Most Delicious Cake Recipe (and easy, too!)

This super simple cake recipe comes out beautifully every time. The batter takes about 5 minutes to whip up if your ingredients are prepped and it takes just about 20-30 minutes to bake. Every person who's ever tasted it requests more, almost immediately. It's my favorite go-to baking recipe and it's amazingly versatile. You can add just about anything!

What you will need for the basic cake recipe:

• 1 cup butter, softened
• 2 cups sugar
• 4 eggs
• 2 teaspoons vanilla
• 3 cups flour
• 3 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup milk
• optional additions (see below)

What to do:

1. Preheat your oven to 175 degrees Celsius or 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
2. Grease/butter and flour a 9 x 12 ish cake pan.
3. Cream together butter and sugar until well blended and a little fluffy. 
4. Add eggs and stir until fully blended.
5. Stir in vanilla.
6. Sift in flour, baking powder and salt. Mix until fully incorporated.
7. Pour in milk. Stir carefully (or it will splash!) until fully blended.

That's your basic vanilla cake batter. If you stop there and bake it, it will be absolutely delicious. BUT, you can make some additions - pretty much anything works. Here are some options:

• Stir in a couple of generous handfuls of dried blueberries or raisins.
• Stir in a couple of tablespoons of flavorful honey. I like the local Sudanese honey I get, but any tasty honey will work.
• Stir in a few tablespoons of rose water or orange blossom water.
• Stir in a few handfuls of chocolate chips.
• Stir in a handful of chopped almonds and some almond extract.
• Add a cup of grated carrot, squeezed dry-ish along with a 1/2 teaspoon of grated nutmeg.

OR, if you're adventurous, add a combination. I just made blueberry/vanilla/honey/orange blossom cake and it's amazing!

Then pour your beautiful batter into the pan and bake until the top springs back when pressed gently or a knife inserted comes out clean. This usually takes about 20-25 minutes for me.

Enjoy!

The Best Soup Ever

I couldn't decide what to call this soup. It is, I suppose, a chicken soup. But it's so much more! I'll never go back to regular chicken soup again. Even my picky child was happy with this soup, veggies and all! The most surprising ingredient, if you're not familiar with seeing it in savory dishes, is peanut butter. I brought the leftover soup to work to share and it was rated 11 on a scale of 1 to 10. I promise it is worth trying!

For extra flavor, you can use the bones and/or carcass of the whole chicken if you've got them. I used the leftovers from a chicken I roasted the night before I made this soup. You can purchase a cooked rotisserie chicken and then use any leftovers for this soup. If you do use bones or the whole chicken carcass, you can pull them out of the soup after they've simmered for a while, before you add back the pureed veggies, allow the chicken to cool a bit, and then pull the meat from the bones and drop it back into the soup.

What you'll need:

• 8 cups of liquid (vegetable broth or chicken broth)
• About 5 carrots, sliced into thin rounds
• 1 large potato, cubed or diced
• 2 cups of pumpkin, cubed or diced
• 1 large onion, diced
• Cooked chicken, about 2 cups of bite sized pieces.
• 4-6 tablespoons of unsweetened peanut butter
• 2-3 cloves of garlic (roasted garlic would be even better!)
• 2 large tomatoes, roughly chopped
• 1 cup of noodles (optional) I like thin egg noodles best, but add what you like!
• juice of 2 limes
• 1/2 cup chopped fresh parsley
• 1/2 cup chopped fresh dill
• salt, to taste

What to do:

1. Bring your liquid to a boil in a large soup pot.
2. Add the onions, potatoes, pumpkin and carrots. Turn the heat to medium and allow to cook for 15 minutes or until the vegetables are tender.
3. Remove about half of the vegetables from the pot and put them in a food processor or blender. Be careful! The veggies are hot. Do not use a food processor with a fitted lid that seals completely. Steam must be able to escape while you puree.
4. Add the chicken pieces to the soup pot and leave to simmer.
5. To the vegetables in the blender/processor, add about a cup of the liquid from the soup, the peanut butter, the garlic and the chopped tomatoes.
6. Puree vegetable and peanut butter mixture until smooth, adding more liquid if necessary.
7. Return the pureed mixture to the soup pot and stir until completely incorporated. Your soup should be a bit thicker and a beautiful shade of yellow or orange.
8. Add noodles.
9. Simmer for about 10 or 20 minutes longer.
10. Turn off the heat.
11. Add the chopped herbs and stir them into the hot soup.
12. Add the lime juice and stir.
13. Taste the soup and add salt to taste.

Enjoy!