The Cook Club: May Results from Olive

I love baking because I love to eat desserts. So for Sue's challenge I decided to try a recipe that I have made before for a soup swap although it was previously from a box mix. I got the recipe off a blog a while ago. I took two recipes and merged them together and fortunately had a special event to serve the cake.

The first recipe is a Golden Butter Cake:

3 cups cake flour (not self rising) I used all purpose

1 tbls baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

1 cup softened butter (2 sticks)

2 cups sugar

4 large eggs

2 tsp vanilla extract

1 cup milk

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees and grease and flour the pans.

In a bowl mix the flour, baking powder and salt.

In a large bowl mix the butter and sugar at high speed for 5 min until light and fluffy.

Blend the eggs in one at a time on high speed.

Beat in vanilla.

Reduce mix speed to low and add flour mixture and milk alternately beginning and ending with the flour mixture.

For this recipe to be converted to the rainbow cake I doubled the recipe and divided the batter into six equal portions. With food coloring, I mixed the batter to make one purple (blue and red), one blue, one green, one yellow, one orange (red and yellow) and one red. Fortunately for me I had a helper to help mix everything.

I then baked each one for 20-25 minutes until a toothpick comes out clean.

Once cooled , put icing on the purple cake and the blue cake. I had help with this also.

Place the cake in the refrigerator for 2 hours or 1 hour in the freezer to set.

Continue to ice the green and yellow cake and refrigerate or freeze to set.

Finally, ice the orange and red cake and refrigerate.

Then you can serve this huge delicious cake. We served our for my big man's graduation from gymnastics. I hope he enjoyed it.

For the Healthy inexpensive dinner, I made two mustard chicken, squash and apples and a veggie confetti.

For the Two Mustard Chicken here are the ingredients:

4 boneless skinless chicken breasts (Mine was on sale see the sticker!! WHOOHOO!!) ($3.73)

2 tbls stone ground mustard ($2.89)

1/4 cup Dijon mustard (had on hand)

2 tbls honey (had on hand)

Combine both mustards and honey and coat chicken on both sides.

Cook for 25-30 min at 375 until done. (My chicken was thin cuts so only took me 10 min.)

220 calories

6 grams of fat

Price $6.62

However, since my chicken was thin cut, I believe that it was less calories and fat.

For the Apple & Squash here are the ingredients

1 squash ($2.03)

2 apples ($2.14)

1/2 cup water (On Hand)

1 tbls butter (On Hand)

2 tbls sugar (On Hand)

1/2 tsp ground Cinnamon (On Hand)

1/4 tsp ground nutmeg (On Hand)

The directions tell you to peel the squash with a vegetable peeler. This sucked and made me realized I definitely need a new peeler. Then you slice the squash in half and scoop out the seeds.

Cube the squash and put it in a dish with the water and cover. Microwave for 5-7 minutes until tender. You heard me microwave.

Peel and cube the apples and add to the squash with the remaining ingredients.

Microwave for another 2-3 minutes and serve.

70 Calories

1 Gram of Fat (recipe stated 0 but there is butter which I feel would amount to some fat..??)

Price $4.17

Vegetable Confetti

1 pepper chopped ($.57)

1 cucumber shredded ($.65)

1 cup shredded carrots ($.89)

Add together and add 2 tbls Fat Free Italian Dressing and pepper to taste. (On Hand)

35 Calories

0 Grams of Fat

Price $2.11

I then decided that I would make a jello rainbow.

I just took 5 different jello colors and made them one at a time letting it set and then adding the next color.

The recipe I found was called Jello ribbons and included yogurt but I did not want to over do the calorie so I just used Jello. Although the colors were a bit hard to see, once it was cut you were able to see the different layers. The kids loved it and it was super easy. I would probably rearrange the colors a bit next time since I let the kids decide what colors to do this one.

50 calories

0 grams of fat

Price $2.95