Ice Cream Cake!!! -as seen on Omnomicon.com-

A family friend runs this amazing cooking blog, omnomicon.com, and posted a recipe that she found in a vintage community cook book. Its a fabulous semi home made take on cake mix cake. She recommended it to me when I was making cupcakes for my sister's baby shower and they are so delicious I have not made a cake different since.

Cupcakes made and arranged by me in April 2011 for my Sister's Baby Shower.

Best thing about this recipe is- no measuring required because you use a box cake mix!!!!!

The recipe given is for chocolate cake and you use chocolate ice cream, but I have also done this with gold cake mix and vanilla ice cream and chocolate cake mix and mint chip ice cream.You will need:
1 box chocolate cake mix (or any other flavor)
1 pint chocolate ice cream, softened (again, any other flavor)
3 eggs
1 c water

 First scoop the ice cream into a bowl and set aside to soften. If you need to pop it into the microwave for a few seconds that's fine too. Just don't go over 10seconds- You don't want it to be soup, just soft.

Preheat oven to 350^o. Grease pan, then dust with flour ( Or for a extra chocolate kick use cocoa powder) or I use baking Pam.

Beat all ingredients together for 4 minutes. And after the 4 minutes it will look like, well melted ice cream.

 Pour into pan and bake 45 minutes. 

Serve with a dusting of confectioner’s sugar, a thin icing, whipped cream or the frosting of your choice.

This cake was made for a cake walk at my works Fall Festival, so it ended up looking like this:

The Cut

This past July I had my first significant hair cut in about 4 years. My sister (who is a cosmologist) took about 13/14 inches off in a ponytail- and then another few for styling.
I recently realized I didn't have pictures from 4th of July weekend on my external hard drive and then realized I had never put them on my computer from my old memory card. Well this was the weekend I cut my hair so I had some pictures- and whenever I stumble on pictures of my long hair I miss it. I'm glad I cut my hair, it was cooler- temp wise- and easier to take care of, but sometimes I miss all the fun things I use to do with it.
I donated my hair to Locks Of Love. I did the same thing in 8th grade.

 Locks of Love is a public non-profit organization that provides hairpieces to financially disadvantaged children in the United States and Canada under age 21 suffering from long-term medical hair loss from any diagnosis. For more information on this organization and to learn how you can help go to http://www.locksoflove.org/