Coconut cake with coconut cream cheese frosting

This recipe is optimized for those with only a toaster oven available for baking, like myself. Adjust baking temperatures and times as needed to what you use.

Ingredients for cake:

• Box of white cake mix
• Wet ingredients called for by mix
• 1 cup of shredded/flaked coconut, preferably sweetened
• 1 Tbsp. of coconut extract
• 1/2 Tbsp. of vanilla extract

Ingredients for frosting:

• 8 oz. cream cheese
• 1/2 cup of butter
• 2 cups powdered sugar
• 2 cups shredded/flaked coconut
• 1 tsp. vanilla extract
• 1 tsp. coconut extract
• Milk as needed to thin out the mixture

Materials:

• Mixing bowl
• Hand mixer, if you want the cake really whipped up and airy, and you’ll definitely need it for the frosting
• Spatula
• Measuring cups and spoons
• Serrated knife to level the cake
• 2 8×8″ square glass pans (because that’s what I had that fit in my toaster oven)
• Spray or butter to grease the pans
• Toaster oven

Preheat the toaster oven to 375 degrees. Prepare the cake mix as directed by the box. I used my hand mixer to whip up the eggs, oil and water because I knew I was adding the coconut and that might make the batter even denser. Once the mix batter has been combined as directed, add extracts and thoroughly mix in to the batter. Mix in flaked coconut to batter. Pour batter evenly into two greased pans. Bake one pan at a time for about 30 minutes. When the timer is done, check center with a toothpick/tester to ensure it is baked through. You should not have anything wet coming out on the tester! Repeat with second pan.

While the cakes are cooling on a rack, cream together cream cheese and butter for frosting. Add in 1 cup of powdered sugar. Thoroughly mix in. Add in second cup of powdered sugar. Again thoroughly mix in. The frosting may be pretty thick at this point, so slowly add in milk to thin it out. Start with 1 Tbsp. and add 1 Tbsp. at a time until the frosting consistency is like that of a store-bought brand. Add vanilla and coconut extracts and, again, thoroughly mix. Add in flaked coconut.

Since this is a layer cake, your life will be made immeasurably easier if you level out the lumpiness on the layers. You don’t need to take off much, just enough to make it level. And if you didn’t evenly divide batter between the two pans, like myself, don’t worry about making the layers the same thickness. This is a homemade cake. Homemade cakes are not perfect. Just incredibly tasty.

Place bottom layer, bottom down, onto serving plate. Set about a 1/2 cup of frosting on the top of the layer and spread to edges. Feel free to add more as long as you have enough to frost the top and edges of the cake as a whole. Place second layer, bottom up, onto first layer. This will give you a reasonably level surface to make your cake as pretty as possible. Spread the remaining frosting on the top and sides of the cake. Serve and enjoy!

Menu 1/6 to 1/12

With the start of the new year, I got a bump in pay thanks to a one-year promotion. Yay! Payroll taxes went the heck up, though. As part of my goal to live a bit more frugally to pay off a few bills, I’m working on making up weekly menus to manage my food expenses. As you’ll see, I’m not all that creative when it comes to breakfast and lunch at work.

Breakfasts Monday through Friday: Luna Nutz Over Chocolate, banana, and grapefruit juice.

Lunch Monday through Friday: Hard-boiled egg, cheese slices, crackers, water or San Pellegrino Aranciata.

Brunch Sunday: 2 slices of leftover pretzel roll french toast, 1 egg scrambled with grated parmesan cheese and Lake Shore Drive seasoning mixed in, one link of apple-gouda sausage, and grapefruit juice.

Sunday dinner: Pretzel-parmesan crusted chicken & green beans (the green beans didn’t really happen)

Monday dinner: Leftover pretzel-parmesan crusted chicken and green beans

Tuesday dinner: Cereal (yeah, I’m being lazy)

Wednesday dinner: Knitting night, Panera Turkey-Cranberry Panini (getting 1/2 to go), chips and lemonade

Thursday dinner: Leftover 1/2 of Turkey-Cranberry Panini

Friday dinner: Out at a restaurant with my brother and sister-in-law

Saturday breakfast: dependent on if I meet up with my brother and sister-in-law. If I do, then I’m not going to local RWA meeting where I eat out all day.

Saturday lunch: see breakfast

Saturday dinner: see breakfast

Recipe: Pretzel-Parmesan crusted chicken

This is a really simple dish to make. Or I could be delusional about that as I’ve made similar types of dishes before so I know the process. This is for a serving size of two. Mainly because I live alone and I don’t feel like frying up more than will be enough for immediate dinner and one leftover dinner at a time.

Pretzel-Parmesan crust mixture:

• 1 1/2 cups of whole pretzels – this is approximate as I used two big handfuls
• 1/4 cup grated parmesan cheese – again approximate

Blend together in a food processor until it’s mostly small crumbs with some chunkier pieces of pretzel throughout.

Ingredients for chicken:

• 1 fat boneless, skinless chicken breast, butterflied in half so you actually have two pieces
• 1 egg
• 1 Tb or so of skim milk
• 1/3 cup of pretzel-parmesan crust mixture
• Salt & pepper to taste
• 1/4 cup or so of canola or your favorite frying oil

Materials:

• Skillet or electric fry pan for cooking
• tenderizing mallet or sturdy whacking implement (I used a can of beans)
• 1 qt. plastic baggie
• bowl for egg mixture
• bowl for crust mixture

Heat oil in skillet or fry pan to about 350 degrees. You don’t need the oil to be deep, maybe an 1/8″ or so. Whisk together egg and milk in one bowl for dipping. Put crust mixture and salt & pepper to taste in the other bowl. Take one half of the butterflied chicken breast and place it in the baggie. Whack it until it’s about a 1/4″ thin.

The chicken in the above picture is before it was whacked, so you want to go thinner. Once both pieces of chicken have been tenderized, dip them into the crust mixture to get a thin layer on them. Then dip them into the egg mixture and thoroughly coat the chicken. Take the chicken out and place it back into the crust mixture. This is where you will get a thick crust. The oil should now be hot, so lay the chicken flat in the pan and cook the chicken about 3-4 minutes on each side until the crust is golden brown.

Serve with green beans if you were intelligent enough to cook those ahead of time according to directions unlike myself. I usually save one of the pieces for dinner the next day and reheat in the microwave for about 1 1/2 minutes.

Update: Pounds jars

Almost a year ago, I posted about a neat little inspiration craft I found on Pinterest. I still have those jars, and there has been movement. When I first made them, my motivation was to lose weight, but, honestly? That goal has *never* worked for me. My brain is just not wired to be focused on weight loss. In March, I did sign up for Weight Watchers after seeing the success that an author friend of mine, Shannon Stacey, was having with it. In the nine months I’ve been a member, I’ve lost nearly thirty pounds.

How have I lost so much if weight loss hasn’t been my goal? I’ve lost it because I’ve made making healthier food choices and exercising more my goals. I bought a FitBit pedometer to keep track of how much I walk a day. It’s expensive, but as I use it pretty much every day with the odd forgetting to take it off the charger and put it back on my bra, it’s been worth it. I know that it’s made an impact on how much I move around each day.

The weight loss has been slow, if not outright stagnant, at times, but I expected this. Weight loss is not the goal. It is only a measure of the choices I am making. Not to say I’m not pleased by the weight loss. I am. I’m more worried about creating sustainable eating and exercise habits which will last the rest of my life. I’ve always known what I needed to do to lose the weight, but I was never ready to make the time commitment needed, especially to the exercise. The other reason I’m perfectly happy with the slow melting away of pounds is that I expect them to stay off. I’ve had rapid weight loss in the past, mainly due to medications, and those pounds always came back with a few more friends. That is not going to happen with the pounds I’ve been losing this last year.

I don’t really have an end goal in mind since the (insert refrain) weight loss is not the goal. I know what size I’ve always felt like in my head, so if I reach that, I’ll be ecstatic. What’s that size? 14-16. Even in my own head I don’t think of myself as a skinny minnie. To me, with my frame and bone structure, 14-16 is thin. I’ve already dropped down to a 22 in jeans and 22-24 in tops. I can slip fitted clothes off and on without having to unzip them. I’m feeling really great about what I can do.

With all of that, I am keeping track of the weight loss with the pounds jars still. The amount of stones I first put into the pounds jar equaled what I thought would be reasonable weight loss for one year, about 1 pound per week, and what I thought it would take to get me into size 20 jeans. This week, I finally tipped over into having more stones in the “pounds lost” jar than in the “pounds to go” jar. I don’t think I’ll empty the “pounds to go” jar before my one year anniversary with Weight Watchers, but I’m fine with that because I think I might come close to making it into those size 20 jeans.