Wizard Hat Cupcakes! I need one more day

Oy.

I still feel like I am playing catch-up 'round here, and thus follows a request for one more day before I have to go back to work.

Unfortunately it is not to be.

So on to other stuff.

I can't remember if I mentioned starting up a monthly have the family over for dinner thing. And by family I mean all 800 of us who live in the area, aunts uncles, cousins, hangers on..

So this monthly family dinner thing was my idea. When I was a kid we ate Sunday dinner every week at my grandma's house. There were far fewer of us then, and the meal did not seem like such a production. Maybe it was, and I was just too young to get it.

At any rate, after I made my suggestion we decided it would be fun to drag out all the old recipes my grandma used to make.

I have been taking on the desserts. There are recipes, because at some point my grandmother got a recipe from someone, or attempted to write down her own. Y'see my grandmother does not really cook by a recipe. Which is fine, and a talent I wish I had, however when one is trying to recreate one of these recipes to suit the memories of AN ENTIRE FAMILY, it is a little stressful when the RECIPE IS NOT RIGHT AND BY THE TIME YOU DISCOVER IT.....TOO LATE TO FIX.

Today marked the third dessert that I had difficulty with. I am no master chef, but I certainly do not consider myself to be a slouch in the kitchen either. These recipes are not complicated. But I dearly wish my grandmother could remember how she doctored these damn recipes. She remembers after I have already finished the dessert usually.

The dessert I made today was called a Coke Cake. I have to say that I was more than a little appalled when I read the recipe. TWO cups of sugar, TWO sticks of margarine, TWO cups of minimarshmallows, AND one cup of coke. That is just for the cake. The icing....ONE cup of coke, and ONE POUND OF POWDERED SUGAR...sort of. Here was my issue. I am following the recipe for the icing. Boil remaining coke in bottle, (Here is one of the issues with these recipes. They are 30+ years old. They call for things like using a King Size bottle of Coke. There is no such thing any longer. So I am on the internet trying to figure out how much damn coke would have been left if I had used a King Size bottle. For the record a King Size bottle was 16 oz. Shows how out of whack our portions are now but that is a post for another time.) ANYWAY... boil remaining coke, 3 TB cocoa and one stick of oleo. I do this. I then pour it over the 1 pound of powdered sugar, and mix. This shit is the consistency of water. It is supposed to be a thin icing poured over a hot cake, but not this thin. So I add more sugar, more, more, more, and more. By the time I got it to a reasonable consistency there had to be well over two pounds of powdered sugar in there. BH and I give it a taste test, and surprisingly it isn't too bad, but definitely sugary. I add pecans, pour it over the cake and hope for the best.

Went over well. Seemed to satisfy everyones beloved memory of this dessert.

We are still peeling people off the ceiling though...and trying to rouse the rest from massive sugar comas.

Afterwards my grandma tells me that she is pretty sure she only used half the remaining coke in the bottle and then added the powdered sugar until the consistency was right.

Good to know.