Lemon Brownie Recipe with Lemon Buttercream Frosting

I love all things lemon and I love brownies, so one day I was thinking and decided that there must be a way to make lemon brownies.  All the gooey chewiness of the brownie and the fresh flavor of the lemon.  I googled recipes but didn't come up with much that looked like what I wanted so I kinda made my own version of the recipe.  I used butter instead of oil because it complimented the lemon and made it extra delicious, but you can use oil instead of the butter.

Ingredients:

Brownies
Lemon Cake Mix
Lemon Jello Box (Small)
1/2 Cup of Butter Softened
3 Eggs

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  In a bowl combine the cake mix and the jello mix.  Add in the butter and mix with a spoon until crumbly.  (Try to mix a little as possible for best results.)  Then stir in the eggs until just combined.  Pour batter into a greased 9x9 inch square pan or for brownie bites, a mini muffin tin.  Bake for 15 minutes for the square pan or 10 minutes for the mini muffin tin.  Allow brownies to cool before frosting.

Lemon Buttercream


1/2 Cup Butter Softened
3 - 3 1/2 Cups of Powdered Sugar
2 Tbsp of Lemon Juice
Yellow Food Coloring
Yellow Sprinkles and Lemon Head Candies (optional)

Beat butter until smooth.  Then add the powdered sugar and beat until all the lumps are gone and the frosting is very stiff.  Add in the lemon juice.  Add in the rest of the sugar a spoonful at a time until you have the consistency that you want.  Add 5 drops of yellow food coloring or more if desired to get the yellow color you want.  Frost brownies or pipe onto brownie bites and decorate with sprinkles and candies.

Begging for Oatmeal

Oatmeal and I go a long way back.  I grew up on a steady breakfast diet of mush which consisted of whole wheat flour and water with a little bit of honey.  So basically boiled paste.  It wasn't our favorite, so whenever we got oatmeal it was a huge treat.  Then I went to college and got married, and I kind of went off oatmeal for a while.  I was doing couponing for a while and managed to get a years worth of cold cereal for free so we ate that a lot.  After that, I decided that I didn't want my kids to grow up eating fruit loops and frosted flakes so I made them oatmeal.  You can imagine that they were less than thrilled after eating sugary colorful cereal for a year.

As I was thinking of ways to make oatmeal appetizing for kids I remembered back to my nanny days when I saw an instant oatmeal that had dinosaur eggs in it.  The eggs were an egg coated sugar candy that dissolved in the hot water to reveal a dinosaur sprinkle.  It was super cool, and the little girl I watched loved it.  Back in my kitchen I realized that I had some left over bunny sprinkles from Easter so I sprinkled some on top of the oatmeal to see if it made any difference to my kids.  It was magical.  The oatmeal had transformed from nasty cereal to a cool treat because it was covered in colorful bunnies.

It's been about 5 years since we started putting sprinkles on our oatmeal, and it is one of my children's favorite breakfasts.  If we are using colored sugar sprinkles I tend to put less sweetener in the oatmeal while I am cooking it so it is still healthy.  Sometimes we use just colored sugar, and often we use the generic rainbow sprinkles from the store.  Occasionally though we do something special and make the sprinkles match a certain shape or holiday.  Some of our recent favorites were the Little Miss Muffit or Halloween Spider oatmeal and the Patriotic oatmeal.  My kids loved the flag on their cereal and have requested that for our 4th of July breakfast.  I'm loving that something so simple and inexpensive has made our breakfasts a more fun and healthy meal.

Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream inspired Cookies

I have a thing for Ben and Jerry's so when I had to make some cookies this weekend I allowed my obsession to inspire me.  These cookies are based on Ben and Jerry's Everything but the... flavor.  All I can say is Yummy!!  I'll be honest, one plate of the cookies never made it to the event, and the three that did were gone before dinner even started.  Not bad!  They were chewy with a hint of peanut butter, lots of chocolate and here are there a little bit of toffee crunch.  The white part of the cookie resembled a chocolate chip batter so the brown sugar/butter flavor was in there two.  Delicious!!

So here's what I did.

Ingredients:

Vanilla Cake Mix
Milk Chocolate or Fudge Chocolate Cake Mix
3/4 Cup Brown Sugar
3/4 Cup Butter Softened
4 Eggs
2 Tbls Water
1/4 Cup Flour
6 Mini White Chocolate Bars (I used Hershey's Cookies and Cream Bars)
2 Large Heath Bars
10 Small Reese's Peanut Butter Cups

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.  Combine the Vanilla cake mix in a bowl with the brown sugar and half of the butter.  Then beat in two eggs.  Add half of the flour and 1 Tbls of water.  Mix tip combined.  Chop up the chocolate bars and peanut butter cups into medium sized chunks.  Gently stir them into the white batter.
In a separate bowl combine the chocolate cake mix with the remaining half of the butter.  Beat in the remaining eggs.  Then add the remaining flour and water.  Mix until combined.  Now we are adding the chocolate and vanilla mixes together, but we want a swirl effect and do not want them fully mixed.  I put the chocolate batter on top of the vanilla and pulled my mixing spoon through both several times creating swirls of the two mixtures.  Once you are satisfied with the mixture spoon the batter into 1" cookie balls and drop them on a greased cookie sheet.  Bake for about 8 minutes.  Cookies should be starting to brown on the bottom but not the top.

We have to go shopping? Noooo!!

Summer is coming soon which means strawberries in the garden, water fights in the backyard and horrible grocery store trips.  Shopping excursions with all four of my kids are awful, and I don't completely understand why.  Most of them are girls.  Shopping is supposed to be fun and addicting right?  No.  Instead my oldest complains that shopping is boring and she would rather be home reading a book.  My second child cries if I don't let her buy whatever she asks for, and my third child cries if we go to any store but the one that gives out free Smarties at the checkout counter.  The baby is honestly the best shopper as long as he hasn't found a way to climb out of the shopping cart yet.  It's a disaster, and I inevitably get the sympathetic, "You sure have your hands full, don't you," comment from passers by.
So my options, Go to the store when the kids are in bed (my only by-myself-time), or find a way to make shopping fun.  Thinking about it logically, I determined that grocery shopping really is an important skill to teach children.

 First of all, grocery shopping is a major family expense.  What better way to teach your children to budget than to show them how you do it at the grocery store?  For example, when my kids ask if we can get that bag of candy I respond, "We could, but then we don't have money for something we want more."  My kids are obsessed with going to Disneyland so they know that if we want to save up money to go to Disneyland then we have to be careful what else we are spending money on.  We also talk about how we can pay for gymnastics and ballet lessons because they are more important to us than more toys and candy.  I don't like the phrase, "We don't have money for that," because I don't want them to stress about us not having enough money to take care of our family, and, on the other hand, I don't want them to feel that if they have money they can just spend it.  Instead I want to teach them how make better decisions with their money.

Second, the grocery store is where healthy eating habits are born.  If you fill your house with healthy food, then that is what you are more likely to eat.  During the summer I allow my three oldest children to plan a meal each week which I will help them prepare.  They are responsible for the health and well being of our family for that meal, and they love the responsibility.  They plan their menu, which has to be passed off my mom, and then when we go to the store they have a budget and can select the items they need for their meal.  They are required to have healthy items as a part of their meal, and their budget is usually around $5 for the meal.  While they are picking out their fruits and vegetables I teach them about how to pick the freshest ones, and they are so proud of themselves if they pick out a good orange or tomato out of the bin.  During the winter, when they don't have as much time to plan and prepare a meal, I let them each pick one fruit or vegetable of their choice for us to take home and try out.  It is a fun way to have them invested in healthy eating and expanding their tastes.
Another strategy I've used to make shopping more fun for the kids is to do something else on shopping day that they love and remember. One of our favorite "Special Shopping Day" activities is to go out to lunch.  Now normally I we go out to eat almost never, but our local library has a fun summer reading program where the children win coupons and vouchers for their reading logs.  Last summer my kids were getting lunch coupons every week to various restaurants in our city, and since they each had one, I would take them to lunch, and I only had to pay for myself.  They couldn't wait for Wednesdays because that was lunch and shopping day.
I still have annoying trips to the grocery store, but as a whole, we have greatly improved our shopping trips.  The children have more ownership in them, and something to do while we are there or right after.  I don't have to bribe them with treats to be good, and they are learning life skills that I hope will stick with them long after this summer.