Apparently I am the only person on earth that did not know cookies could be made from a cake mix!
Here are a few of the variations of this recipe I received after I posted about our cake mix cookies yesterday.
From my Mom:
I have used this recipe for years. Add choc. chips to a yellow cake mix for Choc. Chip Cookies. Yummy!
From my sil:
It has been several years since I made cake mix cookies, but I use to do the lemon ones and dust with powder sugar. Now I'm getting hungry.
From a reader:
I have used this recipe in many a pinch when we had unexpected drop in company. My recipe is a little different than yours. But the mix ins open up a whole 'nother realm of possibilities. It's really yummy to use spice cake with raisins and nuts. We've also done white or yellow cake mix with a dash of extract (orange, lemon and almond are especially yummy!).
1 package of cake mix (any flavor)
1 large egg
1/4 cup of oil
1/4 cup of water
1 cup of chopped nuts, raisins, oatmeal, coconut, chocolate chips, M&M'S® etc. (anything you like in cookies)
And from an inventive reader:
hi, jamin'--we are going to make these tomorrow with chocolate fudge cake mix. i'll toss in some chocolate chips and substitute applesauce for the oil. (i hope it works like that!) these will go great with the ziploc bag ice cream recipe we love.
So there you have it!
All kinds of cookies all from a cake mix!
Thanks so much to everyone that shared their variation of the recipe with me!
Since I really don't like to bake I am always looking for simple baking ideas. I don't even know how I got to this blog, but there was a recipe for making cookies using a cake mix. It only had 3 ingredients cake mix, 2 eggs and 1/3 cup oil. This is a recipe I can handle! LOL So my littles and I made strawberry cookies.
This was SUPER simple and made big soft cookies. The kids really liked them and the flavor possibilities are endless. (I am thinking chocolate fudge cookies sound great next time!) Other than mixing up the ingredients all you do is bake them for 10 to 12 minutes at 375 degrees. We ended up with 16 cookies.
One thing we can always count on.... If we make cookies there will be a certain teenager who shows up to eat them! LOL
Click HERE to read my Cookie Update with variations of this recipe sent in by my readers.
This is completely off the topic of homeschooling...But, it's summer so I figure it can be a what I am doing on my summer vacation post! LOL
I LOVE to scrapbook! However, in the last 18 months since our lives turned topsy turvy I have had very little time to scrapbook. So when the new church we have been going to had a scrapbook night. I HAD to go! I am painfully behind on my chronological scrapbooks. It seems that when everything went crazy the end of 2006 I just stopped scrapbooking. So Intead of trying to get caught up I decided I wanted to try and do a whole album in one night! LOL Okay, it is not a BIG album. It is just a 12 page one and I decided to make the topic the snow we had last March.
I had bought this little acrylic album at the last scrapbooking convention I had gone to in Las Vegas. It is very simple. Just 6 pieces of acrylic help together with 3 metal rings. Here is where the challenge comes in...It's see through! So whatever you do on one side you can see on the other. This made for a interesting time putting it together. You have to constantly think about where you are placing adhesive and what the other side is looking like! I really like how it came out though. Here are the pics.
Cover: To make things simple I chose one main paper and a theme of blue, white and black. The tag on the front is something picked up in a clearance bin for 50 cents. (The price tag was still on it. LOL)
Other than the main paper all the accent papers are paint chips from the hardware store! I punched them, put rub ons on them, sanded them, etc. It was kinda fun to work with them. (Plus they were free from my vast collection I have amassed over the years from all our decorating projects! Yeah, I don't throw anything away! LOL)
I also had some BIG snowflake stickers left over from a past project. I used a lot of velum sayings that were about happiness and joy. The little trees are quilling. Quilling is something I like to use in scrapbooking but rarely do because they don't lay flat. With this album anything goes since it is bound with big metal rings and doesn't need to lay flat.
My son really liked the picture of him hitting his Dad's best friend with a snowball! I used the scrabble tiles to draw attention to that one. I tore all the background paper because I thought it added to the soft snowy look. (Plus if you cut you have to measure and stuff and who wants to do that! LOL)
More paint chips, stickers, velum sayings and some snowflake punches.
On the back I journaled the whole thing with those old time office letter punches. I really love using these in my scrapbooking! I think it gives it a quirky retro feel. (These would be really great for lapbooking too! Wow, I never thought about that until now. Stay tuned, we will be using these in a lapbook soon! LOL)
This is my favorite type of project to do. I didn't buy anything special for this album, except the acrylic album itself. Everything else is leftovers from other projects and thing I had on hand. I am very happy with how it came out!
I put a cup hook on the wall over my desk and have it hanging there. I would like to get more of these acrylic albums to scrap. (Wouldn't it be cool to have a whole wall of these?) Now every time I look at it I want to scrapbook more! (Which is NOT good because I really need to get the house unpacked first! LOL)
My littles have been really into making sticker lately. One of our favorite lapbooking/scrapbooking gizmos is the Xyron Create-a- Sticker machines. These are a really great tool for lapbooking! I like them because the adhesive gets all the way to the edges and makes things lie flat. This is great especially for the lapbooks the kids want to look at over and over. It makes for less chance of things getting ripped or coming loose.
Here is my daughter showing off a couple of the stickers she made.
The small ones above are done on this gizmo. It makes 1 1/2 inch wide stickers.
We have 3 of these and the bigger ones make 2 1/2 and 5 inch stickers.
We use the 1 1/2 inch one the most. It seems to be the most versatile. Of course the refills are the cheapest for this one too. *Which may be why I grab it whenever the littles want to make stickers.)
The machines cost starts at $10.00 for the 1 1/2 inch and go up to $30.00 for the 5 inch. They come with one cartridge of the sticker material. I bought ALL of mine when they were on sale for 50% off at Micheal's and Jo Ann's. They also frequently have the refills on sale for 50% off. (The refills cost from $5.00 to $15.00 at full price.) I always scan the ads for sales and make sure to pick up refills when they are half price.
These are a luxury item and not required for lapbooking. But, we do really enjoy ours and get a lot of use out of them. If you are looking for a fun thing to keep your kids busy and entertained this summer I highly recommend getting the little one! (BTW, the kids do the art and I run them through the machine. They tend to waste too much sticker material when I let them do it.)
The only time I ever get to knit these days is when we are traveling. So on the way to and from Los Angeles last month I knitted Felicity a poncho and my daughter made her the matching hat.
Felicity looks so much warmer now! LOL Now my daughter wants me to make a green one for her. Since we are going to travel 1200 miles in the next few days (To go stay with Dad and look for a place to live! YAY!!!) I will probably get it done!
Yesterday we made Gingerbread Cookies. We had some friends over to play. So it seemed like a good time to break out the kit I bought on clearance after Christmas.
Here they are ready to begin!
The Little Artists!
Here is mine! (Before I ate it.) I haven't eaten a gumdrop in years. I had forgotten how yummy they are!
He is pretty proud of his.
I love it that my 13 year old is not too cool to do things like this!
Icing!!!
At some point the boys decided to just eat the icing straight from the bags! LOL
I bought this kit because I was planning on doing the Gingerbread Baby Lapbook with my 2 little ones. But then someone carted off the book somewhere and I can't find it. (My 4 year old is known for doing this. Usually he can eventually remember where he put it, so he may be innocent in this case.) I told them if they find the book we will make the lapbook. So far no one but me is looking! (What's new? Sigh...) So we may or may not have a Gingerbread Baby Lapbook to show you later.
I have been wanting a Crayola Cutter ever since I saw them advertised on T.V. year ago. This year for Christmas I got my 6 year old daughter one, with the side benefit of ME being able to try it out! LOL
I found this cool princess one on clearance for $12.00. It came with a whole packet of craft materials to make princess goodies, so I figured even if the cutter wasn't all I hoped it would be we would still have fund making the princess crafts. You may have noticed by now that my daughter is the Queen of Cutting and Pasting! LOL You should have heard her squeal when she opened the package!
One thing that impressed me with this products was that my 6 year old daughter had no trouble figuring out how to use it all by herself. Dad put the batteries in and she went right to work using it! There were little pieces of paper flying everywhere! LOL I was surprised it took batteries. Thankfully I had bought extra batteries "just in case" we needed them Christmas morning.
This weekend I got my chance to try it out. I was not quite as enamored as my daughter was with it. It could however be that my expectations were just a little too high though. I was hoping this was something we could use for lapbooking and scrapbooking. I was expecting a really clean cut, what I got was more perforation. I haven't yet tried it on card stock, but I did use it to cut out a picture on photo paper. I had to got over 3 times to get it perforated enough to pop the picture out. It actually came out fairly clean. We might use it some for lapbooking. (I can see it being good for things that have little windows that flap open.) The cut is not clean enough for me to use in scrapbooking though.
With all this said, I would buy it again. It works great for my daughter and she loves it. She can do the difficult task of cutting things out of the middle of a page. It doesn't cut anyones fingers. It comes with it's own self healing mat that clicks together with the cutter for easy storage. While it did not completely measure up to my high hopes, it does deliver what it advertises.
Here is the photo I cut out and a couple of the designs my daughter cut out of some patterned paper.
So that is my review ~~ In case anyone was wondering! LOL
Last Christmas the kids and I made up several sets of these:
These were fun and fairly simple to make. You will need:
2 - 2" flower pots
1 - 1" flower pot (These can be purchased at the Craft Store.)
1 - 1/2" bead
2 - 1" beads
Acrylic Paint your choice of colors.
Fabric Squares 6X6"
Craft Excelsior
Hot glue
White glue
cotton ball
gold chenille stem
yarn or twine
For Mary and Joseph:
Have the children paint the 3 pots. Then, Mom uses the hot glue gun to place on the bead heads for Mary and Joseph. Also add the excelsior hair on Mary using the hot glue. Once the hot gluing is done the children can use the white glue to dress Joseph and Mary using the pieces of fabric. Use a small piece of yarn or twine to complete Josephs head dress.
For Baby Jesus:
Use a square of fabric for the swaddling cloth. Mom hot glues in the cotton ball as the body and small bead for the head. Wrap up the blanket and glue. Twist the chenille stem nto a circle for the halo and leave a stem to run down in the bead to float it over the babies head. Have one of the children fill the manger flower pot with Excelsior. Then Mom hot glues baby Jesus into the Manger.
Make sure to write the kids names and year they made these on the inside with Sharpie Marker.
These make great inexpensive gifts for Sunday School Teachers, Dance Teachers, Awana Leaders, etc.
This is our Christmas Scrapbook.
I know I have not mentioned too much about Scrapbooking on my blog. But, I LOVE Scrapbooking! It is kind of like blogging on paper! LOL My favorite Scrapbook is our Christmas Scrapbook. It is also the easiest of the Scrapbooks I have made. Each year we send out a Christmas letter and picture. What I have done is each year I put a copy of the letter and picture in this album. I started it the year before our 1st child was born. This has turned into a great family history book! I can't tell you how often we are wondering what year something happened and I go find the answer in one of the Christmas letters. It is fun to watch the kids grow year by year and to see our family grow as we have added new kiddos!
Here is the page I added in 2003. This year our youngest child was born 10 days before Christmas. We did a combo Christmas Card and Birth Announcement. I printed the Christmas letter inside the card so you have to unfold the whole card to read the letter.
Here is this years pages. I added more pictures this year than I usually do. Only the Santa picture was in most of the cards. But I loved the closeup of the kids and included it in a few cards to family members. The picture of our dog and his sister (Who lives next door.) is one I have been trying to get for a looooong time! (Posing 2 dogs is hard! LOL) I did include the dog picture in a couple cards to our dog loving friends! :^)
This is such an easy album. You only have to do one page a year! Plus if you send out a card and picture you have already done all the work.
We finished our ornaments for our Jesse Tree! They came out soooo cute!
Here are each of the kids coloring the sheets of pictures for the ornaments.
My 3 year old colored most everything blue, his favorite color! (Although he did do a heart and a star in llellow! LOL)
My oldest has hated to color his whole life, so this was a BIG sacrifice for him. He knew I wanted each of them to make a few of the ornaments. So he colored one sheet for me. :^)
My daughter LOVES to color so she did LOTS of them!
After the kids made them I covered them with clear contact paper to keep them clean and we strung blue ribbon to hang them with.
There is still time to make your Jesse Tree ornaments the first Devotion is for Dec. 2nd!
HERE is my post about Jesse Tree with all the links to the printables!
I mentioned Cream Cheese Corn in my post about Thanksgiving and a couple people have emailed me wanting to know what it is. So here is a recipe I can actually make! LOL (Actually my 6 year old makes this for the Holidays. Each of the kids cook a dish once they are 3 and this is hers. My 13 year old has made the mashed potatoes since he was 3! My 3 year old started this year with helping with the homemade rolls.)
Cream Cheese Corn
1 bag frozen corn
1/2 block cream cheese
2 T. Butter
Put corn in a microwave safe dish. Cut up butter and Cream Cheese and add to corn. Microwave about 5 minutes. Stir and continue to microwave for 30 seconds at a time until it is all melty and delicious!
We have been making this for YEARS! A lady we worked with at Target back when we were teenagers made this and brought it to a potluck once. We both LOVE it! We only make it for the Holidays. It is very rich and YUMMY! Every time we have taken it anywhere it is always requested the next time we come back!
My sister makes the BEST French Cherry Pie in the WORLD! I was talking to her on the phone last night and she mentioned she made it for Thanksgiving. (My mouth is watering as I write this!) I asked her to PLEASE send me the recipe so I could put it on my blog where I could
A. Not lose it
B. Share it with a few hundred of my friends and
C. Brag about what a good cook my sister is! (Which apparently does not run in families because I am pathetic in the kitchen! LOL)
So here is the recipe.....
French Cherry Pie
Crust:
3 egg whites beaten stiff. Gradually add 1 cup sugar, 1t vinegar, 1t baking powder, 1t vanilla and 2 cups soda crackers crumbled. Take off beater and fold in 1/2 cup chopped pecans. Pack into a well greased pie pan and bake at 350 for 20 min. or until light brown.Cool about 2-3 hours.
It works best when you take the crust out of the oven to take a fork and mash the center down leaving a lip around the edge.
Filling:
Whip 1 cup cream or 1 package dream whip (per package directions) until thick not stiff. Add 1 3oz package cream cheese broken into pieces, whip until stiff. Add 1/2 cup powdered sugar and 1/2 t vanilla. Whip until well blended. Pour into crust and spoon 1 can cherry pie filling over top. Chill before serving.
Believe me you want to add this to your Christmas menu! (If only I was not such a disaster in the kitchen... LOL)
I have mentioned before about how I cook most of our dinners in the crockpot. But since we homeschoolers are home with our kiddos 24/7 we have 3 meals a day to cook! Since I HATE to cook this is a big deal for me. So here is what we do for simple and fun lunches...
For the most part all our lunches are quick things. I don't want to get stuck back in the kitchen when I feel like I just left there after breakfast! We eat a lot of quesadillas, soup & sandwiches. With these I add a few slices of fruit, carrots and string cheese and VIOLA! Lunch!
This is a butterfly sandwich! This got started by our 16 year old babysitter and now whenever I make sandwiches I HAVE to make butterfly sandwiches for the 2 little ones. Fun, Fun, Fun!!!
One of my favorite gizmos for lunch though is my sandwich maker.
I got this at Wal-Mart this Summer for under $10.00. It is great for me because I am not a big fan of cold sandwiches. This makes 2 hot melty sandwich in 3 minutes! Turkey and swiss on wheat bread is my favorite! You can also make Monte Cristo sandwiches in it. Which the kids LOVE! I make those a lot when we are having a late breakfast and I am trying convince them that we had breakfast and lunch at the same time! LOL But the BEST part of the sandwich maker is you can make muffins in 3 minutes!
Okay, they come out as weird little triangles, but they taste great! LOL I love that I can make muffins without turning on the oven. I make a lot of blueberry muffins and cornbread muffins. This comes in hand with the crockpot too. We can come home to a hot meal and have cornbread to go with it in 3 minutes! (You can make 4 at a time so multiply 3 minutes times however many you need for your family. I have all my recipes down to make 8 muffins because that is what we usually eat.)
So that is lunch at our house. If you have any great recipes, tips or suggestions to make lunch easier I would LOVE to hear them!
This is a very kid friendly project! I a planning to have the items on hand so the kids can make these while they wait for dinner this year.
Here are the instructions:
You need Double Stuffed Oreos, Chocolate Frosting, Whoppers, Butterscotch Chips & Candy Corn.
1. Take the Oreo apart. Make sure all the white filling stays on one side. With a table knife cut a slit through the white filling.
2. On the other half of the Oreo cut off a small piece to make a flat edge. Smear frosting on the side of the cookie that use to be attached to the white filling. Stick the flat edge of the frosted cookie in the slit you cut in the white filling.
3. Place a Whopper on to make the body.
4. Fill the frosted side with Candy Corn to make the feathers.
5. Use a Butterscotch Chip to make the face, stick it on with the frosting. Make sure to get the drip side down to get that Turkey look! LOL
That's it!
Here are my kids working hard last year making Turkey's!
In an effort to simplify MY life without the expense of eating out, I am trying to make dinner Monday through Thursday in the Crockpot! Here is our latest recipe addition. Crockpot Lasagna!! Click HERE for the recipe!
Friday night is pizza night at our house, so there you have it! If you stop by for dinner any night of the week you now know what you will be eating! LOL Yep, for right now we are having the same thing week after week! So far no on is complaining. I figure it is 7 days in between the times they have the same thing. The kids kinda like knowing what's for dinner without asking. I figure when we get tired of one of these I will find another crockpot recipe and switch to that one. Plus the weekends will be different each week.
I can tell you it is a great feeling to know that dinner is all taken care of by 10:00 a.m.!!!!
My daughter made me this adorable little pen and holder at church a few weeks ago.
I had seen the pens made before, but I had never seen a little mini flower pot used for a stand. It is just perfect for sitting next to my computer. Plus no one is likely to steal MY pen since I can easily spot them with it! LOL The mini pot holder is just a pot turned upside down. My daughter wrote "Mom, I Love you!" on it with markers. Needless to say I LOVE IT!!!!
Here is another shot where you can see the pen part better & were she wrote on the mini pot.
These would make great gifts for Grandma's, Awana Leaders, Sunday School Teachers, Co-op Teachers, Neighbors....And there are only 80 days until Christmas!
My neighbor told me awhile back that Baked Potatoes could be made in the Crockpot. I had never heard that before! Finally, I got around to trying it & it worked great! HERE is the instructions I found online.
So for dinner we had baked potatoes topped with cheese,sour cream and brocolli. It was SOOOOO delicious!
This is a great simple meal for those days we are out of the house most of the day with classes and need something ready to eat when we get home!
Yeah!!!
(Oh, the instructions say 2 and a half to 4 hours. I did mine for 4 hours.)
This is the most fun way I can think of to clean out the junk drawer!
First,,,Did you know you get a cool FREE box when you buy a new air conditioning unit after yours is blown out after a power surge?
After acquiring your "cool" box (Pun intended! LOL) go to your junk drawer and find all the cool things you will never use again. (Straws, batteries, fuses, plug in, old radio, juice lids, drawer knob, spool with string, etc.) With a glue gun attach them to a shallow box. Then hot glue your newly created control panels to the inside of the box.
Add a old cellphone, flashlight and some tap lights the neighbor is throwing away...Also make sure you include an old piece of string to set traps with! You now have the coolest Rocket Ship in town!
My 2 oldest children are taking an Art Class on Mondays. They came home last week with a art pad, pencils and etc. that needed to be contained. I went to Micheal's and bought them canvas tote bags. It just seemed wrong to take a plain canvas bag to Art Class though! LOL The 1st week of class they practiced drawing silhouettes, so that inspired us to try this:
Cool huh?
These were SUPER easy to do and the kids LOVE them!
Step #1 I taped a piece of freezer paper to the back of my laundry room door. (The only room I have that has no windows, so we could make it dark!) Then I sat each kid down on a stool and using a flashlight to make a shadow I traced them. (This was the hardest part! I found it worked best if I had them actually lean against the paper on the wall while I traced them.) We cut out each of the profiles and ironed them onto the canvas bags. (Freezer paper has a wax coating on one side do the wax will make it stick tight to the bag.)
Step #2 Start painting!
We used cut up pieces of a kitchen sponge to apply the paint. For paint we used left over latex wall paint. You might notice our bags seem to match the chair my daughter is sitting in! LOL (It also matches my children's bathroom!)
It took a couple coats to get it how we liked them!
The latex paint seems to stick just fine. I decided since we all have paint clothing stained with paint from past projects that surely it would stick to our bags!
Once the paint was dry we peeled off the freezer paper and had our final products! It should be pretty easy to tells who each bag belongs to!
My 3 year old is really in to making little books. Nothing fancy, we just staple together a few sheets of paper and then he tells me what he wants written and drawn inside them. (I have tried to get him to do the drawing, but he insists I do it! My drawing skills are pretty pathetic though! LOL) Anyway the only problem I have with these is that he wants to carry them everywhere and after a few days of loving from a 3 year old they start falling apart. Enter DUCT TAPE! LOL We have a bunch of ends of rolls laying around after our duct tape crafting and so I reinforced the spines with a little strip. It works great! He has been carrying these around for several weeks and and they are still looking good. Plus the staples don't stick his fingers anymore!
He could hardly stand to part with his books while I took the picture of them! LOL
The little one on the right with the hand of the front he made at his Wednesday night church class. When I came to pick him up he ran to the door yelling "MOM, WE MADE A HANDBOOK!!!!" I am thinking "Why would a 3 year old need a handbook?" Then he ran and got it and held it up proudly and said "See, right there it's a hand!"
It is so fun to see the world through the eyes of a 3 year old!
We have homeschooled our children from the start and we love every minute of it! This is my place to share my thoughts on homeschooling, my kids and living for the Lord. All the while being a little outside the box!!
If we make cookies there will be a certain teenager who shows up to eat them! LOL
To make things simple I chose one main paper and a theme of blue, white and black. The tag on the front is something picked up in a clearance bin for 50 cents. (The price tag was still on it. LOL)
I punched them, put rub ons on them, sanded them, etc. It was kinda fun to work with them. (Plus they were free from my vast collection I have amassed over the years from all our decorating projects! Yeah, I don't throw anything away! LOL)
I haven't eaten a gumdrop in years. I had forgotten how yummy they are! 
This year our youngest child was born 10 days before Christmas. We did a combo Christmas Card and Birth Announcement. I printed the Christmas letter inside the card so you have to unfold the whole card to read the letter.
I added more pictures this year than I usually do. Only the Santa picture was in most of the cards. But I loved the closeup of the kids and included it in a few cards to family members. The picture of our dog and his sister (Who lives next door.) is one I have been trying to get for a looooong time! (Posing 2 dogs is hard! LOL) I did include the dog picture in a couple cards to our dog loving friends! :^)
Then hot glue your newly created control panels to the inside of the box.
You now have the coolest Rocket Ship in town!
Cool huh?
I taped a piece of freezer paper to the back of my laundry room door. (The only room I have that has no windows, so we could make it dark!) Then I sat each kid down on a stool and using a flashlight to make a shadow I traced them. (This was the hardest part! I found it worked best if I had them actually lean against the paper on the wall while I traced them.) We cut out each of the profiles and ironed them onto the canvas bags. (Freezer paper has a wax coating on one side do the wax will make it stick tight to the bag.)
Start painting!
We used cut up pieces of a kitchen sponge to apply the paint. For paint we used left over latex wall paint. You might notice our bags seem to match the chair my daughter is sitting in! LOL (It also matches my children's bathroom!)
It took a couple coats to get it how we liked them!
The latex paint seems to stick just fine. I decided since we all have paint clothing stained with paint from past projects that surely it would stick to our bags!
