• I Love You Brownies

    Brownies have to be one of my all-time favorite deserts.  I mean, for one thing, they’re chocolate.  They’re sweet, soft, and are just begging for a scoop of vanilla ice cream or a tall glass of cold milk.  There’s just not much better than that. Unless you’re one of those people who don’t like chocolate.  If that’s the case, I can’t imagine how you landed on my little blog – but anyway, have you had your head checked lately?  You don’t like chocolate?   Are…

  • Out and About: Road Trip to Omaha

    This past week was a fun one for my little family.  We opted for a stay-cation this year, and spent the week pretty close to home.  We took our girls to Worlds of Fun, our local amusement park one day, spent a day lounging around and doing not much of anything, and then spent a couple of days road-tripping it.  Destination:  Omaha. Omaha is just about a 3-hour drive from our home near Kansas City, so it really made an ideal, quick road trip.  Since…

  • Out and About: P. Allen Smith’s Garden Home

    I’m just going to apologize in advance.  This is going to be one of those picture heavy posts, and it pains me to say that I cut it waaaaayyy down from my original selection of photos.  But there’s just so dang much to see, so hang in there and trust me on this one! A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about our last-minute anniversary trip to Eureka Springs.  We spent half of a day wandering around and eating our way through the city, then…

  • Hot Chocolate Cake with Homemade Marshmallows

    So, my daughter’s 7th birthday is next week.  First of all, it’s really just not possible that she’s turning seven years old.  Not possible.  Second of all, this means that I have a big family party looming on the horizon. That means my house has to be cleaned.  It also means I need to plan a menu, figure out decorations and – oh yeah – do all that cooking and baking without undoing all of the cleaning and planning.

  • Cookies ‘n Cream Cupcakes

    This was another fun cupcake that I made for a surprise birthday party this week, which is actually somewhat fitting because these cookies have a surprise in the bottom of them, half of an Oreo cookie!  I’ve made these once before and they were a big hit, so I’m really hoping they go over well at the party.  But really, how could they not?  These are a white cake with chunks of cookie baked in the batter, and topped with a cream cheese buttercream.  The…

  • Stuffed Crust Pizza

    This has been an extremely busy month for my little family.  Between my husband’s work schedule, birthdays, graduations, anniversary parties and my oldest daughter’s last days of Kindergarten (and all that comes with it), T-Ball, dance class and gymnastics, we’ve been running in a million different directions.  Dinner has become almost an afterthought lately…let’s just say there have been a lot of turkey sandwiches and cereal for dinner this month.  I know, I know.  Bad food blogger. Today, I noticed we were on the same…

  • American Kitchen Stories

    When I think back on my childhood, then to my college years, and now to my adult life (I use the term adult loosely), many of my happiest and most vivid memories took place in a kitchen.  When I think of family gatherings, I’m always transported to a kitchen.  When I was a teenager, we had a phone with a long white cord in our kitchen – and I spent many nights laying on my kitchen floor talking to my now husband. On Sundays, all…

  • Pumpkin BTS Cake

    So, I don’t really care what you call this cake.  Anytime you combine pumpkin, homemade whipped cream and caramel sauce?  Uh-MAZE-balls.  My last BTS cake has driven almost 120,000 visitors to Lemon Sugar, and is among one of my most requested desserts in my inner circle. Inner circle?  That means my family.  I don’t know why I called them my inner circle.  I’m clearly not Miley Cyrus.  I don’t have an “inner circle.” But if I did, I would totally feed them BTS cake. If…

  • Spiced Cranberry Apple Butter

    Who still has cranberries left from the holidays?  Anyone besides me?  I always stock up and freeze what I’m not going to use, because I firmly believe that cranberries aren’t just a winter fruit.  It drives me crazy that you can’t find them year round, so when I see ’em, I buy ’em. Our CSA has been overly generous with our apple deliveries lately too – so much so that we haven’t been able to eat them all quickly enough.  We eat them like crazy…

  • Cherry Almond Sour Cream Cake

    Today has been a bit traumatic for me. I cleaned out the sippy-cup drawer.  I threw them all away.  My nearly-four-year-old has stopped using them, so into the trash they went.

  • Versatile Chocolate Cake

    Just a quick update to add pictures of the Birthday/St. Patrick’s Day cake I made for my Mother-In-Law’s belated birthday party.  She loves this chocolate cake, but my 5 year old wanted a green cake.  So – we compromised.  A four-layer chocolate cake with milk chocolate ganache filling, frosted with green vanilla buttercream and decorated with green M&M’s. I definitely prefer the chocolate frosting over the vanilla frosting, but this was still yummy. Recipe and more details to follow.