Sugar Free Cake

Our answer to any kind of celebration is to bake cakes, cupcakes, cookies, or some similar sugary treat, but not everyone that we know is able to have sugar.  Sometimes it can be difficult to know what to bake for these people.  It just doesn't seem like a real birthday without cake, so our solution was to make a sugar free cake.  I'm sure that you can find recipes for sugar free cakes, but we decided to keep it simple and buy packaged cake mix from Pillsbury.

To make the cake even more fun, we added cookies around the cake's edges.  Hershey's makes sugar free chocolate chips, so we used the recipe on the back of the bag to make our cookies.  Although the cookies don't taste quite like normal chocolate chip cookies, they do make a close substitute.

I think in the future we'll try to make sugar free desserts from scratch instead of from cake mix, but it's nice to know that the mix does make good cakes if we are in a hurry.

Book Review - The Help



The summer is almost over, and I’ve only managed to read one of the books that I put on my list at the beginning of the summer.  If you're looking for suggestions for reading, you can still look at my summer reading list.  Of course, I read plenty of books that weren’t on the list, but the only one that I read from the list was The Help by Kathryn Stockett.    

I’d heard good things about the book for about a year before I read it.  Since it’s set in Jackson, Mississippi, and Kathryn Stockett is originally from there as well, I knew that I would have to read it eventually. 

I wasn’t certain what to expect when I first started reading the novel.  It’s a story told through the voices of three different women.  Two of them are black women who are working as help in homes of wealthier people, and the other is a white woman who is a part of this upper society. 

I think that the best parts of the book are the characters and the different voices that tell the story.  I can see why the book has become a bestseller, and I would definitely recommend reading it. 

There’s also a movie based on the book coming out on August 10th which I will be interested in watching.  I’m hoping this will be a case where the movie is as good as the book.  I do know that they filmed the movie in Mississippi, so I will be looking forward to seeing that part.

Enjoy your weekend!