Lemon Glazed Greek Yogurt Pound Cake

I had a lot of yogurt in the refrigerator from all my shopping so I decided to try to make a few things with it.  My first stop was my pile of recipes to see what I could make with my Greek yogurt.  The final decision was pound cake.  I had a recipe that used sour cream so I figured that it would work great.  I really wanted to make a citrus one since I normally make one with cinnamon and sugar (which is also super yummy but very different).  I used lime flavored Greek yogurt but it didn't taste very lime flavored when cooked.

I pulled all of the ingredients out to make sure that I had enough.  I took out four yogurts but I ended up only using three.

I added the sugar to the mixing bowl.

Then mixed the butter into the sugar.

I added the eggs one at a time with the help of my son who helped me crack each egg and turned on the mixer until it was combined.

I measured the Greek yogurt into a measuring cup.

I mixed the dry ingredients into another measuring cup.

I added some of the dry ingredients and the wet ingredients.  Taking turns in between each to have them mix fully.  The batter was nice and thick when it was all done and I scooped out whatever was left in the other containers and mixed by hand.

I greased two loaf pans and my small loaf pan with the butter wrappers and evenly divided the batter.

The baked loaves and they came out looking perfect.  The cake was tender but still as sturdy as a pound cake.  I thought it tasted like a moister version of the Sara Lee Pound Cakes that come from the freezer section of the grocery store.

We might have eaten one and half loaves before I even got to making the glaze but the glaze took it from tasty to amazing.  I juiced my lemon (which already had the zest taken off to make my blueberry muffins).  The lemon was sitting in my fridge waiting for the next use since I already took off the zest.

 I mixed the juice with the rest of my bag of powdered sugar and some quick dissolve granulated sugar because I found two different recipes and decided to try both just to be on the safe side.  One recipe said to poke holes in the top of the bread and the other didn't mention it so I poke holes in half of the loaf and I don't think that it made a difference. 

The glaze didn't thicken at all but I put the loaf in a plastic container and poured it in just in case I needed to catch it all when it ran and it did.  I enjoyed the last loaf with lots of lemon glaze goodness because it soaked into all of the sides.

I hope that you make this sometimes soon.  I would be great topped with fresh fruit or served plain. I figure that with yogurt, you could make a case for breakfast too!! I can't wait to try a few different yogurt flavors to see how that changes the pound cake.

 Enjoy this slice before you make your own!  It is super tasty and I know that you will enjoy the moist goodness as well as the flavor.

Lemon Glazed Greek Yogurt Pound Cake

4 c all purpose flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 c sugar
1 c margarine
4 eggs
1 tsp vanilla (optional)
2 c Greek yogurt
Juice from lemon
powdered sugar

Mix flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt in a medium bowl.  Set aside.  Beat 2 cups of sugar and margarine until light and fluffy.  Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each.  Mix in vanilla.  Stir in flour mixture alternately with Greek yogurt, beating after each addition until smooth.

Pour into well greased loaf pans or bundt pan.  Bake 45 minutes at 350 degrees.  Makes 2 1/2 loaves or one bundt cake.

After cooled, mix juice of one lemon and powdered sugar to taste.  Pour over pound cake to glaze.

Shared at Saturday Night Fever on Yummy Healthy Easy
and Homemade Monday on Frugal by Choice

March Reading Review

This month was a little busy and was hard to get in the reading that I wanted to do so it was sadly my lowest month yet but I still got a few good reads in.  I was reading the books that are going to be made into movies but I wasn't really enjoy them.  I got the Dark Places book which I was supposed to read and then it was due back in a few days so I returned it because I knew that I couldn't finish before it was due.  I picked up the next book, Winter's Tale, and it was huge.  I didn't get to start it because I couldn't carry it anywhere with me so I moved on to some other books that could travel in my bag with me.  I think that I got back on track with my reading then.  I guess we will see if I return to the other books after a little bit of a break or not.

I reviewed all of the books that I read this month.  If you missed them or are interested in reading my review, please click on the title and it will take you back to the original post.  I hope that you check out some of them and see if they are interesting for you to pick up and read.  If you read any of them and would like to share, please do!!!  Happy reading!!

A Long Way Down

by Nick Hornby

Balanced

by Tricia Goyer

Child's Play
by Leslie Hamilton

 

A Stillness of Chimes

by Meg Moseley

To The Nines

by Janet Evanovich

Ten Big Ones
by Janet Evanovich

Books Read for 2014

January    8

February   9
March     6

Total Books 23

Thrifty Thursday: Great Frugal Reads for Cooking

I was asked a great question the other day on my blog and I wanted to share the answer.  What are some of my favorite frugal books that I have read?

I used to read a lot of books from the back of our library (that is where they have the non-fiction book at our library) going through sections on parenting, couponing and living a more green life.  I have some favorites that I enjoyed through my reading.  There are a lot of others out there that aren't in the library so I hope to read them sometime but it goes against my frugal nature to buy a book that I am going to read quickly and not pick up again so I haven't purchased them.

When I started thinking about the books, I decided that I break my frugal books into a few different categories.  There are so many books to read on the subject depending on how you are interested in saving money:  Cooking, General Frugal Tips, Reducing Usage or Being Green and Kids.  A lot of people maybe interested in one topic and not the other.

My favorite books to read are cookbooks which I know puts me in a small group of people because most people use cookbooks for reference material.  If you haven't read a cookbook yet, try one of these first.  I think that recipes are wonderful but when a cookbook has more information about the author and their life, it is almost like an autobiography.  These cookbooks have lots of great recipes and provide some great information on how to cut back grocery spending or cook less expensively.  The best part about spending money is that your families won't even know because they are eating yummy meals at home (instead of in restaurants or getting take out). 

Click on the title to see my original thoughts on the books when I read them.  I know that I am going to read a few other books this summer on my frugal list so please give me your recommendations too!

Miserly Meals is great for easy recipes like biscuit mix and other basic recipes that can be done with stuff around the house.  It is a super cheap to make the recipes in her book and they are simple and tasty.  Love her biscuit mix.  I picked out 53 recipes that I liked so I bought this at the used book sale at the library (might have even been the copy I read at the library).

Once A Month Cooking is a great book to start figuring out for to do once a month cooking or at least a little freezer cooking. We are picky eaters so I don't always love all of the recipes that she makes but there are a bunch in this book that made it worth buying at the used book sale so it is now part of my collection but it gives lots of good tips on how to make the meals your family likes and what freezes well.

Everything Meals on a Budget has some great recipes that are cheap to make.  There were a lot of basic and good recipes that appealed to me.  I picked out 63 recipes that I would make and wrote my list of those recipes so feel free to check out the post and see more details.  I haven't bought this book but I probably would if I found it cheap!

The Cooks Country TV Show Cookbook is a great cookbook with lots of great recipes.  They aren't necessarily all frugal but there are some recipes that you can make that are great and you can make less expensive.  I love the show on PBS and I love all of the America's Test Kitchen recipes but this book has a lot of different kinds in it and a great value for under $25.  I got it at the library and my husband actually bought it for me (isn't he thoughtful).

Pioneer Woman Cooks and all of her other recipes are great.  I have tried a few of her recipes which most can be found on her website but if you want to sit down and read a cook book, this is entertaining and there are great recipes.

Make the Bread, Buy the Butter is my favorite corn bread recipe.  The rest of the book has great stories and information about cooking things from scratch and which is cheaper.  It is great to see how she breaks down each item and whether it is cheaper to make at home or buy at the store because that is something that I am always thinking about to make the most frugal choice.

Homemade Pantry talks about healthy eat and has some good recipes but the information around the recipes was even better then the recipes themselves.  It may inspire you to make your own cheese but I wasn't so inspired but I did love the stories and the idea that it was possible.  I didn't want to make all the recipes but I loved the stories that went with them and they inspired to garden and can.

Family Feasts for $75 A Week is a book about feeding your family for a set budget.  It gives lots of recipes gives great cost effective recipes that range so that you aren't always eating the same kind of food.  It gives a lot of information about shopping and saving money at the beginning followed by lots of recipes.  Some of the recipes weren't simple enough for my family but there were a bunch that were.

$5 Dollar Dinner and $5 Breakfast and Lunch Cookbooks were both so good that I asked for them for Christmas.  I love the recipes in them and how they were organized.  There was the cost of each item estimated on the side of each item even though I could get most of the items for cheaper.  My only compliant is that it gives you all of the items in the meal so instead of just saying here is a chicken dinner, it tells you to serve with green beans and mashed potatoes.  I guess it makes it easier for people to see how you can get the whole dinner for the amount that she is promising but I don't need any help with how to set up a meal.

Have you read any of these wonderful cookbooks or do you use any already in your kitchen?  What are some of your favorite recipes?  Do you think cookbooks could help you save money?

Kid Wednesday: O is for Owl, Octopus and Opposites

We had a busy start to our week because my son usually does preschool four days a week but this week he was home sick.  For most kids this would be laying on the couch and resting but for my son, he wanted lots of activities.  We started O week with some O sheets.  He colored his owl and traced O is for Owl.  My little man is not great at coloring and usually stops and tells me that his arms are tired but this time he asked me to color in the wings while he colored the rest of the owl.  I love that he used all of his colors. You can download this picture here.

Then, he did the dot marker O. He picked the black dot marker which is currently one of his favorites because it is the newest.  He colored in part of the owl but who can blame him after all the coloring he did in the other picture.  You can download this sheet here.

Luckily, this gave me enough time to pull out all of the materials to make up the O for Owl cut out artwork.  I started with a big sheet of brown construction paper and drew a big oval.  He cut the oval out and then cut out the inside after I made a little hole for him to cut.  He glued them on to the background with his glue stick and then he added wings.  Does it look like an owl yet?  Do you see the green tupperware cup off to the right?

The next thing we did was trace the bigger side of the cup on the yellow and the smaller side of the cup on the white to make two different sized circles.  My son did all of the tracing while I held the cup just to be on the safe side.  Then, he cut out the four circles.  He glued down the yellow circle and then the white circle and topped it with a little black circle that I pulled out of the scrap bag already cut in circles (from our snowman plate project).

We needed to put on the finishing touches of a beak and claws so we pulled out the scrap bag of orange and my little man picked out the papers that he wanted to use.  He found a long piece of orange that he wanted for the beak and he didn't want to cut it or anything because he thought it looked cute.  He picked two different rectangles to make the feet and I cut the one for an example and then he cut the second foot.

After he was done gluing everything down, he wrote at the top O is for Owl just like was on his first sheet.

He was ready for the next project after finishing all of that so we moved on to octopus.  I cut a few cuts around the toilet paper tube (spray painted white) and asked him to finish them which he cut a few more and told me that an octopus only had 8 legs and I made too many.  I told him it was a crazy octopus and we could make a regular one too.

He picked out the eyes and then set to decorating it with dot stickers and glitter glue.  He had a blast making it but the "real" octopus only got eyes and no dots.

I pulled out two "O" books which were a little bit of a stretch but my son told me why I picked them out so he saw the O logic of why I picked them.  Please Try to Remember the First of Octember and Oh, the Thinks you can Think which are both Dr. Seuss books.  My O was picked out in each book and luckily my son went with and we read our "O" books together and enjoyed a little Dr. Seuss rhyming which is always interesting. 

There are so many great books for the letter O to read but we were stuck at home being sick so we didn't get to go to the library to find any.  The best two owl books that I found on Amazon were Owl Babies by Martin Waddell and Patrick Benson and Owl Moon by Jane Yolen.

I looked for octopus books and there were a lot of different books that looked interesting that I had heard of before including An Octopus Is Amazing (Let's-Read-and-Find... Science, Stage 2) by Patricia Lauber
 but our library didn't have it so I looked for a few more on their site and found the only one that I had heard of before An Octopus Followed Me Home by Dan Yaccarino.

There was another book was My Octopus Arms by Keith Baker which looked really interesting and talks about lots of things that the octopus could do with their arms.

The author of the book Little Owl's Night wrote a new book called Octopus Alone by Divya Srinivasan so either book would be a great read for O week. There are so many books with owl and octopus characters so find your favorite and enjoy the search.

When he was feeling better, he went back to school (and mommy did a happy dance).  He did this O is for octopus sheet when he went back to school and find the O's.

Then, he made a pattern with the dot markers on the O.

He made an owl that was a little different then the one that we made at home with an O for the neck instead of the whole body.  This is one that his friend was making.

He missed a few of the crafts while we were at home like making O prints with a toilet paper tube and paint.  I thought he was going to make it back before they did it so I didn't want to do it at home and have him doing the same things at school but here is a picture of his school friend doing it.

His favorite activity at school was his opposite book.  He cut out the words that were opposite and used a glue stick to put them on the pages next to each other.  He loved this book and wanted to read it over and over but even though he did it 12 hours ago, it is still wet and the pages are sticking together so I asked him if he used all the glue sticks in school and he said that he used three because two of them ran out....I can see why!  It had a pretty basic cover where he wrote his name.

On the inside he colored just the empty cup.

He liked the up and down the slide pages a lot.

There were lots of pages and he was excited to see that I picked out three opposite books to read for bedtime.  I didn't even think about opposites because I was thinking owl and octopus and we had none of those books so I was excited to find three opposite books and he was really happy to hear them all.

I hope that you have a great O week and learn some great things about the letter O!!!

What I got this Month While Staying Under Budget

This list amazed even me when I saw how little I spent this month so check it out and the totals are at the bottom of the list.  I did end up giving a bunch of yogurt and some of tea bags to my mom when she was here visiting.  I think that she did a little shopping in the cupboard to take some Shout and a few other items like a package of socks that I had bought for my husband.  I am not really sure if she just likes shopping so much that she can't stop but she went home with a bunch of bags of stuff but I can say that she bought some stuff at Aldi's and Target for us so I am sure it works out evenly.

Food
Russet Potatoes (10 pounds)
Tetley Tea Bags (6) 
Froot Loops (2)
Apple Jacks (2)
Golden Grahams (2)
Kashi Berry Cereal (5)
Rosemary Triscuits (4)
Sweet n Low
Truvia
Hamburger Helper (8)
Progresso Recipe Secrets (2)
Crisco Baking Sticks (8)
Annie's Shells and Cheese (2)
Mahatma Rice (7)
Pop Secret Popcorn (7)
Cheese Its (4)
Rice Dream Milk (2)
Domino Flip Top Sugar (3)
Domino Flip Top Brown Sugar (3)
Zevia Soda (2)
Barilla Meal
Mueller Pot Sized Spaghetti (4)
Barilla White Fiber Shells (2)
Barilla Lasagna Noodles
Barilla No Cook Lasagna Noodles
Lance Bold Crackers(2)
Minute Maid Pink Lemonade Juice Boxes
Lemon
Kings Hawaiian Rolls
Aldi's Pretzels
Twix (8)
Snickers PB (14)
Milky Way (2)
Think Thin Bars (10)

Refrigerator
Gallon of Milk (3)
So Delicious Coffee Creamer (10)
Breaded Chicken Tenders(2)
Oscar Mayer Turkey (2- 9 oz packages)
Johnsonville Ground Sausage (2- 16 oz packages)
Kraft Shredded Cheese (2)
Oscar Mayer Bologna (4)
Land O Frost Simply Turkey
Oscar Mayer Protein Pack (2)
Yoplait Yogurt (30)
Liberte Yogurt (2)
YoCrunch Yogurt (4)
Yoplait GoGurt (2)
Simple Hash Browns (4)

Freezer
Green Beans (3)
Edamame (6)
White Corn (2)
Corn (10)
Innovation General Tso's Chicken
Innovation Garlic Chicken
Farm Rich Mozzerella Sticks

Personal/Cleaning Items
Renuzit Air Freshner
Windex (2)
Tide (10 oz) (4)
Olay Facial Cleanser (2)
Suave Kids Shampoo
Centrum Flavor Blast Vitamins
Suave Lotion
Tresemme Shampoo
Clear Shampoo Total Care
Vidal Sassoon Shampoo
Vidal Sassoon Conditioner
Tums Smoothies
Angel Soft Tissues (6)

Other
Glass Snapware Containers (3)

What did you get this month?  Did you stay under budget?

Not sure if it was because I was working so much or because I had a sick son followed by me getting sick but I did great this month at the stores and didn't spend that much but got a bunch.  I must have made my trips really count!!!  There were also a lot of great catalinas which doubled during super doubles and the General Mills promotion which I rolled a lot to get free groceries (and my $10 Giant community credit which I get monthly for being chosen as an active member every month).

Total Retail $641.21
Total Savings $606.15
Total OOP $35.06