Dirt Pudding for my Farmer Dad

After church this morning, I asked my dad what dessert he'd like for our Father's Day celebration.

He said Dirt Pudding.

This confused me a bit because that's NOT a dessert our family makes...ever.

But, hey, it's his day so I said OK and headed to the store for some milk, Oreos and vanilla pudding! Luckily, Walgreens has the small packs of Oreos on sale for 99 cents this week and I had a coupon for $1 off two packages. SCORE!

Then I headed home to jump on the Internet to find the recipe. I found a recipe for Dirt Cake I on allrecipes.com that looked good. Then I read the comments and found some suggestions on tweak it a bit so I took those, as well as made some of my own.

Before I got started, I had to crush the Oreos...unfortunately I don't have a full-size food processor but my mini one did the job just fine.

It took a bit longer but my mini-processor is much easier to store than the full-size ones!

Here's the final product. I added a small John Deere tractor in honor of my dad. If I had some green icing or green food coloring, it would have been fun to add a "field" to the top as well...maybe next year.

I think he enjoyed it, as did the rest of the family! So I'm sharing the recipe on here so others can enjoy it (and so I have it if I ever want to make it again).

Here's the recipe...

Dirt Pudding/Cake
3 T. butter/margarine, softened (I may have used 4 T. since I had a half stick in the fridge.)
1 (8 oz.) package cream cheese, softened
2 (3.5 oz.) packages instant pudding mix
3 1/2 c. milk
2 (12 oz.) container frozen whipped topping, thawed (I used 1 1/2 containers because I NEEDED to eat the rest with a spoon right after I finished making this.)
32 oz. chocolate sandwich cookies with creme filling, chopped very fine in food processor (white cream will disappear)

Mix butter and cream cheese in bowl. In a large bowl, combine milk and pudding mix with a whisk. Then add the whipped topping. Combine pudding mixture and cream mixture together.

Layer in a trifle bowl (or a flower pot or other pretty dish), starting with cookies then cream mixture. Repeat layers. Chill until ready to serve.

If you put it into a flower pot, you can add an artificial flower or gummy worms or plastic trowel.

Celebrating Dad

To the best Dad (and Papaw) ever...

I love you!

Quick & Easy Black-Bottom Cupcakes

To celebrate Father's Day, I volunteered to make a couple of desserts for a casual evening gathering on my parents' backporch.

I decided to go with quick-n-easy desserts that I don't have the recipes for. A quick text to a co-worker got me started on the first - a strawberry angel food cake trifle.

Basically, it's a layer of cut-up angel food cake (or pound cake), topped with a layer of pudding (made with 1 & 1/4 c. water or milk & a tub of whipped topping), then a layer of whipped topping (I heart whipped topping!), then a layer of strawberries (or your choice of berries or fruit or candy). Repeat!

Since my four boisterous nephews were also going to be present, I decided to go with cupcakes for my second dessert.

One of the first recipes I remember baking on my own is black-bottom cupcakes - from scratch. The recipe was out of this great kid's cookbook that my sister and I loved.

Well, I didn't have that recipe at home but I did have a box of chocolate cake mix, a brick of cream cheese and some chocolate chips! With a quick call to my sister who provided an alternate cream cheese mixture recipe, I was off to the oven.

The recipe...

Chocolate cake mix

Cream cheese filling:

1 8 oz. package cream cheese (softened)

1 egg

1/2 c. sugar

1/8 t. salt

Chocolate chips (as many as you want!)

Make cake mix as directed on the box.

Beat cream cheese filling ingredients (except for choc. chips) together. Stir in chocolate chips.

Fill the cupcake liners about 1/3 (or a bit more) with cake mix and add a tablespoon of the filling. Bake according to the instructions on cake mix box.

 

They turned out pretty good. Not quite a good as the originals, but no one complained! Next time I think I'll try to make the cake mix and filling a bit thicker and see what happens.

Be sure to visit some of the great posts from the Cupcake Carnival and Cupcake Tuesday by clicking on the buttons below. They are way more creative than I am!

5 Things from My Dad

In anticipation of Father’s Day, I started to think about all of things I’ve inherited from my father, as well as everything he’s taught me. The list is too long to put in this post, so I narrowed it down to 5 things:


1. My blue eyes:

 

2. My sense of humor: I’m a little off kilter and silly, just like my dad. We have some great inside jokes in my family and most of them can be traced back to my dad. I say “Butler.” He says “Cincinnati.” We both laugh. See I told you, an inside joke!

3. My love of the comics page:

 

First let me say that my dad reads two newspapers front-to-back every day and I picked up that habit from him as well. However, my mom does that as well but she does NOT read the funnies (what we call the comics page) – that is something I learned solely from my dad.

It’s so bad that a) we’ve passed it on to my oldest nephew and b) dad and I can have such serious conversations about certain comic strips. So much so that if my mom walks in mid-conversation, she asks us who we are talking about.  When we say “Crankshaft” or Funky Winkerbean,” she rolls her eyes and walks away!

4. An appreciation for the land and what it can give to us:

 

My dad’s work uniform is a white t-shirt, blue jeans and work boots. For his entire life, including the four years he went to college, he has farmed. He’s farming the same land that his father and grandfather farmed and that is a lesson as well. My dad instilled in me the knowledge that if you work the land and tend it carefully that it will provide for you – and your children and your children’s children and so on. It’s not an easy life’s work and I’m appreciative that he – and others – chooses to do it so I can pursue my life’s work without worrying about having to grow food to feed myself.

5. A sense of family:

Enough said!