the same….crazy and fun! I like to use the comment “It’s fun fun!” Along with the emoji with the rolling of the eyeballs…because sometimes I have to convince myself that what I do is fun. Sometimes it just takes longer to get it:) So when I say those words to my friends, they know that life is crazy and we WILL get through it. You just put that smile on your face and it will come if you let it.
Okay, back to my blog post…..this year we made our Jesus cake again. We try and make it every year but sometimes life happens and we don’t. What is hard is that we have a birthday right before Christmas so to have cake two times along with all of the sweets and treats can be a lot…this year we made it early, intending to use it for our cookie exchange but we never did. I froze it and when we were celebrating for New Years I pulled it out and we had it.
The cake takes some time to make. I use a springform pan like for a cheesecake to make my layers large. The bottom layer is chocolate cake made normal and baked. We then freeze that layer on a plate. The next is either cherry chip or strawberry dyed with red food coloring. Bake it and freeze that. Then the top layer is white cake dyed with green. Freeze that and then move on to making your frosting.
We make a boiled flour icing.
1 cup milk and 6 T of flour. Mix together in a saucepan and cook until thickened. Stir continually with a whisk. This will get very thick…you want the lumps gone. Then cool. We usually set it in a window…because it is cold this time of year or we put in the refrigerator to speed up the process.
Then beat together: 1 cup shortening, 1 cup granulated sugar and 1/2 tsp vanilla. Then add the flour mixture…it will become fluffy after 5 minutes or more.
What we like to do because it isn’t pure white….we like to frost it with the boiled icing to get a good coating. Then we freeze it again. Then take a container of cool whip and coat the cake smooth. This gives it a good clean coating of icing.
Freeze this solid so that you can decorate the top.
In the center of the top we take a star cookie cutter and lay it carefully down. Mix yellow food coloring and sugar together to make yellow sugar. Then carefully sprinkle that on the cake to make a star. Gently push down the sugar to make it stick. Then use a smaller heart cookie cutter and make red sugar hearts all around the top edges of the cake. These are all going to symbolize things.
When you are ready to present your cake place a large red candle in the center and give each of the people present a smaller birthday candle.
Print off the pdf that explains the presentation of the cake and you are done! This would be great to make into 3 or 4 smaller separate cakes and given to families for the holiday season.
I hope you enjoy and maybe will add this to your families tradition next year. Be blessed today and remember Motherhood is fun fun! Keep saying it with a smile and eventually it will stick.
