• Chocolate Chip Graham Cracker Bars

    You can actually SEE how delicious these are.  You can see the powdery sugar stuck to the gooey, chocolaty graham cracker cookie.  You can SEE it, can’t you? And yup – they taste just as good as they look.  Maybe better. I broke all of the July-in-Kansas rules today and turned my oven on.  Yes, I turned my oven on even though it was exactly 900 degrees outside today.  And with the heat-index, it felt like 950 degrees.  But I just had to make these…

  • Southwestern Eggrolls

    These look like they would be complicated and mess up your kitchen, but they’re EASY and you bake them!  No frying, no splattering grease, and they use one bowl and a cookie sheet.  Doesn’t get much easier than that!  This is also one of those recipes that you can play around with the fillings and add whatever you want to meet your needs.  The only thing you have to watch is the liquid content – try to keep the ingredients drained and dry so you…

  • M&M Cupcakes

    Sometimes, the hardest part of this blog is deciding what to write about.  Lately, my life has become pretty routine – I follow the same schedule and do the same things, week after week.  It’s hard to write about interesting things when you aren’t DOING interesting things.  {Well, blog-worthy interesting things, that is!} I just mentioned that fact to my husband.  He told me that I needed to start doing something interesting, then. I glared at him and told him that I was going to…

  • Friends of Lemon Sugar: Reese’s Cake

    Today’s guest poster in the Friends of Lemon Sugar series comes to us from BAKE ; a great foodie, lifestyle and photography blog by Jenny.  I love to read her posts because they make me happy, and I feel like I’m right there with her.  One of my favorite posts of hers is her Neopolitan Cupcakes, a recipe which has inspired me to follow suit!  Head over and check out her site, today.  You won’t be sorry!  Thank you, Jenny for stopping by to share your fabulous…

  • A Pantry Makeover with Organized Living™ (Part 1: Before)

    Ok.  I feel like I need to make excuses and be defensive about my pantry for a minute. First of all, yes, the picture above is my pantry.  This is what my pantry looked like the day after my daughter’s Rainbow Party just a few weeks ago. I’m not proud. I have an awesome pantry, which was a requirement when we built our house five years ago.  In fact, we even made it bigger than the plans originally called for because it wasn’t quite big…

  • Pumpkin Ice Cream

    So, I have to admit that as I write this tonight, I’m wearing two pairs of socks, a gigantic sweater and I’m sitting under a blanket drinking a huge mug of extra-hot coffee.  It’s definitely not ice cream weather right now. Isn’t it funny how the first cold night of the season brings out the cold-drama?  I’m pretty sure that 42 degrees in mid-January is going to feel like a heat wave, but tonight it’s awful.  And I want nothing to do with ice cream…

  • Smith Island Cake

    Sometimes, I love long, time-consuming recipes that I can work on a little bit at a time over the course of a day or two.  I tend to over-book myself sometimes, so I frequently find myself baking against a deadline – which is fine and definitely keeps me on task – but occasionally, it’s nice to bake at a slow, leisurely pace. This is the perfect cake for a long day of baking.  While I could have done the whole thing in a couple of…

  • A Rainbow Party

    Last weekend we celebrated my daughter’s and niece’s 4th birthday with a Rainbow party.  They’ve been talking about it forever, pretty much since the day after their Princess Party last year.  We were a bit hurried, especially after we ate dinner because the weather was supposed to get bad, and everyone kind of left in a mad rush to beat the storms. As usual, I focused the decoration for the party around my dessert table.  A simple white table cloth allowed the rainbow colors to…

  • Chocolate Covered Strawberry Ice Cream

    So, relevant but irrelevant:  last week I cleaned out my refrigerator.  Like, REALLY cleaned it out.  I took everything out, scrubbed it, sanitized it, threw away, organized, and made everything pretty and bright.  In my cleaning frenzy, I uncovered four pounds of strawberries that we purchased the weekend before at the Farmer’s Market.  The strawberries were clinging to life, on the edge of questionable, so I chopped them up and was racking my brain for strawberry recipes. I made a strawberry cake (that recipe is…

  • Cream Cheese Lemon Bars

    I have been eyeing* this recipe on Pinterest for a couple of months now.  I think it called to me because it reminds me of a bakery-type lemon bar, which I love.  Well, I usually love them.  I don’t like the ones that taste like egg yolk.  Have you had those before?  Ugh.  They almost give lemon bars a bad name, but if you have a really good one, you’ll forever be in search of another really good one.  Or maybe that’s just me… So,…

  • Out and About: It’s Fair Time!

    I’ve been attending our local county fair most of my life.  My hometown hosts the fair, so watching the parade and spending a few nights with the whole town at the fairgrounds has become a bit of a tradition for me.  I remember riding in the parade with my ball teams when I was a kid, marching in the parade with the cheerleaders in high school, and now we spend it on the sidelines, helping our kids collect candy and goodies from the floats. The…

  • Skillet Apple Pie

    There is just something about good apple pie that makes me happy.  Obviously, it’s delicious, but there’s a lot of nostalgia that comes with it, too.  The smells of baking apples, cinnamon and buttery pie crust take me back to my childhood and for a moment, I’m back in my Mom’s kitchen, or in one of my Grandma’s.  My Grandma used to sprinkle the leftover pie crust with butter, sugar and cinnamon and bake it – I can remember fighting over those little bites of…