A few weeks back I got the sweetest email from a friend of yore, a girl that I went to summer camp with and then college. She was writing to tell me that she reads my blog and uses my recipes—two bits of information that always catch me off-guard and give me a little thrill. Aside from a handful of readers who leave lovely comments I have no idea if people actually read my blog. Sure, I occasionally glance at the ticking numbers on my site meter, but they don’t mean much—for all I know, the majority of hits are by people searching for enlightenment and when google lands them on my blog they suffer pangs of bitterest disappointment and disillusionment which leads to a falling out with all search engines. I hope that doesn’t happen, of course, but I have no way of knowing. (Yes, there are high-techy ways of finding out, but I am not inclined towards any techy-ness, and certainly not any HIGH techy-ness.)

So when Bethany (for that is the name of the aforementioned sweet girl) emailed me and told me that she actually uses some of my recipes in her CSA newsletter, I was first surprised, second tickled, and third addled. Because—hello!—does this means there are people actually reading and cooking from this little blog? I mean, that’s what I want them to do, but whoa, dude! All my shortcomings—the stupid things I’ve said and done, the outrages claims I’ve made—it’s like getting caught with my pants down, and just because I’m used to walking around in public with my pants down doesn’t mean I don’t still blush when someone looks at me, know what I mean?

You don’t?

Um, okay. Forget I said anything, okay? (Geesh.)

I am slip-sliding all over this post, the point of which (yes! there’s a point!) is cake.

Cake was the point of Bethany’s email, too. See, she was after a recipe. This is what she said, “I still remember a particular mint cake that your mother sent down to school once – a three-layer white cake with flecks of green that was dense and sweet and amazing. I had the recipe and lost it. I’d be grateful for any leads on this – but no hurry.”

I immediately knew exactly what she was talking about. It’s not every day that you eat a mint cake with real mint in it, and I clearly remember the first time I had this cake. It was at a cousin’s outdoor wedding up in Pennsylvania (my husband and I were a couple months shy of getting married ourselves), and at the reception, we had this cake.

Come to think of it, I don’t remember much of anything about the wedding or the cake. It’s more of a fact lodged in my brain than an actual visceral memory. I know we had this mint cake, and I know it was delicious, and I know the wedding was lovely. But that’s all I know. The end.

In order to bake this cake, I had to beg some dried mint from my mom. She brought me the last of her mint which didn’t measure quite up to the full three tablespoons, but it had to do.

And do it did, just fine.

I iced the cake with cream fluff frosting, but any butter frosting would be fine. However, I think this elegant cake would be super classy served plain (perhaps baked in a bundt pan), dressed only with sugared strawberries or red raspberries, whipped cream optional.

Here’s what happens when I serve my husband his first piece of cake. I pull up a stool, sit down, and then stare at him as he eats.

“What do you think?” I ask.

Silently, he chews. I tap my foot and wait. He swallows.

“Well? What do you think?” I ask again.

He ignores me, shovels another piece into his mouth, and continues chewing.

“You’ve had plenty of time to taste it,” I snap. “TELL ME WHAT YOU THINK!”

Then the Baby Nickel sidles up to the table, attempts to sneak a taste with his grubby paw, and gets the boot.

And I am appeased, for my question has been answered. My husband likes the cake.

Mint Wedding Cake

This cake made two full 9-inch layers, but you could get three layers if you used 8-inch pans.

A note on my recipe card says: put no mint in icing. The cake is perfectly minty as is—any more would be a plunge headlong overboard.

Oil of peppermint is not to be confused with peppermint extract. Check the baking aisle of your grocery store or a health food store.

For a standard white cake: omit the oil of peppermint and dried mint leaves, and increase the vanilla extract to 2 teaspoons.

1 cup butter
2 cups sugar
3 cups sifted cake flour (I used Softasilk)
4 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons crushed dried mint leaves
2/3 cup milk
2/3 cup water
1 teaspoon vanilla
4 drops oil of peppermint
6 (3/4 cup) egg whites

Beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form. Set aside.

Using the soiled beaters, cream together the butter and sugar.

Measure the flour, baking powder, salt, and dried mint into a small bowl. In another small bowl, measure the milk, water, vanilla, and oil of peppermint.

Add the dry ingredients to the butter mixture alternately with the wet. Fold in the beaten egg whites. Divide the batter between two greased, wax paper-lined (grease the wax paper, too), and floured 9-inch cake pans. Bake the cakes at 350 degrees for 30-35 minutes. Allow them to cool for 10 minutes before running a knife around the edges of the cakes and carefully dumping them out onto a cooling rack.

If desired, ice the cooled cakes with buttercream (some suggestions: cream fluff frosting, buttercream frosting, and vanilla buttercream frosting).

I stored this cake, well-covered with plastic wrap, in the refrigerator. The cool temperatures made the cool minty-ness even more refreshing.

This same time, years previous: banana cake with creamy peanut butter frosting

My friend called me this morning:

Friend (all excited-like): Well hell-OH!!! Are you OKAY???

Me (surprised): Well, yes, I’m fine, thank you. Why do you ask?

Friend: Because you haven’t blogged for like FOUR DAYS and I have no idea how you’re doing when you don’t write. I was getting all worried because I thought something might be wrong because you weren’t writing and then I have to call you to find out and—

Me: Oh goodness, I’m FINE. Truly! And I think it’s only been three days since I posted, but I’ll forgive you the slip-up ‘cause it’s real sweet of you to care. Not much is happening here. I’m plugging away at using up my freezer stuff so I don’t have any new recipes to write about and I figured that everyone is probably bored stiff of hearing about the kids so that’s why I didn’t post. I do have a new recipe in the works—

Friend: Oh no, no. When you don’t write, I worry and then I have to call you to find out what’s going on.

Okay, so that’s not the conversation verbatim—

(Excuse me, but my youngest son is hacking up something in the downstairs bedroom with a scissors. I better go check.)

(Back again. No scissors involved [like yesterday]—he was just pounding on a sheet of cardboard with a green dry erase marker and a metal dustpan.)

—but it gets the point across.

And yes, I really am fine. I have a luscious cake post I’ve working on, but since my friend didn’t say she doesn’t want to hear more about my kids, I guess she kind of might not mind hearing more about them, so…

Story One: Windy Wood
Last I wrote, my kids had just rigged up a two-sided ramp using sawhorses, boards, and sheets of plywood.

They spent the afternoon shooting down the sides on wagons, trikes, and bikes.

When it came time to clean up, my son discovered a new game: stand a sheet of plywood up on end and then let it fall to the ground with a whoosh, right beside the other kids and resulting in a vigorous gust of wind and some wild hair. I observed this new game from my spot in the brand new strawberry patch (25 Sparkle and 25 All-Star).

It didn’t take me more than two seconds to toss my baby plants and sprint to the house for the camera.

I sat on the ground beside the girls and snapped madly away while the my son hoisted and dropped the board and my husband hollered at me from the strawberry patch to put the stupid camera down and come over and help him right this very minute.

Story Two: Cereal Worship
I don’t buy cereal any more. We’ve been living on granola (I make this recipe once a week, and sometimes twice), oatmeal, pancakes, and eggs. This is a big switch for me, a former cereal addict. But it’s gotten to the point where I no longer crave the boxed bits o’ dry crispies (too much), and I’ve accustomed myself to think ahead for our morning meals.

However, we’ve eaten so much granola lately that even the kids have started to beg for mercy. So a couple weeks ago I bought one box of frosted mini wheats and everybody but Papa got one bowl before the box was empty. It wasn’t nearly enough to alleviate our granola boredom.

So yesterday I included “cereal” in my grocery list. My husband was doing the shopping and stopped at a Dollar General on the way out of town to pick it up. Three whole boxes, he got. The kids were ecstatic.

My oldest son was the first to spy the splurge. He ran leaping and yelling (and totally ignoring our orders to come back here right this minute to help bring in the groceries) upstairs to shout the good news to his sisters. Then he sat down (once again, ignoring our orders to help put away the groceries) to read the cereal boxes.

This morning’s breakfast of honey nut cheerios (mixed with granola, ‘cause I can’t help myself) was an enormous hit. It put everyone in a downright jolly mood.

Story Three: The Life of My Porch Swing
It appears that my porch swing has a life of its own. It gets tired of always facing west and likes to shake things up every now and then.

Sometimes I go outside and find it facing towards the road.

Other times I go outside and find it making out with the white bench. (I know!)

And still other times I go outside and find that it’s up and tried to leave the porch all together and that a little monkey has taken its place.

Story Four: My Niece
Yesterday evening we took care of my niece. Normally when she comes over, she disappears with the older kids and I never see her. But this time my son was mowing the yard and the roaring machine, it turned out, kind of shell-shocked the poor dear.

At first I didn’t realize there was any problem. I was in the garden and the other kids were in the yard, on the porch, running in and out of the house. But then I went to the house for something and found the little girl quietly kneeling behind the picnic table, her hands over her ears.

I took her to the other side of the porch where it was quieter, but even when the machine was on the opposite side of the house, she kept her ears covered. She didn’t seem that upset, really, just … frozen.

Eventually she made it out to the rocks in the flower garden where she played with Sweetsie for a bit. But then my son brought the mower around to the barn and shut it off.

I watched my niece watch my son as he sat on the silent mower. After a minute she called to me loudly, never once taking her eyes off the monster machine, “Jennifer! I’m scared!”

I alerted my son to the traumatized child fleeing the rock garden behind him and he came up on the porch to entertain her.

I think my niece might adore my son. Just look at that face!

He danced around and made silly so she might be happy.

He cracked her up, he did.

And then he cuddled with her on the porch bench while my husband did the finish-up mowing.

This same time, years previous: flour tortillas, chocolate-covered peanut butter eggs, the value (or not) of the workbook, asparagus-walnut salad, asparagus with lemony crème fraîche and boiled egg

If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you know that every winter my husband and I do a bet with each other to see who can spend the least amount of money for the longest amount of time. I won all the bets (here’s one of them) up until last year when I lost (sniff).

This year, however, we’re not doing the bet. This year we’re doing a seismic overhaul of how we manage our household finances. It has been revolutionary and I am on fire.

It all started a couple years ago when my friend and her husband took a Dave Ramsey class. She’d fill me in on Dave’s theories and methodology and I’d grill her on the details. I began to think that we might benefit by learning more about The Dave Plan, but my husband didn’t view the new ideas as rosily as I did. His comments ran something like this: “You pay for everything with cash? That’s stupid.”

“But hon, I do better when I pay with cash,” I’d say. “I need to see what I’m spending.”

“Nah, it’s too inconvenient, not to mention too risky. I don’t like it.”

So we continued to bounce along from pay check to pay check (it’s amazing how attached you can get to a non-working plan), spending money when we needed to and wanted to and hoping we didn’t face-plant. Sometimes we’d get sick of all the bouncing and would attempt to get control of the situation, but it never stuck and soon we’d be back in the good old Sliding By Position.

A note of clarification: our financial situation wasn’t dire, as far as financial situations go. We didn’t have credit card debt, and John possessed a fairly good understanding of how our money moved. (We’ve since learned that understanding how our money moves is very different from controlling how our money moves.)

Then last fall my friend loaned me her Dave Ramsey book. I slurped it up, and when she informed me that a new Dave class was opening up, I planted myself in front of John and informed him that we needed to take it. He, wisely, agreed. So every Tuesday evening for the past eleven weeks (two more to go!) we’ve been meeting at a local school for our two-hour sessions; the first hour we watch a DVD of Dave and the second hour is class discussion.

Far and away, the best thing this class has done for us is—and this can not be overestimated—it has put us on the same page, hallelujah! We now share a framework with which we can talk about money. John agrees that paying for things with cash is perhaps a wise idea, and we plan to get rid of our household credit card in the near future (we’ve switched to debit) and—

Whoa, whoa, whoa, let me back up. For those of you who aren’t familiar with either Dave Ramsey or his Financial Peace University (the fancy name for our class), here is a sample of a couple of the main ideas:

*people spend 12-18% more when they use a credit card than when they use cash (even when paying off the credit card every month), so use cash
*rainy days will happen; plan for them
*never get a loan for a car or anything for that matter (except a house and college, if you must)
*financial peace means having a plan and sticking to it

Dave’s financial plan is comprised of a series of baby steps, the first three of which are:
1. put aside a thousand dollars in an emergency fund
2. snowball your debt
3. save 3-6 months of living expenses (which is step one expanded)

There are more steps, but since they’re the ones that John and I are working on right now, they are all I’ll mention. I don’t want to overwhelm myself (or you).

This class has challenged me to not only change how I handle money, it’s also challenged me to rethink how I view money. I somehow got the idea growing up (in a series of Mennonite churches and with halfway-granola Mennonite parents) that money is bad. We were to avert our eyes from it, and not depend on it, talk about it, or roll in it. People who had a lot of money were entangled in its snares. Not being controlled by money meant not having any. ‘Cause didn’t Jesus tell us to sell everything and follow him?

These teachings still persist. Just the other week we had a Sunday church service that revolved around money. The classic Do Not Worry About What You Will Eat Or Drink scripture was duly intoned, and there was much talk about trusting God and good stewardship and yadda yadda yadda. Inside I was screeching, Don’t tell us not to worry! Tell us what we can DO so we can STOP worrying! Which is completely anti-Everything I’ve Been Taught because not worrying about money is all about faith, right?

Wrong! If faith means turning a blind eye to finances and just hoping things work out, than I want none of it. (Which is probably not what any church leaders intended us to do—the turning a blind eye part—but when we’re given mystical, floaty, o-happy-day teachings in place of concrete advice, general clueless-ness is the unintentional side effect.)

What does work is getting A Financial Education and A Plan and Sticking With It. Scrutinizing our spending habits, naming where the money goes, and working with what I have and ONLY with what I have, has provided me more peace than anything I’ve ever done.

(I can share more of the nitty-gritty details regarding our allocated spending plan and envelope system, if you’re interested—just give a shout-out in the comments. But if not, no prob. I don’t want to drag you all through our money dirt [which is not to be confused with pay dirt].)

Three Post Blog Post Disclaimers
1. Dave Ramsey does not know who I am.
2. I do not agree with everything Dave Ramsey says.
3. Dave Ramsey sometimes gets borderline Prosperity Gospel-ish which turns my stomach—when he gets going like that I just plug my ears and chant, I’m not listening I’m not listening.