Dump Cake

       

Yum!  We made dump cake this week – I’d forgotten about this until I ran across the recipe when I was looking for something else.  (The something else was a good recipe for zucchini bread – if you have one, please share it in the comments!)

This is such a simple dessert to bake, M was able to do almost all of it when he was only 2 years old!  My 9” x 13” pan is missing (I think it’s in the shed being used for an oil change pan – yuck!), so we used a slightly larger baking dish.  The fruit didn’t quite cover the bottom like it should, but if you use the correct size pan it should be just fine.

Ingredients:

• 20 oz. can of crushed pineapple
• 14 oz. can of cherry pie filling
• 1 yellow cake mix
• 3/4 Cup of butter or margarine

First, grease your pan.

Then dump the crushed pineapple in and spread it around the bottom.

Dump the cherry pie filling in and spread it over the pineapple (we ended up just mixing our fruit together to cover the bottom of our dish). 

Next, sprinkle the cake mix on top of the fruit.  Use the entire mix, and smooth it out with a spoon as much as possible.

Then slice your butter and lay it on top of the cake mix, evenly, trying to cover as much of it as possible.

Bake in a 350 degree oven for 45 minutes. 

Try not to eat the entire delicious thing in one sitting. ;)

***NOTE***Previously when we made this, instead of slicing the butter and placing it on top of the cake mix, I melted the butter in the microwave, then mixed it into the cake mix in a separate bowl until all the cake mix was moistened and crumbly.  Then we sprinkled it on top of the fruit.  It was less time consuming than slicing all that butter AND we ended up using less butter that way.  I only remembered this after I had half the butter already sliced! 

Have a beautiful day! :)

Book Review – Simplify Your Life

I recently read Simplify Your Life, by Woodeene Koenig-Bricker.  As you may know, I’ve been making a dedicated effort to bring more simplicity, peace, and focus into our family life – and this book came at the perfect time!  (Remember how I was going to write several posts about my efforts to simplify?  They are still up and coming, it’s just that I was thrown off a bit by the fact that apparently simplifying means spending less time on the computer.  Huh.  Who knew?)

It’s a quick read, in fact it’s marketed as part of a “30-Minute Read” series.  There are a lot of relevant quotes scattered throughout the book, and I really enjoyed reading them.  Quotes like this one:

“Our Life is frittered away by detail.  Simplify, simplify, simplify!  I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumbnail.”

                                                                             -Henry David Thoreau

Or this one:

“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.”

                                                                           -Hans Hoffman

This little book (only63 pages) gives sound advice on the following areas:

• Cutting down on clutter
• Simplifying relationships
• Nurturing our minds, bodies, and spirits
• Simplifying the way we live as we learn to use our resources wisely and treat our environment with more care
• How growth in gratitude will help us live more simply as we focus on our blessings and stop wasting time and energy to gain what we do not have.

Much of what I read was plain common sense, but there were new ways of viewing areas of my life that I appreciated, and I really enjoyed this book!

One more quote:

“Both abundance and lack exist simultaneously in our lives, as parallel realities.  It is always our conscious choice which secret garden we will tend…. When we choose not to focus on what is missing from our lives but are grateful for the abundance that’s present – love, health, family, friends, work, the joys of nature and personal pursuits that bring us pleasure – the wasteland of illusion falls away, and we experience Heaven on earth.”

                                                                - Sarah Ban Breathnach

Thank you to The Catholic Company for providing me with a complimentary copy of this book to review.