Happy December! Tomorrow we go for our sonogram and hope to find out whether baby Coffman #6 is a boy or a girl.  I can’t tell who is more excited, the kids or me!  We’ve haven’t even cracked the baby name book.  We’ve used a lot of our favorites already, so are hoping a more focused direction will help us generate ideas.

Last night for supper we had homemade vegetable beef soup from scratch made with soup bones. We ate it with pumpkin dinner rolls and warm Molasses cake with whipped cream.  Yum!  It’s a blustery 26 degrees around here, very unseasonably cold and warm liquids are welcome. 

I had 1.25 gallons of soup left and since it was a little bland I dumped a bunch more garlic powder, onion powder, salt, pepper, and parsely in it.  Kind of a spray and pray method and poured it into glass canning jars for the freezer. Now we have 5 jars waiting for desperate lunches.  When I remove the 2 piece lid I can quickly thaw the whole thing in the microwave.  If you try this method, leave plenty of head space or your jar will break in the freezer from the pressure of the expanding soup.

Here’s our Molasses Cake Recipe.  It is modified from my newest e-book:  How to Have a Grocery Shrink Christmas.  I used black-strap molasses for the vitamins and the cake turned out looking like dark chocolate.  The recipe only has 2 Tablespoons of sugar in the entire cake!  The rest of the sweetening comes from Molasses, which gives a good dose of vitamins.

Molasses Cake

1/4 cup pumpkin puree

1/4 cup softened butter

1 egg

2 Tablespoons sugar

1 cup molasses

1 cup hot water

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon ginger

1 teaspoon cinnamon

2 1/2 cups pastry flour (or all-purpose flour)

Cream the butter, pumpkin, egg and sugar.  Add the molasses and water.  Blend the rest of the engredients and mix into the molasses mixture.  Pour into a greased 9 x 9 square pan, or 9″ round cake pan.  Bake at 325 for 45-50 minutes.  Eat warm with ice cream or whipped cream.  Yum!