Molly wanted a Hamburger Cake for her birthday. We trolled around the Internet and looked at lots of photos and ideas. This is what we came up with. It might look like something difficult but let me be the first to tell you-I am not much of a baker and if I can put this together anyone can! I don’t have any photos of the cake in progress.

I bought 2 cake mixes-1 yellow and one chocolate. I made the chocolate in a 8×8 brownie pan-square patty like Wendy’s burgers!

I made 2— 8 inch rounds out of the yellow cake but filled one with more of the batter (bottom bun smaller-top bun larger.)

After they cooled I trimmed the patty to make it nice and flat as well as trimming the bottom bun. Then I took the extra chocolate cake and added it to the top of the top yellow cake bun to make it more dome like. Make sense?

I bought 3 cans of frosting 1 chocolate and 2 white

We took some frosting out  and divided it into 3 bowls for condiments and added food coloring –red for ketchup, green for lettuce and yellow for mustard. You don’t need much. After you reach the desired color put each into a plastic bag and squeeze down to one bottom corner. set aside.

Take more white frosting into a bowl and add color to look like American cheese—use this to frost graham crackers to look like cheese slices on the burger.

Take the other can of white frosting and make it bun colored-we added a bit of the chocolate frosting for some color plus some food coloring.

Now to put it together

bottom bun cake first with burger patty (chocolate cake) next. Frost the chocolate cake with the chocolate frosting-making the edges look burgery!

 To that we put the graham crackers already frosted on the edges of the burger cake-hanging over a bit. We didn’t go all the way into the middle of the burger with these I wanted it to stay stable and thought this might make it tippy and too sweet. We did use more of the cheese frosting between the graham crackers and on the edges to look like melting cheese.

Then top with top bun. Use the bun frosting to glue the dome shape together. Try to smooth the frosting out as much as possible. Now get your condiment frosting’s and cut a tiny bit off the corner (a little larger for lettuce) and pipe lettuce around the bottom edge and squeeze squiggly ketchup and mustard on the cheese frosting.

We added a few slivered almonds on the top for seseme seeds.

This really wasn’t too hard. And it was surprisingly good. I thought it was going to be way too sweet-but it wasn’t. It was a little hard to cut but no one seemed to mind!

Remember I used to post recipes on Thursdays and invited readers to join in the fun and link to recipe on their blogs on Thursdays? Well let’s try again!! If you need the whole sorted explanation of why I chose to call them quarter recipes you can read about it here.

So here is my meager but tasty and healthy recipe for this week.

We enjoy smoothies many mornings. On this day we mixed up a couple of frozen bananas, about 3 large handfuls of spinach,  some orange juice, a couple of tablespoons of goji berries, a couple of tablespoons of chia seeds, and a whole lot of frozen blueberries in my VITA-MIX.

I keep my chia seeds in the freezer, that’s why they look sweaty.

This may be a green smoothie, but the blueberries really make it more purple.

If you have a favorite recipe to share (it doesn’t have to be raw) leave a link in the comments to your blog’s recipe post.

Or think about joining in next week. Because I have the world’s best salad recipe to share next Thursday! (I have been eating it for days)

The grocery stores around here have been having some great prices on fruit-some organic and some not. I try to buy organic whenever possible-which is about 90-95 % of the time. But there are a few things like pineapples and mango that I don’t often see here as an organic choice. But the last few weeks these have been really cheap. So I stocked up and have been making this smoothie over and over again with a few minor changes here and there.

These measurements are just guesses because when it comes to smoothies-I just dump things into my Vita-Mix.

1 to 1 1/2 cups pineapple chunks

1 to 2 mangos

1 frozen banana

a handful of ice

almond milk-enough to make it as thick or thin as you want

a handful of almonds

2 Tablespoons of chia seeds

2 Tablespoons of hemp seeds

dash of cinnamon

This tasted a lot like orange sherbet!  I almost always make green smoothies and adding spinach to this didn’t change the taste too much.   Other additions to this basic mixture that tasted good have been spinach, frozen strawberries, flax seeds and a cut up orange. You can pack tons of nutrition into these smoothies, which is a great start to the day!

If you have a raw recipe to share this week please leave a link to your raw post in the comments. Thanks!!

With the nice weather here this week-we have been busy hitting the playground and back yard! But I did take the time to sprout some quinoa. I say take the time-almost tongue in cheek, as these little nutrional powerhouse grains sprout overnight! And this tastes great too!

Tabbouleh

1 c sprouted quinoa

1/4 c olive oil

3 T lemon juice

1 t salt

cucumbers, tomatoes, red onions and at least 1/2 c parsley.

This tastes better if you make it and then let it sit or marinate for at least a half an hour.

If have a raw recipe to share this week-leave a link to your raw post in the comments or just type it out sand add it to the comments. Thanks!!

Good Morning! I am not someone who gets up and eats breakfast right away. Sometimes 2 or 3 hours pass before I am ready to eat. When I have time I often make smoothies. I am working on making those green smoothies actually taste good. I make bad, bad green smoothies. But I recently found this site-with over 70 green smoothie recipes!!! So there is hope for me. Did I already link to this last week?  If so, sorry I am getting old!

Sometimes I just have plain fruit and sometimes I have museli. It is really expensive to buy but not too expensive to make your own. And you can customize it to your taste! I use a large container and start with raw oats and various nuts and or seeds. I usually use almonds, pecans and sunflower seeds. Then I add some dried fruit-I love raisins, some apples and strawberries that we dehydrated and cocoa nibs.  Shake it up!

I always add fresh fruit either berries, a grated up apple or a banana. I use almond milk from the carton-so technically not raw but very convenient for the 1/4 to 1/2 cup that really use. If you pour the milk and let it sit, the oats will soften some. I prefer it chewy. And I like to top it with lots of cinnamon.  Especially on chilly mornings.

Ginger-well she just prefers icicles!

If you have a raw recipe that you want to include this week just leave a comment here with a link to your raw recipe post! I would love to have others join in!

If you have more apples than you know what to do with, this is a great recipe that uses approximately 8  large apples.

preheat 350 grease 9 x 13 pan

In a medium bowl atir together 2 cups sugar (or less!) 4 cups chopped apples, mix well

stir together  2 cups of flour, 2 teaspoon baking soda , 2 teaspoons cinnamon, 1 teaspoon salt.

In a large bowl, stir together 1/2 cup veg oil, 2 eggs beaten, 2 teaspoons vanilla extract.  Add the apples and the sugar,  mix well, stir in the dry ingredients and 1 cup chopped walnuts.  Bake 45 mins

I really enjoy cooking…when I have a clean kitchen, time, and  people who are actually going to eat what I make.  This is usually not the case these days so my dinners are usually easy  to make and easy to clean up.  But tonight I actually made a whole Indian meal.  It wasn’t too time consuming.  I used the crock pot and the rice cooker and got those started around 12:30pm and we ate around 5:30.

I made Chicken Curry, Rice, Curried cauliflower, Cucumbers and sour Cream and heated up some Naan.

The Sri Lankan Chicken Curry is really easy.  This recipe serves 4.  I always make more.

3 T oil

2 onions finely sliced

1 one inch long piece of ginger chopped

2 garlic cloves

1/2 t turmeric

1 t chili powder

2 t garam masala

14 oz boneless chix (today I used a bag of the flash frozen chix tenders)

3/4 cup plus 2 T unsweetended coconut milk

2 tomatoes quartered

1/2 t salt

heat oil in a medium saucepn.  Add onions cook till golden. add ginger, garlic and spices-mix well for one minute.  add chicken mix well cook stirring for 5 minutes.  (at this point I threw mine in the crock pot with all the rest of the ingredients!)

Pour in 1 cup plus 2 T water.  bring to a boil.  reduce heat, cover and cook for 10 minutes

reduce heat to very low. add the coconut milk.  cook 10 minutes of until chicken is thoroughly cooked.  stir in tomatoes and salt.  cook 5 more minutes.  add fresh cilantro to taste-I add LOTS!

serve this over rice.  basmati is what we like best-I mix 1/2 brown and 1/2 white-cuz my family won’t just eat brown!  I added some olive oil, salt, frozen peas, a couple cinnamon sticks, cardamom pods, and some whole cloves in with the rice to cook.  It smells divine!

I also always serve this with cucumbers and sour cream-or you can make a riata.  I skin cucumbers and use the slicer part on my grater and grate into a bowl.  add salt-don’t be stingy with the salt here- and set aside so they make some juice.  add a few spoonfuls of sour cream and lots of black pepper.

Curried Cauliflower

1 head cauliflower cut up into pieces and put in a bowl with 1 t turmeric and 1 t salt.

Heat 6 T ghee (butter or oil will do) and saute cauliflower until tender. remove and set aside.  In same pan fry 1 t cumin, 1 t cayenne (use less this will be HOT), 1 t fresh ginger stirring constantly.  add 3 small chopped tomatoes and 1 t sugar and cook for 5 minutes.  add cauliflower back to pan stir, lower the heat, cover.  cook 8-10 minutes.  garnish with chopped coriander leaves (aka  whole lot of fresh cilantro).

We also always have Nan with this meal.  You can usually find it frozen if you can’t find it fresh.