Boxed cake mix taste like bakery? Tried it!

 Hello friends! My husband is out of town and I am with two little ones and no body to give me a break. Needless to say I am going a little crazy! Not to mention little Eli just turned two months old today and we got his vaccinations. If you have to know one thing about me, it should be that I am very pro-vaccinations. I can talk your ear off about how you should not only vaccinate your kids but yourself as well! I wont, but I really can! Anyways, both my kiddos are really cranky and I needed something sweet to eat and get a sugar buzz to get through this day. So I made a cake!

 I am a huge fan of boxed cake mix because of the convenience. You can just throw things together and it usually (I might have burned a cake or two in my day) turns out. Also the canned frosting is so easy to just throw on the cake. It really doesn't get much easier than that! The thing is you can really tell when it is boxed cake mix and canned frosting. It taste good, but not good enough that you would prefer it over a bakery styled cake. With that said have you seen those pictures going around Pinterest and Facebook floating around that says make boxed cake mix taste like a bakery? I have seen this floating around for it seems like forever and I always wondered if it was correct! So, I decided to live up to my blogging name and try it out!

Now, let me tell you what it says to do. So, first you add an extra egg, or two depending how you like your cake. I only added one. Then you add in melted butter instead of oil, and you double it. For my cake mix it said use a half of cup oil so I melted a cup of butter in the microwave and added that. Also instead of water you add milk. Then I added two cap-fulls of vanilla extract. The picture that I have seen around said to preheat oven to 350 then when your about to throw in the cake turn it down to 325. That is exactly what I did. It said to bake it for 25 minutes. At 25 minutes I inserted a toothpick it came out with cake still on it. I think the toothpick came out clean at 32 minutes. So keep your eye on you cake it could cook at different times!

After baking it, it looked pretty good. Smelled good too! It was hard to wait until it was done to try it! I did though, you all should be very proud. While I was waiting for it to cool I had a thought about the canned frosting I was about to use. There had to be a way to make that taste better, and also make it so there is enough to cover the whole cake. That's what I hated about canned frosting, it was NEVER enough to cover the whole cake! So I decided to mess around with the canned frosting. So what I ended up doing was taking chocolate (whipped) Duncan Hines frosting and add about 5 drops of vanilla extract. I say about because I went to go put some in the cap and spilled it into the frosting. OOPS! Then I added about a tablespoon and a half of butter. I like my frosting to be thinner. Then I added 1/3 cups of powdered sugar. I also added in a half of a tablespoon of Hershey's chocolate powder to add to the chocolate part. It was pretty much add a little bit of this and that until it was to my liking. Then I added it on my cake. 

Now the frosting that I made was thin. Like super thin but you can make it thicker by adding in more powdered sugar. Also you can do the same for white frosting. I haven't made it yet but I would think that you could add the vanilla, powdered sugar, and butter to make it taste better. It is easy to just make your own frosting but mine never turn out! For some reason my butter cream taste like, well, butter. I know butter is in the name but I want a delicious butter cream not a stick of butter in my mouth. Also the possibilities are endless with canned frosting. You can add peanut butter or any extract. Pretty much anything that sounds good, use your imagination. Now to take out a piece of cake and see what that looks and taste like.

Let me tell you this was the best boxed cake I have ever had. Now, to compare it with a bakery style cake is unfair. It is delicious but not bakery delicious. You can definitely take a bite out of this cake and a bakery style cake and tell which is which. It is very good and by adding those couple ingredients and not really taking that much more time to make it, it makes it like 1,000x better! It is definitely worth it! So, try it, tell me how you like it, and enjoy it! I am going to go and get another piece because it is delish!

Easy Peasy Pumpkin Muffins

Hello friends! This week has been crazy! In between my oldest being done with kindergarten, doctors appointments, and just plain crazy kids, I haven't had any time to do anything! I thought today I would post my first recipe. I will be posting recipes every now and again. Now, I should mention that I am a horrible cook! I mean it! Half the stuff I make is barely edible. I am an okayish baker. I enjoy baking so maybe that's why a little bit more than half of the stuff I make turns out. Today I am going to post about muffins, pumpkin muffins to be exact. I know right now is not the time to be posting about pumpkin being as its summer and not fall. I really wanted pumpkin muffins this morning though so I thought I would kill two birds with one stone and post about my pumpkin muffins while eating one! You are just going to have to keep this in mind for those fall days, or you can just be crazy like me and make them right now!

I made these muffins for my daughters kindergarten Halloween party. Without the coconut oil though I just started to add that. I got the original recipe off of the food.com website. I figured that sounded easy enough to make so I tried it out and did a trial run. My family ate all the muffins in one setting! They were so good! I also added icing to the top of them because I needed that little bit of extra sweetness. So let me tell you how to make them and hopefully you will love them as much as my family does! 

• 1 15oz can 100% pure pumpkin
• 1 box of spice cake mix
• 2 teaspoons of coconut oil

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. 
2. Mix in the pumpkin to the spice cake mix using an electric mixer. Make sure that it is well blended. 
3. Add in the teaspoons of coconut oil. Blend in with electric mixer until you cannot see any of the coconut oil. 
4. Spray the liners with nonstick cooking spray. You can also just spray the pan if you don't have/want to use liners. 
5. Put the mix into the muffin liners/pan. I used a regular old kitchen spoon and used about a spoonful for each muffin. This is not like regular mix. It is super thick and stays together.
6. I baked mine for 18 minutes and it was perfect but you can bake for 18-22 minutes. A toothpick when inserted should come out clean when done.

Makes about 20 cupcakes.

Easy huh? I love how simple and easy this recipe is! Mine comes out super moist. It is not like a regular muffin by how it tastes. It is kind of gooey? I don't know if that's the right word for it. It kind of reminds me of a thicker more cake-like pumpkin pie, if that makes sense. All I know is when I make them my husband and I have at least 5 each because they are that good. This is what the batter looks like after I mix everything together:

I already made my first batch, then I took this picture. If you can see the batter is super thick. I added the virgin unrefined coconut oil to mine. The stuff that still smells like coconut. I figured it would be okay because the spice cake mix was a really powerful flavor. They do make a refined coconut oil that does not have the smell or taste of coconuts or you can not add it in or none at all. Your choice! I made a glaze for ours this morning by taking powdered sugar and adding milk to it until it was my desired consistency. I have also made a thicker icing just adding more powdered sugar. I made that for my daughters Halloween party so I can make spider webs and use little raisins as the spiders. Not to pat myself on the back or anything but I thought that was the cutest thing ever. You can also add raisins to the mix and it taste awesome!I know that you are just dying to see the finished product so here it is:

I'm telling you, if you're a fan of pumpkin you are going to love these! I know I do! I think I am going to go and get my 6th one now. Try it out, then tell me how much you looooovvvveee them. :-)

Want to try free things? Be a BzzAgent!

Hello, everyone! My oldest is at her last full day of Kindergarten. When did my baby get so big?! Ugh! My two youngest are both taking naps. Which to me, is a miracle. They NEVER nap at the same time. That means mommy gets to do a blog post! Yay!

I thought I would change up my post a bit. I am a stay at home mom, which also means slave of children. True story! I have been a stay at home mom for two years now. For me, it's very hard to be a stay at home mom because I love what I do. I just got my college degree before my husband and I decided it was best for me to stay at home with our children. So now I find myself trying to think of ways to help out or at least not bother my husband to buy things we really don't need. I am trying out a couple websites now that either give me free product or I can make a little bit of cash off of. Either doing surveys, telling people about products (that I try for free), or even just checking my email. I will post about the ones I have tried throughout my blog posts and hopefully you can have fun on them too! u

First website I thought I would tell you about is called BzzAgent. Let me tell you about BzzAgent. First of all you sign up, its completely free! After you sign up they will have a bunch of surveys for you to do. Now these surveys tell BzzAgent about who you are and what you like or dislike. This will qualify you to try out free product or as they say you will be invited to a campaign. Now all you have to do is wait for your package in the mail (which to me is so exciting) and then you try out the product. They will have different things they want you do on the main page. Like give friends and family samples (or coupons) and tell people people about the product, or post about it on social websites, or blog about it if you have a blog. What you have to do varies to each campaign. With each campaign I have done I had to do a review on the product. To me that stuff is easy and the products I try actually interest me!

When I signed up I thought I would never qualify for a campaign or get anything out of it. I saw mixed reviews online and some people say that they have gotten invited to many different campaigns and some say that they don't get many invitations. I believe its just how you answer your surveys. You want to answer them completely honestly and when you try out product be 100% honest with your reviews. I have done 3 campaigns so far, and I started in March. I have qualified for 5 but two of them I knew I wouldn't be able to give an honest review because I wouldn't have tried the products so I decided not to do them. The three I have done are Starbucks k-cups, Children's Claritin, and now I am onto Coppertone Sunscreen. I will tell you more about the Coppertone Sunscreen at the end of this post. I have called the company because I was so impatient with my first campaign and because we were moving so I wanted to make sure I didn't miss it. It was nice to talk to them on the phone. They were very pleasant and didn't have a single problem when talking to them. This is what my home page looks like now:

One cool I have found about BzzAgent is that they team up with a site called mypoints and they give you points for completing activities in the campaigns. You can then use those points when you get enough of them to get gift cards to almost any brand you can think of. Mypoints also has stuff you can do on their website for points but I haven't done any of that...yet. Also they let you know how you are doing with a bzzscore. They work with a ton of different companies so you get to try a broad range of products. Like:

Is it obvious I am doing the Coppertone Clearlysheer Sunscreen campaign? It should be because this sunscreen is awesome! It makes your skin soft and it is non-greasy! I have put it on my face and it just leaves it soft and smooth,not to mention it didn't cause a single breakout!I have applied it when I did gardening all day and also before I went to the zoo. I did not get a single sunburn and my skin was soft and smooth afterwards. My mom applied it too and only her shoulders got a little red. She has sensitive skin also and it didn't cause any disruptions with her skin. Now if I was just going to the isle and saw it without doing the campaign, I probably wouldn't buy it. Just being honest here! I get the cheap stuff! Now I would double think that motion because I really do like this sunscreen. Once I am done using all this sunscreen I am going to make a DIY one (I will post about it when I do), but if that doesn't work this one is the sunscreen I am going to use. Here is a pic from my BzzAgent page on it that tells about the different types and it even says how many days I have left to finish my activities with this campaign. 

 I got to try this and the other products for free! Oh, I already said that? Sorry, I just think that is so cool there are websites out there that lets you do that. If this interest you, I like to say try it out! :-)