How To Make An Alligator Cake

Bug has known for quite some time now that his birthday was in January. Fortunately, he also knew that January came after December and after Christmas.

Unfortunately, his birthday is towards the end of the month, so for a few weeks we had to endure "Is it my birthday YET? It's January! I should be turning four!"

About two weeks before his birthday, we asked him what kind of cake he wanted. The first thing out of his mouth? "Alligator cake mommy!" Not only that, he wanted CHOCOLATE alligator cake.

Huh.

All I have to say is - thank heavens for the Internet!! Turns out that this particular endeavor isn't so hard.

I baked 2 boxes of cake mixes (Duncan Hines devil's food in case you were curious); one in a regular 9x13 rectangular pan, and one in a fluted pan (bundt pan, but not a 'real' bundt pan). Oh, and I also baked lots of cupcakes for Bug to take to school; 6 of them were used for the legs & eyes.

I cut the rectangle into a Christmas-tree like shape (the mouth is the top of the 'tree'), and the bundt cake into thirds. With the leftovers from the rectangle, I added a 2nd layer to the head, and used a bunch of pieces to assemble a tail.



Kind of ugly, isn't it? Very uneven! This is where frosting is your friend. After whipping up a batch, I used it to glue things together & level things out.



Once I'd finished that, I tinted the rest of the icing green (light green mama! dark green alligators are BAD gators! very scary!), I used my icing squirter (how do you like my use of technical jargon) to squirt the stars. Honestly, that's the quickest part of the whole endeavor!

Here's a slightly better overhead shot of him:



I used bamboo skewers (cut into thirds) to anchor the eyes to the cake at the proper angle. The spikes down his back (and the eyeballs) are some generic gummy fish. Because there's nothing like flavored plastic to complete a cake! The teeth & claws are mini-marshmallows. Turns out that if you cut them in half diagonally, they naturally have that 'sharp' point.



And we end with a shot of Bug not-so-patiently waiting for his party to start so he can eat his new friend.

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies

I hear that it's fall somewhere. Not around these parts, at least not yet, so I like to pretend that it is with these cookies. I like to bake them around Halloween time, although this a great pumpkin pie alternative around Thanksgiving as well.

Ingredients
1 cup softened margarine or butter (2 sticks)
3 cups sugar
2 eggs
1 15oz can canned pumpkin*
2 teaspoons vanilla
5 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons nutmeg
2 teaspoons cinnamon
2 12oz bags milk chocolate chips

* For those of you who may be a bit more purist in your cooking, this is about 2 cups of your own homemade pumpkin puree. For those of you who want to learn how to do this, there's a great tutorial here.

1. Preheat the oven to 350F (around 175C) and grease your cookie sheets.

2. Cream the butter & sugar until fluffy. I left my electric mixer in the picture because this is the only time you'll use it.


3. Add all the wet stuff (pumpkin, eggs, vanilla) & stir it all together.


4. In another bowl, add all the dry stuff (flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, nutmeg, cinnamon.) The original directions said to sift it, but I find that just stirring it all together works rather nicely.

Alternatively, do this first and have your little helpers stir it all together while you get all the wet stuff taken care of.


5. Dump the bowl of dry stuff into the bowl of wet stuff. I think you're *supposed* to do this bit by bit, but I just dump it all in there at once. You do have to be bit more careful when you're stirring so you're not breathing the flour, but it works.



6. Stir in the chocolate chips. I prefer to use all milk-chocolate chips, but the store didn't have 2 bags. So this is one bag of milk chocolate & one bag of semi-sweet.



7. Drop by teaspoon or nifty scoop onto your greased cookie sheets. I can get 16 on one well-loved sheet.



8. Bake for as long as they need. In my portal to Hades, that is 8 minutes, followed by about 2 minutes more sitting on the sheet that is now on top of the oven. You want the edges to be set, but not hard. Remove to wax paper/racks/foil to cool completely.

This will make a boatload (60-75, depending on size) of delicious cookies. Enjoy!!

Adventures in Breadmaking - Part II

Find Part I here.

Like I said before, it took me about 2 weeks to figure out what ingredients I really needed and then to actually start using the breadmaker. These have been my efforts over the past month or so.

According to Mr. Coffee's recipe book, a good starter loaf was just plain old White Bread.



And I have to say.... it was very tasty. This was the smallest size - one pound - and it was light, fluffy, and just very good. Even Husband liked it. (The kids are like me. Bread? Eaten!)

Second, I tried a Cherry loaf.



I picked this one to try because you used cherry juice instead of water, and you also added in dried cherries. It's kind of hard to tell scale here, but this was a 1.5 pound loaf. I'd expected it to come out taller than the white bread, but it was the same height. So I had a denser loaf instead.

It did not taste quite as cherry as I'd hoped. The scattered chunks of dried cherries helped with that though. This bread tasted really good when I slathered lots of butter on it & then warmed it in the microwave.

Next up, I decided to try making garlic bread. My Mr. Coffee book did not offer any options, so I scoured the Internet until I found something that sounded promising. (i.e. I had everything in the cupboard already!)

Technically, I still didn't have the correct seasonings, so instead of pulverizing garlic cloves, I just used garlic powder. And a bit of Italian seasoning. But the recipe also called for parmesean cheese, so how could it go wrong?

As it turned out.... the bread tasted good, but it wasn't GREAT all by itself. (Figures that this was the first loaf I was sharing outside of the family!). Perhaps if I had brought garlic butter, it would have gone over better.

In the end, there were leftovers, and I let them stand for a couple of days. Then I sliced them into little slices like this.



The dish in the middle contains olive oil, black pepper, and more Italian seasoning. Made that bread downright YUMMY.

Last night, I decided to try another juice based recipe. And the sweet-bread setting. The result? Orange-cinnamon bread.



I tried this bread because the liquid is orange juice instead of water. (Yes, I'm back to the juice thing.) This loaf finally rose like bread is kind of supposed to! It's not as dense as the cherry or garlic bread was; this had more of the consistency of the white bread. Taste-wise, you can pick up on the hint of cinnamon, but not the orange juice. Bummer.

So far... still in love with the bread machine! Especially the smell when it's baking.

Egg-Free Monsters Jumping on the Bed

Shortly after Bug turned a year old, we figured out he was allergic to eggs. Once we completely cut them out of his diet, his skin started clearing up, and in general he became a much more likeable person. (Or maybe it was the fact that he could crawl. Whatever.)

He hadn't outgrown his allergy by the time we reached his second birthday, which meant I was tasked with making an egg-free cake for him. Because he was going to eat cake! Already he had a far sweeter tooth than Bird did at that age, and he was also old enough to notice that I was not letting him eat cake at other parties. (Not to mention he was getting tired of graham crackers.)

Since he was turning 2, he really had no opinions as to the type of cake he wanted. So I decided to base it off of his favorite book, Five Ugly Monsters - a tale of lots of ugly monsters jumping on the bed & bumping their heads.

Here's how it turned out:



The Recipe
Not sure where I found this, but it was oh-so-easy! Especially for those of us who do NOT make cakes from scratch. Unfortunately, this is not for those who have wheat or milk allergies.

INGREDIENTS
· 1 (5 ounce) package non-instant pudding mix
· 2 1/3 cups milk
· 1 (18.25 ounce) package cake mix
· 2 cups semisweet chocolate chips (optional!)

DIRECTIONS
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Lightly grease one 9 x 13 inch baking pan.
2. Combine chocolate pudding and milk in a saucepan and cook over medium heat until thick, stirring frequently.
3. Remove pan from heat and add in dry cake mix. Mix together and pour into the lightly greased 9x13 inch baking pan.
4. Evenly spread the chocolate chips over the top of the cake. (Note: Do not do this if you plan on frosting the cake later!)
5. Bake at 350 degrees F(175 degrees C) for 40 to 45 minutes. Let cake cool and serve.

Editorial comments - I could only find cookable chocolate or vanilla pudding at the store. I put chocolate pudding in with the chocolate cake mix, and vanilla with the yellow cake mix. Make sure you are reading the labels; they do not necessarily come in 5oz packages.

Now, eggs are apparently one of the things that will make a cake rise, so while this cake is moist & delicious, it is very flat. If you look closely at this shot from the foot of the bed, you can see the chocolate layer - that was from one cake mix, and it's maybe 2 inches wide.



Because of that, the actual bed part is 2 batches - so double all the ingredients.

In order to make the headboard & footboard, I cut the 9x13 cake across into 2/3 and 1/3 pieces Then I used a compass (drawing, not direction) to draw an arc on a sheet of paper, cut it out, and used it as a stencil.

The Frosting
I will unashamedly admit to using chocolate frosting out of a can. There is only so much one can do!

The red is my frosting. (A box or 2 of confectioners sugar, 1 tsp of vanilla, a scoop of Crisco, and enough milk to make it the consistency I wanted.) It took an entire pot of Whilton dye, and an awful lot of a bottle of food coloring to get it that red. (And yes, it had to be red. The boy in the book had a red comforter!) Consequently, it took an awful lot of extra powered suger to thicken the frosting & keep the stuff from looking like stage blood. It was still a little runny, so when I used the straight-tip, the stuff kind of melted into itself, making for a smooth, stripy-looking comforter.

The Monsters
I really wanted monsters that nobody knew. After all, it wasn't like this was a Sesame Street party or anything. Thus began a really long search that ended nowhere. EVERYthing in all of the stores were licensed characters. Apparently we don't make up too many characters of our own anymore.

Finally, as I was falling asleep one night, I remembered owning some monsters. And I also remembered keeping a plastic container of all sorts of plastic creatures. All I had to do was find it in the attic. Thankfully, a couple of hours later, I was successful!

On the bed... the blue monster is Figment in a space suit. The purple & green monsters were from a MacDonalds Happy Meal sometime in the mid-80s. The red monster was from a Wendy's Happy Meal - probably around the same time. I have never been so happy to be a pack rat!

The one licensed character I couldn't avoid is Sully (from Monsters Inc). He wasn't quite tall enough, so I have him propped on some extra pieces of chocolate cake.



The little boy is Harry (not Potter), though Bug was convinced it was him. Even though Bug doesn't have red hair.

Strawberry Bread (or, how to recover when you totally screw up the recipe)

I was trying to create an appetizer from things I (mostly) already had in my refrigerator. When it comes down to it, I was REALLY trying to find a way to use all these lovely strawberries before they went bad:




So naturally I went to Chef Google and asked him how to make strawberry appetizers. After a bit of reading, I decided to make a sauce/frosting out of strawberry cream cheese, sour cream, and a bit of powdered sugar.

As far as amounts go..... I was pretty much just throwing things into the bowl until they tasted good. But judging from the picture, I used about half of an 8-oz tub of cream cheese, and a little more than half of an 8-oz container of sour cream. There are a couple tablespoonfulls of powdered sugar in there.



Now, while the mixture tasted good, it was a little too runny for my needs, so I popped it into the freezer for about 10-15 minutes.

Then I used my frosting squirter to pipe it onto the strawberries.



Now, I was worried about the sauce getting too soft again, so I put the whole tray into my freezer - they would have about 30 minutes to set, and would very easily soften before it was time to eat them.

Except.

Well, except that I guess I didn't put the tray into the freezer too well, because when I opened the door, the entire thing came leaping out to greet me!

Thankfully, the lid was on tightly, so nothing fell out, but it definitely wasn't pretty anymore.

Out came the chopper!! Slowly, I turned my not-so-pretty strawberries into a lovely pulverized mess.





Then I spooned some of the strawberry pulp onto a triangle of crescent roll....



... rolled them, and baked them.




Oh my word, they were SUPERB!!! A very tasty treat. More like a bruch food than an appetizer. I'd definitely make these again.

A Castle Cake for a Princess Party

Note - Bird turned four in May 2007. She loved that party so much that she wants a semi-sequel for her 5th birthday. Part of that means another castle cake, so I'm trying to remember how I did the first one!

Bird has loved pretty, sparkly things for as long as I can remember. She loves to dress up - even if that just means wearing her normal dresses (and not costumes or the like.)

So when she turned 4 last year, it wasn't exactly a surprise that she wanted a princess birthday party. Thankfully, it was just generic princesses, so we had free reign to do all sorts of non-Disney things.

Husband decided to turn our dining room into a castle. He got the really big appliance boxes from our local Home Improvement store, and spent his time the night before the party putting this together:



It kept him busy while I worked on decorating this masterpiece.



Bird's only real request for the party (aside from the princess theme) was that she wanted a castle cake. At first, I thought she meant something easy - bake the cake in a castle-shaped pan. Even nicer - it was a current pan at that time, so it only necessitated a trip to the craft store to buy it.

But no. Although she thought it looked pretty, she said she wanted something that looked like a castle. And castles aren't flat. Which left me rather stumped.

Thankfully, a friend pointed me in the direction of this site, and I found all sorts of castle shaped cakes. Let me tell you, there are some talented people out there!! I saw all sorts of configurations - some of which I figured I could do, and lots more that I couldn't. I had it narrowed down to a couple of easy ones, (ones I actually knew how to frost) and finally called her over to pick the type she wanted.

Except I forgot to close the window for this one. The one I pointed out to Husband cause I thought it was so pretty. The one I figured I couldn't really do in a million years.

The one where she actually said "Oh Mommy, that one is BEAUTIFUL!!!" (Seriously. She was only 3 and she actually uttered those words. How could I deny her?!)

There were several hurdles requiring my attention:

- I did not have the pans this cake required. (Thank heavens for several weeks and those 40%off coupons for those local craft stores!)
- I did not know how to make fondant frosting. Nor do I like the taste of real fondant frosting. (I eventually found a recipe for buttercream fondant frosting that tasted really good, but I'll save that for another post. Probably when I have to make another castle cake!)
- Something in the cake had to be egg-free, so that Bug could eat it too. (I finally settled on making egg-free cupcake towers. )

The actual construction of the cake took a couple of days. The party was on a Saturday. I baked all of the parts on Wednesday and Thursday, saving the actual decorating for Friday night.

In the end, the body of the castle was 2 8-inch square pans, with about a box and a half of cake mix split between them. The circles are 2 6-inch circle pans, with about a box of cake mix split between them.

For stability, there is a cardboard square between the 2 square cakes and a cardboard circle between those two layers as well.



The bottom half of the towers are regular sized cupcakes; the top half of the towers are mini cupcakes. The tower tops are indeed ice cream cones. I'd thought about either melting pink chocolate over them or just covering them in pink sprinkles, but I was too tired. I used a single 12-inch shishkabob skewer to vertically hold the tower together. It took a couple more skewers to anchor the tower to the body of the cake. (I did that after I did the white frosting on the towers)



Fondant (even buttercream fondant) is a tricky mistress. It looks really good, but if you haven't covered up the cake underneath, it will show every mistake. So I had to frost the cake with regular (homemade) frosting first. Then, once I'd mixed & rolled out the fondant, I could cover the cake with it. I went in 3 stages: the square parts first, then the circles, and finally the towers. I actually did not frost the cupcakes all around - I wanted them to look a little more stone-like, so I only frosted the tops to help them stick together, and then wrapped the tower in the fondant.



Once I had a while castle, I made a huge batch of regular pink frosting and went crazy.

The morning of the party, I heard Bird get up and go out into the kitchen. Then she went into the dining room. Then she finally made her way to our room. She came up to me and asked "Are those castles for me?" When I told her they were, she responsed "They are so pretty! I love them!!!"

Thank goodness!!

Jello Ice Cream Pie

I'm not entirely sure where I found this recipe, but judging from the way it's worded, I suspect I found it on a message board somewhere.

The ingredients: a box of Jello (I chose cherry), a pint of (French) vanilla ice cream, a graham cracker crust, and some cherries (optional & chosen to match the Jello flavor).


Boil 1 cup of water. While you are waiting, measure out one pint of ice cream because a) you are too cheap to buy one pint of expensive vanilla ice cream and b) the store didn't have 1 pint of plain vanilla anyhow.


Once you've got the water boiling, add it to the Jello & stir until everything dissolves. Add about 1/3 of the pint of ice cream & stir until it all melts.


Allow the mixture to come to room temperature. You can put it in the fridge if you want, but it's just as easy to let everything soften on your counter - doesn't take too long either. I quartered my cherries while I waited.

Once the mixture is at room temperature, stir in the rest of the ice cream until it melts. Add the cherries, and then dump the entire mixture into the pie crust.


Cover and pop in the fridge, allowing it a few hours to solidify.

Potato Skins

I mentioned a while back that I made potato skins for the Super Bowl. In case you wanted to make your own, here's how I did it.

Start with as many potatos as you want. I only really wanted 4, since we are a family of 4 and the kids have a combined appetite of one person.



Give them a really good scrub, poke them with a fork a few times, and then pop them in a 400F (200C) oven for anywhere between 30-60 minutes. The bigger they are, the longer they take.

Once they are cooked, let them cool to room temperature so you don't burn your hand off trying to finish preparing them. Not that I'd know anything about that. Ahem.

Prepare your frying pan by dumping in a bunch of oil & turning on the burner. I did a 60:40 mix of olive oil and vegetable oil.



While the oil is heating, slice each potato in half, and scoop out as much of the middle as you like. I like to leave a bit on the sides, but not so much on the bottom. By the time you are finished with this, your oil should be hot & ready to go. Pop those suckers right in!!



The seasoning you see is garlic powder - season to taste. You may notice there's only 6 skins in here - I did not fry nor season the skins for the kids. They'll live a little longer because of it. :)

After several minutes, take them out, put them back on the cookie sheet, and fill them with whatever your little heart desires. I stayed simple - a dallop of butter on the bottom, cheese, and bacon bits. Other ideas: olives, scallions, onions, peppers, jalopenos.... the possibilities are endless.

Pop them back into the oven (still 400F) for as long as it takes the cheese to melt. Enjoy!!

Shaken, Not Stirred

One of my favorite labs in chemistry is making ice cream.



It is a wonderful real-world application to the concepts we've been studying - reactions, and the amounts of chemicals involved. If the proportions are incorrect, things go BOOM!! (or you get lousy ice cream).

It's incredibly easy to do, and fits nicely into one class period:

Into a quart-sized resealable bag combine:
* 1 cup milk
* 2 tablespoons sugar
* 1/8 teaspoon vanilla

Half fill a gallon-sized resealable bag with ice and toss in a generous handful of rock salt.

Seal the smaller bag & place it into the larger bag. Seal the larger bag, and then shake the entire thing for about 15-20 minutes. The more you agitate the bag, the quicker the concoction will solidify. It is ready when it's about the consistency of soft-serve ice cream. Pour into bowls & enjoy!

Tips:

- You really do want a quart-sized bag instead of a regular sandwich bag. Sandwich bags are thinner and are more likely to develop holes from all the shaking. Nobody wants salt-flavored ice cream!!

- If you are feeling particularly nice, have towels (or old spit-up washcloths & cloth diapers) on hand for the students to use as insulation for their poor, dainty hands. (did you catch the sarcasm there? *groan*) In all seriousness, though, it is very cold, and if you are not as prone to wearing thick sweatshirts like my students are, you will need something for your hands.

- If too much rock salt is added, the ice will melt before the ice cream is ready. Just add more ice & salt.

- Collect all the ice in one sink - rock salt is a pain to clean up.

- Don't want plain vanilla?? Add whatever flavor you want to the sandwich bag. This last time, my TA (who's also one of my AP students) & I decided to make chocolate ice cream. Dumped a bunch of Hershey's syrup into the milk mixture & smooshed it around before putting the bag into the ice bag. Very tasty!!

Bacon Crackers

I first read about Bacon Crackers over on the Pioneer Woman's blog. (And if you need more explicit directions, definitely click that link & check them out over there.) I was a bit skeptical that something so easy could turn out tasty. I mean, come on - only three ingredients?

Sure enough, that's all it takes: Club Crackers, parmesean cheese, and thinly sliced bacon.



Grab yourself a bunch of crackers & spoon a heaping teaspoon of parmesean cheese onto each one.



Then wrap a slice of bacon completely around each cracker. I used turkey bacon cause I like less grease (and yes, I realize the tradeoff is more salt. I wish they made a low sodium turkey bacon!!)



Bake on a wire rack (don't have one of those - how do you like my mini-muffin pan standing in instead?!) in a 250F (120C) oven for up to 2 hours (if you have a normal oven), or a mere 1.5 hours (if your oven is more like my Portal to Hades).

I had to be careful - these suckers went from not cooked to nearly burnt in the space of a few minutes. Since I used turkey bacon, I didn't really need the muffin pan, so I probably would just line them up right on the cookie sheet instead.

As far as taste went.... they were okay. (The folks I cooked them for seemed to enjoy them far more than I did though!) I felt it could use less salt & more cheese. Should I do this again, I will probably sprinkle some mozzarella in with the parmesean. Cause really, what's a little more fat at this point?!

Umbrella Cake (baby shower)

Judging by my sitemeter, folks like to look at cakes! Considering I do a fair share of looking around at them myself, why not post more?!

This is a cake I did for a baby shower:


The top of the umbrella is a chocolate (most likely Devil's Food!) cake cooked in a 9x13 pan. I drew the umbrella shape onto a piece of paper & then cut it out to trace over the cake. The frosting is homemade, and I did just use regular food coloring for the blue since I wanted it to be a nice pastel.

The umbrella handle and all the babies (It's raining babies! Ha! I'm so easily amused!) are yellow cupcakes - the handle being mini-cupcakes & the babies regular size. I used a different cake flavor here because the party was for a playgroup, so the moms got the chocolate & the kids got the cupcakes. I used Wilton dyes for the skintone, and that black gel icing you can get at the grocery store for their faces. If you click on the picture, you can tell that I tried to experiment with different facial expressions. It didn't go well, so we ended up with lots of smiling babies instead!

How to Make a Train Cake

Bug's 3rd birthday party was yesterday - the theme was trains. Well, Elmo and trains, but that was cause it was easy to find paper plates and plastic bags with Elmo on them. (It was a train birthday party, not a Thomas birthday party, and apparently you can't have a party if there are no licensed characters involved.)

Anyways, one of my creative outlets is making spiffy birthday cakes for my kids. So I decided to try a train cake this year. After finding inspiration from the insanely tiny picture here, I bought my cake mix & mini-loaf plans and was ready to go!

Two boxes of cake mix (I prefer Duncan Hines as opposed to Betty Crocker; they taste the same but I find the DH cakes much easier to build with.) was enough to bake 8 mini-loafs of cake. Remembering to grease the pans would have been a good idea. Thankfully, I had 5 decent loafs, and parts of the other 3 to work with.

My plan was to have a 5-car train: engine, tinder, flatcar, boxcar, and caboose. After some trimming & leveling with my gigantic kitchen knife, I assembled the skeleton of the train as seen here:


Next up was to do the base layer of frosting. The main reason for doing this is because it will glue all the pieces together, as well as cover up any mistakes that may have occured (a crack here, a chipped corner there). I do make my own frosting - powdered sugar, a glop of plain crisco, a dash of vanilla (use clear if you need pure white frosting; otherwise it doesn't matter), and enough milk to make it all congeal together when you beat it with your mixer. More sugar will make it stiffer; more milk will thin it out. Tip: If you have slightly runny frosting, it will have a nice smooth glaze when it dries and sets - a plus if you plan on covering your cake with fondant frosting or drawing a picture on top.

(sorry about the quality of the photo, but it's the only one I took!)

Finally, the colored frosting!! After checking which dyes I actually had (food coloring just doesn't do it for me - I like much more vibrant colors), I essentially settled on a rainbow cake. It was incredibly tedious to keep rinsing the bowl & tools every time I switched colors, but the end result was worth it!





The wheels are mini-oreos and the "tinder" is crushed mini-oreos. The "logs" in the flatcar are mini Crunch bars.

Bug LOVED the cake, and couldn't wait to eat it. He claimed the front part of the locomotive - so he could have both cookies and marshmallow. And frosting. LOVED the frosting. Come to think of it... I don't think he actually ate any of the cake!!

Applesauce Bread

Last week, we ran out of bread; I forgot we were home all the time for summer & didn't plan accordingly! Since I also a bit lazy I did not want to pack the kids up & go to the grocery store either. So I pulled out this recipe for applesauce bread that sounded interesting but I'd never actually tried. Not too bad, but we made it again today & it came out much better!

Ingredients

1/3 cup butter softened

1 cup sugar

1 egg

1 1/4 cups applesauce

1 1/2 cups flour

3/4 tsp. baking soda

3/4 tsp. cinnamon

1/2 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp. salt

1/2 tsp. ground nutmeg

1/8 tsp. ground cloves

Directions

Preheat oven to 350 (about 175C)

In mixing bowl cream together butter and sugar.

Add egg and applesauce; mix well.

In a separate bowl combine flour, baking soda, cinnamon, baking powder, salt, nutmeg and cloves.

Gradually add to the creamed mixture just until combined. (I used a regular spoon, not the mixer, at this point)

Pour into greased bread pan.

Bake for 60-65 minutes. (This is where the recipe & I parted ways. I have an oven that I affectionately refer to as my "portal to Hades." My first loaf was burnt at the 50 minute mark. This time, between 40-45 minutes was perfect.)

mmmmm.... tasty finished bread!!

If you wait a few minutes to slice it, you should be fine, but if you are impatient like we are the bread is a little crumbly. Tastes great as is, or with some butter & jelly.