My crock pot failure

I tried to make crock pot oatmeal last night so we could eat it this morning but it failed so completely that I determined it to be inedible. Here's what it was supposed to look like:

Delicious right? I chose to add raisins and brown sugar and cinnamon to my pot of pre-planned yum and I didn't take the recipe completely seriously when it called for steel cut oats so this is what I came away with:

It smelled WONDERFUL. It didn't at first inspection look too bad either with it's warm, plump raisins and cinnamon sugar color. Alas, it was an illusion and a lie. The whole bottom was burned and when I tasted it to see if my nose was telling the truth about the flavor I discovered that it was completely bland and watery. Notice the dark, dark edges and that slightly burned look there at the bottom? Yeah, I'm still soaking that right now so that I can clean this tasteless mess out and make my crock pot useable again. I will attempt this recipe at least one more time following ALL of the instructions and not wandering off course to do my own thing with a recipe that looked super simple. What did I end up feeding my family for breakfast instead, you ask? Just a standard easy favorite. Natto, rice, fried eggs, and furikake. Seems to be a wonderful easy fall back for me. 

Ghiradelli Mocha Devil's Food Cupcakes

I made these cupcakes from Ghiradelli's devil's food cake with mocha butter cream frosting. I ran into a challenge when I decided that "add 1 tsp of vanilla" meant add all the vanilla but the cake came out really tasty anyway and the frosting is MUCH better served cold than at room temperature in my opinion.

 Here's the link to the Ghiradelli site recipe; just pay close attention to the instructions. This is an image of the cake from the website YUM!

http://www.ghirardelli.com/bake/recipe.aspx?id=1029

Fresh Fruit Trifle (I made this one up on my own)

I had a dear friend in need of comfort food and of course that equates to desserts or pasta in my world. Saturday, I chose dessert!

This Fresh Fruit trifle was so incredibly easy to make and thank goodness too cause I was running late! I got 2 lbs of strawberries, a package of blueberries, a gigantic Angel Food cake, and a super large tub of Cool Whip, dragged it all home and got started. I saved out a few of the strawberries (3 to be exact but you can use more or less as it suits you) to go on top for decoration then washed and quartered all the rest into a medium bowl with the washed blueberries. I think I added about a quarter cup of sugar maybe a half, I really just eyeballed it, and let my daughter do the stirring to get every berry nice and coated. The berries then went into the fridge while the whipped topping sat on the counter and I ran off to change clothes. I think about 30 minutes probably less later I broke up the angel food cake into the bottom of the trifle bowl and poured out a good bit of the berries over it then covered the berries with whipped topping and repeated the layering one more time making sure that I got all of the juice from the berry bowl into the trifle bowl. I created the lovely design you see on top there and literally ran out the door! 

Now I'm sure that this trifle would be better if the berries were allowed to macerate longer, possibly even over night, but don't fret if you don't have that kind of time. I still got rave reviews about the dish and if I had to hazard a guess I think it's probably one of those dishes that would keep in the fridge over night pretty well letting the angel food cake absorb some of the rich berry juices. Of course that all depends on whether or not it survives that long LOL!

Happy cooking!