There are many crazy things about this cake, not the least of which is that it does not call for eggs. Hence the name, I suppose… (It’s called crazy cake.)

Image from VeryBestBaking.com

You guys all made fun of me last time I substituted baking soda and vinegar for eggs in a recipe, but HA. This recipe is doing it on purpose. I feel smart now.

Another thing that makes a crazy cake crazy is that you mix it all in the pan you’re going to bake it in. I feel like a rebel doing shit like this, y’all.

The instructions for this recipe said to poke three holes in the dry ingredients to pour the wet ingredients into. I did it with my finger, of course.

Here’s a tip, though, free from me to you: Once you have used your finger to make a hole in your dry ingredients, do not lick it to clean it off. I am assuming you have seen the cinnamon challenge? If not, here:

Also, the hole was too small. TWSS.

And, defying all logic, you then pour cold water over the whole thing and mix it up. I am not sure, in that case, what the point of the holes was, but whatever. Crazy cake lives up to its name yet again.

Mixing cake in a pan is more difficult than you might imagine, and one tends to give up even though there are still lumps of white flour. (And by “one tends to give up,” I mean that I gave up, yo.)

I baked it for 34 minutes. Then I let it cool.

When I went to cut myself a corner piece, most of it stuck to the pan, but I swear to you the directions clearly said “ungreased.” Next time I’m just going to spray everything with Baker’s Joy no matter what the directions say because I will never again believe anything that says a pan should be ungreased. Fuck that shit. Liars.

It tasted ok I guess. The outside was a little burned and chewy, but the inside part wasn’t bad. And, if you think about it, “crazy” is still a good name for the cake in this case, because it’s a little weird on the outside, but it’s good at its center. (Right? Right? I win the metaphor medal. Thanks.)

Sorry, guys, but the blog is going to be a little food-heavy this month. I was starving when I wrote up my schedule so all the food looked really appealing. Husband and I are doing our darnedest to stick to a Paleo-ish diet. Some days we do better than others. (“Cavemen ate cookies, didn’t they, honey?”)

This one actually sort of qualifies even for a diet, since it’s fruit salad. Cavemen totally had fruit.

Image from Rachel Schultz

The “secret” ingredient is vanilla Jell-o instant pudding, though, and I’m pretty sure the cavemen didn’t have that… But it’s a secret ingredient, so maybe we can just pretend it’s not in there and eat it anyways.

In college, whenever someone decided we were having a potluck, I always made fruit salad. I lived in a dorm with only a microwave and tiny refrigerator, so cooking anything super ambitious was out of the question. I would get a big take-out box of fruit from the cafeteria (totally not stealing– it was a buffet and they gave you take-out boxes), chop it up, mix it together, and throw a yogurt in there. I’ve never heard of using Jell-o pudding powder instead of yogurt, but I’m game for anything, guys.

At our house, fruit salad is made with whatever the fuck we can find that is not moldy. Today I managed to gather a pretty decent collection.

You’ll note my leftover strawberries from the fruit roll-up experiment. I thought about saving them to make more fruit roll-ups, but no.

This does not even resemble what the recipe calls for, but hey, it’s fruit, so it totally counts.

Next the instructions said to use two tablespoons of the Jell-o pudding powder.

Fuck that noise, yo. What am I going to do with the remaining Jell-o pudding powder then, huh? Chocolate chips leftover are fine, but not powdered Jell-o pudding. So I dumped the whole thing in there.

Now, you will notice, perhaps, that my recipe didn’t use as many of the “juicy” fruits as the other recipe did. This did not bother me. I like granny smith apples, and I don’t care what you say. But it turns out that in this case, the juice actually serves a fairly important purpose, and that is to dissolve the Jell-o pudding powder. Oops.

So, er, yeah, mine is not the most beautiful fruit salad ever created.

Still, it tastes pretty good, I guess. Nothing special, and I’d pit it against not-stolen cafeteria fruit and yogurt any day, but still, not bad. Even if mine is way uglier.

You all know of my love affair with my slow cooker. If I can slow-cook it, I totally do, so I was on board immediately when I saw this pin for apple cinnamon slow cooker pork loin. Mmmmrmrmrmrm.

Image from Rachel Schultz

I joined a “boot camp” at one of my local gyms, and I made this after my very first session, so my arms were like jelly and I was sort of stumbling around all exercise-drunk. (Is that just me?) I was not reading or following directions very carefully, but hey, when you just throw everything in the crockpot, directions don’t matter too much anyways, right?

So I threw the whole pork loin on top of some apples in the crockpot.

And THEN I realized I should have cut it up to put the apples in it first, but who the hell needs a cutting board anyway? And why dirty up another thing? So I cut that bitch in my crockpot. That’s how we do.

Fine, not as pretty as the pin, but hey, it’s me.

Then I threw all the other shit in.

And then I turned on the crockpot and let it go for 7 hours.

I actually thought I was catching a cold because my nose ran all day, but I think it was maybe just the cinnamon smell cooking into the air. It was pretty strong. (Bad thing about working from home and also making slow-cooker meals is that you have to smell them all day and be tempted to eat it all before dinner.)

So, imagine my surprise when the final product was… bland. It wasn’t bad, exactly, it just wasn’t really sweet or tangy or spicy or anything that would make it that interesting.

A resounding “meh” for me on this one, but I might try it again sometime with a cinnamon rub on the pork loin or maybe just adding the cinnamon in halfway through cooking it or something. I dunno. Crockpots sometimes tend to sap all the flavor out of things… But you know me. I probably actually won’t try it again because I am lazy and I move on from failures quickly (she says, as she wallows in every mistake she ever made in her youth…).

It’s no secret that I want to lose a few pounds. After all, I did try the 3-day military diet. Blech. Check out the video below to see why I’m giving Slim-Fast a go and why I really want to lose the weight (and not just the fake reasons I usually tell everyone). (If you can’t see the video, click here!)

(Here’s that bourbon chocolate milkshake I mentioned in the video.)

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Fruit Roll-Ups are one of my fondest memories of childhood. Ok, well, that right there is hyperbole. My fond memories do revolve around more significant things than Fruit Roll-Ups. But we did have fun with them. In elementary school, all the kids who got Fruit Roll-Ups were the coolest because (get this) we’d take them and squish them to the roofs of our mouths and say, “Look! I have a retainer!” Yes, children without retainers were pretending to have them. Coolness is relative in elementary school, guys.

Anyway, when I saw this pin for how to make your own Fruit Roll-Ups, I knew I had to try it.

Image from The DIY Mommy

The first problem I came across was the problem of fruit. I had exactly… grapes, and nothing else. But then I remembered my frozen strawberries, purchased aspirationally when I bought my tiny blender thinking I’d drink a smoothie for breakfast every day like Jenna Marbles. Perfect. I didn’t want those fucking smoothies anyway.

The second problem is that my cute little individual blender, while adorable, is not big enough for two cups of strawberries.

No problem. I can make it in batches, I thought. And sure, they’re frozen, but I’m adding honey as liquid so it’ll all be fine.

And the answer to that thought process is a resounding NO. No, it will not blend. So I dumped everything out into a bowl, microwaved it for 30 seconds, added a little water, and blended it in even smaller batches.

It only took 3 or 4 (or 5 or 6) batches to get it all done and poured out onto the cookie sheet.

Not the most appetizing thing in the world, but hell, I’ve eaten worse. How bad could it be when the only two ingredients I used were strawberries and honey?

My oven’s lowest setting is 200 degrees, so I turned it on and stuck this in the oven. I thought it might be done in about 3 hours. It took 4 and a half. At one point, though, I thought it was done and took it out and even ate some, only to find that the center of the pan was still liquid.

Oops. When it was actually done, I took it out and peeled it off the paper. It was pretty nasty, guys. Not to be gross (ok, I’m lying about that– this is solely to be gross), but it looked sort of like a used, dried up maxi pad. Om nom.

Actually, though, it tasted pretty damn delicious and I think wouldn’t even need the honey were I to make it again. But let’s be honest: I’m not going to blend 5 batches of strawberries and bake something for four hours just for a piece of Fruit Roll-Up that I ended up eating in two sittings, no matter how damn delicious it is.

For those of you in the U.S. with me, happy Memorial Day! Since Memorial Day is sort of the unofficial kick-off for summer, I thought I’d try out something from my Summer board today: sand dollar cinnamon sugar cookies.

Image from mamamiss.com: Sand Dollar Cinnamon Sugar Cookies

Past sugar cookie operations have not gone according to plan. Also, you will note from previous entries that I am a useless sack of dicks in the kitchen, and precision is my baking downfall.

So I did not have high hopes for this, especially considering it’s a sugar cookies from scratch recipe. But I gathered my supplies.

There is one fairly high skill-level kitchen task which I can accomplish without fail and without the use of special tools nearly every time: I am an egg separating prodigy. I only use the shells and can separate them without breaking the yolk pretty much every time. So I did that first. Here is proof that I did not fuck it up:

Ask me to “cream together” softened butter and powdered sugar, though, and I scratch my head and utter something akin to, “Beh?” Number one: I don’t know exactly what constitutes “softened” butter. I sort of half-melted mine and called it good. Number two: I don’t know what “cream together” means so I just threw it in my KitchenAid and mixed it.

Also, I never buy unsalted butter, so this was salted butter, but I figured it would all even out if I just left out the pinch of salt the recipe called for, right?

Then I added the dry stuff and only sprayed some of the fine flour-dust around the kitchen because I turned the mixer on too high too fast. But that’s just part of baking… I think…

Per instructions, you leave this dough in the refrigerator for at least two hours before rolling it out, but I didn’t read that part before I started, and I had a pool party to go to, so that shit went in the refrigerator for like ten minutes before I got impatient and said to hell with it and rolled it out anyway.

I probably should have waited. It was super sticky, but the biggest problem was that it was really hard to pick up the cookies once I cut them and they sort of got squished in transport from the counter to the cookie sheet. I performed some field medic magic and did the best I could putting them back in a round shape, but after two sheets, I gave up and put the rest of the ball back in the refrigerator. So, on the plus side, I can dirty up my kitchen again tomorrow with a new batch of these fuckers.

Also, it takes for-freakin’-ever to find the most perfectly shaped almond slivers and arrange them in a star-shape on top of less-than-perfect circle cookies.

But I did it. I persevered. For two sheets of cookies, anyway. Then I was like, “Fuck this shit, I’m goin’ swimming.” Except then I didn’t go swimming because it was sort of cold… but I did drink rum, so close enough.

ANYWAY. The crucible of the oven (ha, literally) reshaped these things into something a little less horrifying and I actually wasn’t too embarrassed to share these with people.

I did wait to bring them out until everyone else had also had a few rum drinks, though. And they tasted pretty damn delicious, if I do say so myself. I guess it’s hard for cookies made up of largely butter and powdered sugar to taste bad.

Anyway, happy Memorial Day, Pintestes, and happy summer!

Just a quick note about The Pintester Movement: Thank you, thank you, thank you to those of you who have signed up! As of the writing of this post, I have 133 participants! Amazing! There is still time to sign up if you want to– go for it! And don’t worry if you haven’t heard from me yet. I’m going to send all participants an email tomorrow with instructions, links, and a few other goodies for your post, which should go up on May 30 (so we all post our stuff on the same day!). Thanks again!

I put this pin test on my schedule before the other member of my household went on a paleo diet kick. I’m pretty sure cavemen didn’t have Bisquick, but I’m making these damn cookies anyway.

Image from Plain Chicken: Bisquick Chocolate Chip Cookies

These cookies are supposed to be big and fluffy and easy — just like me. Haaa.

Anyway, I also happened to have the ingredients around. We won’t talk about how my brown sugar was a little fossilized and my Bisquick was past the expiration date… by like a year…

(And, yes, that’s an entire stick of butter.) But let’s be honest, folks. I’ve cooked with way worse ingredients than brown sugar and Bisquick that are just a little too old.

Besides, mixing the brown sugar with the other stuff mostly took care of any crusty bits.

I had to moosh out a few lumps, but you know. That’s how the cookie… uh… gets mooshed, right?

Then it was time to add Bisquick and chocolate chips. And nuts if you want, but I like my cookies nutless — just like me. Haaa.

It made a dough that looked a little dry to me, but hey, who am I to judge? I’m not exactly a cookie expert or anything.

… Unless eating lots of cookies makes me an expert, because then I’m pretty sure I qualify as a cookie Olympian.

Here’s a bad thing about this recipe: There are leftover chocolate chips and brown sugar. Fuuuuuuuck. Guess what I’m having for lunch next time I wake up with PMS.

Now before I give you the verdict on the cookies themselves, let me give you some points about this recipe that I find a little bit distressing:

• You have to be willing to eat (or do something with) approximately a fucktillion cookies, because that’s how many this recipe makes. No problem for me, but I’m just sayin’.
• As mentioned above, there will be leftover chocolate chips. Not distressing unless shark week is on its way.
• As with all chocolate chip cookie recipes, you cannot just assume that each cookie sheet of cookies will require the same amount of baking time (at least in my crap-ass oven), so if you want them to all be uniform, you have to stand there and keep checking the golden-brown-ness of them. That was kind of ok with me because I just played many rounds of Candy Crush in between checking.
• An entire stick of butter. I try not to think about it.

So, with all those caveats in mind, I will tell you that I thought these things were pretty delicious. In my case, they were better than my standard chocolate chip cookie recipe, probably because the Bisquick took some of the precision aspect out of it. The precision aspect is the major reason I suck at baking. The secondary reason is mostly that I am a spaz.

So, bake away my lovlies, as long as you’re willing to eat a fucktillion cookies with a stick of butter in the recipe and then ravage half a bag of chocolate chips next week before Aunt Flo stops by.

If vacuuming drunk isn’t a thing, it’s about to be, because it’s 2:30, my chores aren’t done, and I just tested this motherfucker:

Image from Imbibe Magazine, photo courtesy West Egg Cafe

I had to. It’s my job, guys.

It’s a bourbon chocolate milkshake. Not a chocolate bourbon milkshake. The bourbon is definitely the first ingredient.

For this test, I had to get out my brand spankin’ new never-been-used-before blender.

I bought that thing specifically so that I could have smoothies for breakfast like Jenna Marbles. I bought it months ago. No smoothie has been had for breakfast. And I do not look like Jenna Marbles yet, either.

The cool thing about this blender is that you blend your stuff and then you drink it right out of the thing you blended it in. Genius.

Also, the recipe said to use vanilla ice cream and chocolate syrup, but fuck that shit. When I make a chocolate shake, I use chocolate ice cream, bitches, cuz that’s how I roll.

(My short stint on the military diet scarred me and I still feel the need to measure everything to make sure it’s exactly a cup or a half a cup or whatever.)

It also calls for 2 ounces of bourbon.

Now I’m no chemist, but that is a ratio that makes me all warm inside.

Will it blend?

Indeed, it will.

Although I may have been a little over-zealous on the blending because it got sort of soupy…

And you remember how I said that ratio made me all warm inside? Well, drinking this made me all warm inside too, in that alcohol sort of way. Also cool inside because of the ice cream. It was very confusing, really. But I enjoyed it greatly. It’s like 90 fuckin’ degrees here and I still have to clean 2 bathrooms and vacuum the whole house, so I might just make me another one a’ deeze.

And, yeah, I drank it out of the blender cup like a badass. This way everyone just thinks it’s a health drink, right?

When I kept up a personal blog regularly, the one hard-and-fast rule about things I would not blog about was my weight. Blogging about weight never goes well. It either looks like I’m fishing for a compliment (“Oh, you’re not fat!”), or, if I really am needing to lose a little, I get lots of not-so-helpful advice from everyone, many of whom could stand to lose a few more pounds than me. (Oops, did I say that out loud?)

So this entry is not about weight. It is about a diet. Please don’t give me weight loss advice. I know how it’s done. Please don’t feel obligated to leave empty compliments about the size of my ass. I know what I look like and I know what range I’m supposed to be in, I promise.

Ooh, a little defensive first thing in the morning, aren’t we? It’s probably the lack of calories talking.

Because this week I tried the 3-day military diet.

Image from Blessedmommy.Hubpages.com

Supposedly, you can lose up to 10 pounds in three days on this here diet. I never expected to lose 10 pounds. My metabolism moves at about the speed of a comatose sloth (due to Reasons– don’t give me metabolism advice either). I hoped for maybe five pounds. That seems reasonable, right? Hope for half the weight loss of a normal dieter?

I started off not feeling too bad about it. Day 1 was not actually that much different than what I eat normally, except for cutting out the snacks. Plus there was caffeine, which I don’t allow myself too often (although I indulge in celebratory Diet Cokes sometimes).

Breakfast, Day 1

I was still feeling pretty good about it at lunch.

Lunch, Day 1

And, yes, I used measuring cups and spoons to make sure I was getting exactly the right servings of everything, anal-retentive types.

Supper was kind of ginormous. Also, there was ice cream. Diets with ice cream? Sign me up, right?

Supper, Day 1

Day 2 made me crankier. This was significantly less food than I usually eat and following on the heels of a snackless Day 1, I was not happy about it.

Breakfast, Day 2

Also, a cup of cottage cheese is a lot of cottage cheese. Blergh.

Lunch, Day 2

Supper, Day 2 (Not pictured: 1/2 cup of ice cream)

By the end of Day 2, I was suffering from major brain fog. I tried to put the cottage cheese back in the pantry instead of the refrigerator. I was so hungry that I ate dinner kind of early, which turned out to be a mistake because by 9:00 or so, I was ravenous again. I took to muttering vaguely intelligible phrases under my breath, like, “diet schmiet,” and, “mmm delicious popcorn,” and, “fucking shitass damn poop horrid cock bitch whore.”

I’d like to tell you that I didn’t cheat at all, but I snuck two extra Saltines so that my stomach wouldn’t start eating itself.

I felt a little better the next morning– more positive about the whole thing, at least.

Breakfast, Day 3

Lunch pretty much broke my spirit, though.

Lunch, Day 3

Yes, that is a single piece of dry whole wheat toast with one tiny hard boiled egg on it. That’s all. One egg! On one fucking piece of toast! When I was little and made up stories about being captured and thrown in the dungeon, the evil captors still always fed me more than this. Sure, it was gruel and crusts, but at least it was more volume.

At this point, I would have given up if I hadn’t already told half the world I was doing this as a pin test. No amount of weight loss is worth having that for lunch, really.

Here’s dinner. I broke and added a tiny bit of mustard and relish to the tuna because a cup of dry tuna is kind of a lot.

Supper, Day 3 (Not pictured: 1 cup of ice cream)

Another two Saltines got me through the evening and I went to bed empty-bellied, but hopeful.

So, to summarize: I stuck with this diet to the letter except for four extra Saltines. (The mustard and relish were allowed.)

I would like to report that, despite my bad attitude, I lost a billion pounds and highly recommend this to everyone. I did not. I lost 1.9 pounds. Not even 2. And I’m eating Mexican food and pizza today so I’m probably going to gain at least 1.9 pounds between now and bedtime.

It sucked, I hated it, and I would gladly take back that 1.9 pounds if it meant I could not be starving for three days. And this is why I fail at almost every actual diet. I’d rather be chunky than feel like I’m dying. (GAH! I mentioned my weight. Ignore that.)

In conclusion, this diet sucks and is not worth the pain… kind of like the military. (Oops, did I say that out loud?)

Alright, I admit it: This morning I woke up and realized I didn’t have a pin test planned and I really didn’t feel like going to the grocery store, so I went through my boards until I found something I could make with only the ingredients I had on hand.

Good thing I had a brown banana and an almost-empty thing of oatmeal or I wouldn’t have been able to make 2-ingredient cookies.

Image from The Burlap Bag

Normally, this would not constitute “food,” and I would be forced to make a Taco Bell trip for lunch. But if Pinterest says you can make food out of it, who am I to question?

Also, I didn’t have anything delicious to mix in. The chocolate chips and Rolos are long gone, compadres. (I was on my period. Shit happens.) But I did manage to dig a box of yogurt raisins out of my purse from when I took my nieces to the museum last week and needed emergency snacking supplies.

(The Auntie of the Year Award goes to me because I took them out for gelato instead of making them eat yogurt raisins.)

Does not in any way resemble cookie dough:

Still doesn’t, even mooshed and with yogurt raisins in it. (I don’t know why I thought that would help.)

I admit, here, to straying from the directions. Spraying the cookie sheet is an important step, guys. Don’t skip it. But I skipped it because I was using this awesome stoneware cookie sheet that I love and nothing ever sticks to the damn thing. It’s magical.

I was still not confident in how these would turn out, as they sort of looked like piles of cat puke.

They didn’t look all that much better when they came out of the oven.

Maybe slightly older piles of cat puke.

Also? They stuck to my fucking cookie sheet even though it’s magical and nothing ever sticks to it. Fine, cookies. You win. You will stick to anything.

I managed to pry them off the cookie sheet with only minimal damage, except for losing most of the yogurt raisins out of them.

And they tasted about like you’d expect: bananas, oatmeal, and yogurt raisins smooshed together and slightly dried out. Not like a cookie. More like bananas. And oatmeal.

I do admit to eating all of them because I was hungry and still too lazy to go to Taco Bell. And, on the plus side, eating all of the cookies only means that I ate a banana and half a cup of oatmeal, plus some stray yogurt raisins, so I don’t have to run a penitent mile or two later (ha, like I would anyway).