You have got to try this delicious brown sugar peach cake recipe because the cake alone is amazing with tiny diced peaches (better if fresh) and the caramel brown sugar icing really makes it extra special!

This cake is very moist!

The diced, fresh pieces are really gorgeous in the yellow box cake mix!

Look at how stunning, tastes even better than it looks!

In preparing the icing, make sure to stir constantly so it doesn’t burn. This will make a thin, shiny icing similar to that of a sheet cake.

The cake will naturally rice in the center and the icing is thin and will fall to the sides so if you want a prettier finished product, you’ll want to trim the top off so that it’s level and flat. I didn’t do this process because it didn’t matter to me.

The icing is superb! You can see how how my cake’s tall center is sticking up! It looks funny but the whole thing was delicious!

Look at those tiny peach pieces! If you love biting into a peach you can leave your peach pieces bite size, go with what feels good to you.

Ingredients 

• 15 ounce yellow cake mix, (I like Duncan Hines)
• 3 large eggs, or the amount specified by your cake mix
• 1/3 cup vegetable oil, or the amount specified by your cake mix
• 1/2 cup peach nectar or peach juice
• 1 lb peeled and chopped peaches, (about 3-4)
• drop orange food coloring, optional

Brown Sugar Frosting

• 1/2 cup unsalted butter, cut in pieces
• 1/2 cup heavy cream
• 1 cup packed brown sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 2 1/2 cups confectioner’s sugar, sifted

Instructions

• Preheat oven to 350F
• Blend together the cake mix, eggs, oil, and nectar and food coloring, if using, until well combined. Fold in the peaches and turn the batter into a lightly sprayed 9×13 pan. Bake for about 28 minutes, or until done…you can check with a toothpick, it should come out without batter clinging to it, but moist crumbs are fine.
• Put the butter, cream, and brown sugar in a saucepan and bring to a boil, stirring constantly. Take off the heat at add the vanilla and the sifted sugar. Whisk until well blended and the little lumps of sugar have disappeared. Put it back on a low heat if necessary.
• Pour the frosting over the cake, trying to get it evenly coated on the first try, because it will set up quickly and you won’t be able to spread it without cracking the surface.
• Let the frosting harden at room temperature or in the refrigerator before cutting.

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Elizabeth Richey
About the Author: Elizabeth Richey, living and thriving in rural Arkansas, Aquarian and iced coffee enthusiast. When she’s not writing, gardening, playing with her chocolate lab Maple or sharing videos on YouTube (Elizabeth’s Many Adventures) you can find her enjoying time with her family or traveling somewhere new! Most of the time she’s dreaming of being kicked back in her hammock in her cottage garden listening to the birds sing. 

If you’re like me and freeze to the bone every winter and love some good comforting food, you’ve got to try all 4 of these cozy soups for winter. I honestly couldn’t even tell you which one is the COZIEST, because we love them all so much in our home! If you’re looking for the top 4 coziest soups for winter, look no further!

Zuppa Toscano

I’ve got to start out with this one because if I don’t everyone in my family will call me a fraud because I obsess over this soup! This is one soup I literally always eat way too much of but there is just something about the flavor profile after cooking that Italian Sausage in the soup for awhile! Oh mercy!

This soup is a copycat recipe stolen from Olive Garden and I tell ya, the first few times I made it I was just stoked that it tasted as good as theirs. But since then I’ve somehow tweaked it in a way that mine is BETTER than Olive Garden’s now!

Not everyone in my family loves the spinach but it literally has no flavor and no crunch, I think it all just goes together wonderfully into this creamy, comforting, cozy potato soup with Italian Sausage. You can find the RECIPE HERE!

Creamy Chicken Potato Soup

Now this recipe we literally just had for the first time last week and my husband and I both stuffed ourselves because it was so over the top delicious! Imagine this, a potato soup base plus some shredded chicken and the carrots give you chicken soup vibes! We shredded the chicken really small and you cook the soup long enough the starch from the potatoes make it a thicker soup so you couldn’t even see the chicken in it. We also diced up our celery smaller so it cooks away! Absolutely loved it! I’m a cheese lover so I topped mine with a good amount of shredded cheddar and it. did. not. disappoint.

You can find the scrumptious RECIPE HERE for this glorious soup! You won’t regret trying it!

Chicken Tortilla Soup

Chicken Tortilla soup is another one that is a very cozy soup and the bomb-diggity in our house! I’ve been making this recipe for years and instead of buying those pre-made tortilla crisps, I make them homemade and my family swoons every time! I have tried this recipe on the stove top and in the crock pot, same basic idea but if you’ve got time to prep in advance I do it in the morning in the crock pot. But I also sometimes just decide on a whim to throw this together so I do it on the stove and just allow at least an hour for everything to simmer together so that the flavors really marry!

To make my homemade tortilla crisps I literally take flour tortillas and cut them the size I want, get a pan on the stove hot with some vegetable oil in it just about 1/4″ deep, then I drop them in and cook them maybe 20-30 seconds on each side if I’ve got the burner on high. By the time I turn each one it’s time to turn again then they’re all done. I put the smallest amount of salt on these and done! Some people add more salt and my husband has wondered what they’d taste like if they had some taco seasoning on them but just plain is a fantastic companion to the soup so I’ve not steered away from that.

You can find the full recipe here and note this version is for the crock pot but like I said above, if you need to rush it alone, you can accomplish this in one hours on the stove top!

Cheddar Broccoli Potato Soup

Imagine broccoli cheddar soup and potato soup had a love child and BAM, you get this!!! This is so creamy, so cheesy and so cozy! This recipe is also so easy to throw together! Cups of cheese, carrots, good ol’ potatoes and of course, for the love of broccoli! I sometimes opt to use bigger broccoli heads in mine, just depends on my mood! I also almost always add MORE cheese to this recipe than it calls for because I am 100% a self proclaimed cheese head! You should try it, (recipe here) you’ll never be disappointed in adding more cheese!

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Please do follow my blog or subscribe to my newsletter to be notified when I share new recipes or health & fitness tips! <3

Xoxo, Elizabeth

I’d love if you’d subscribe to my newsletter to get updates on new articles!

About the Author: Elizabeth Richey, living and thriving in rural Arkansas, Aquarian and iced coffee enthusiast. When she’s not writing, gardening, playing with her chocolate lab Maple or sharing videos on YouTube (Elizabeth’s Many Adventures) you can find her enjoying time with her family or traveling somewhere new! Most of the time she’s dreaming of being kicked back in her hammock in her cottage garden listening to the birds sing. 

Let’s take a stroll down memory lane, you’re at Grama’s house, it’s a super cheesy dish and the only way you ever ate tuna, it’s Grama’s Tuna Casserole! I hadn’t had this in ages so I finally recreated my Grama’s recipe! Make sure you pin it for later!

Ingredients:

1 bag of egg noodles

2 cans of tuna

1 large box of velveeta cheese

1 stick of butter (I didn’t claim this was healthy)

1/2 to 1 cup of milk (I used Fairlife, use any kind you like)

Salt and pepper to taste

We start this Tuna Casserole Recipe by chopping up your Velveeta into bite sized pieces!

We then add the milk, velveet and butter to a stock pot. You begin to bring this mixture to a boil, add salt and pepper to taste. I probably used 1 tsp of black pepper and 1 tsp of salt but will adjust more at the end.

As soon as we start making our cheese sauce, I also start my boiling pot of water to get my egg noodles cooking. Egg noodles cook pretty quickly so by the time the cheese is fully melted down, your noodles are almost done.

Did I mention this is a super quick meal?

Now we’ve got our cheese sauce looking saucy and smellin’ like Grama’s house! I also put the tuna in a bowl to chunk it all up and get it ready to be added to the glorious pot!

Once the noodles are done, strain those and then pour them back in the warm, empty pot. Then add your cheese mixture and give it a good stir!

Look at this heaven! This is exactly how I remember it from my grama’s!!!

At this point you’ll add your tuna and give it a good stir and let it simmer about 5 minutes to warm the tuna. Then you can taste test it to see if you need more salt or pepper. I almost always add more pepper but we can fans of black pepper.

Okay, who doesn’t love a good Tuna Casserole Recipe?

The night I made this dish I hadn’t had my grama’s Tuna Casserole Recipe in probably 5+ years and my husband had never had this recipe. As I described it he said his grama made the same thing and his mom never did so he hadn’t had it in 20+ years. As soon as I got it done, we were both pretty excited!

If you like the cheese sauce to be less THICK, just use more milk in the beginning. And no worries, if you get it almost done and at THAT point think it’s too thick, you can always add milk then and let it get warm and thin down for you.

I decided to just throw some corn with this dish so we had some sort of veggie but let’s be real, we came for the tuna casserole!

Reheating tip: Add a teaspoon or 2 to your bowl of leftovers, microwave 1 minute, give it a good stir with that milk in the bottom, heat another minute and stir again. This will help the cheese sauce thin back out after being refrigerated. You’re welcome!

If you’d like to read my personal story, you can find it here!

Please do follow my blog or subscribe to my newsletter to be notified when I share new recipes or health & fitness tips! <3

Xoxo, Elizabeth

I’d love if you’d subscribe to my newsletter to get updates on new articles!

About the Author: Elizabeth Richey, living and thriving in rural Arkansas, Aquarian and iced coffee enthusiast. When she’s not writing, gardening, playing with her chocolate lab Maple or sharing videos on YouTube (Elizabeth’s Many Adventures) you can find her enjoying time with her family or traveling somewhere new! Most of the time she’s dreaming of being kicked back in her hammock in her cottage garden listening to the birds sing. 

I’ll quickly share with you how easy it is to render pork fat down into lard which is a simple fat, a more wholesome grease you can use for all types of cooking from frying to baking!

If you are trying to be more self sufficient and are raising your own pig, then you might not have considered yet if you should ask the butcher to save the fat for you. It doesn’t cost anything extra for them to save it for you and if you don’t ask for it, I’m not really sure what they do with it. But it really does seem like a waste to me to not use it.

The other day I rendered down the fat from our last pig so I thought I’d share the process with you for when you go to do the same. The process is very simple and straight forward so let’s dive in!

Preparing the Fat

When you get the fat back it is in white chunks about the size of a pork chop and you will want to cut it into “bite size pieces” so that it cooks down faster.

I used my roasting pan to do this and I highly recommend this process but you can also do crock pot, stove top or in the oven. For me using my counter top roaster meant I could start it and leave it throughout the day and didn’t have to heat up my house with the gas stove.

You can score a very reasonably priced roasting pan on Amazon HERE.

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Cooking down the fat

I put my roasting pan at 400 degrees and just had this on during the day as I worked (I work from home). I checked on it every hour and gave it a good stir. After about 5 or 6 hours, it looks like the image on the right. You want to make sure you don’t have the heat on too high or else your final lard product could taste MEATY! So if you hope to use your lard in baking or desserts, you want to make sure you keep the temp 300-400 degrees only and commit to this taking half your day.

Straining

Once everything has melted down and you have an amber liquid and chunky bits, then you can start the process of separating these items. The chunky bits are what is called cracklin and some people will fry and eat these as a snack. I’ve never tried that so I can’t recommend it or not. If you’re curious, give it a try.

I chose to separate these out and just toss them. I used a mesh strainer because the one I have has a handy lip on the edge so I can rest it on my large bowl. Here is a set on Amazon that has 3 sizes, if you’d like to snag one similar.

You could also just use a regular strainer like you’d use for pasta because we’re going to filter this a 2nd time to make sure and get the small particles out of it.

Straining Again

In our second phase of filtering, cheesecloth is recommended. If you’re planning ahead and don’t have any you can find it on Amazon here.

I actually couldn’t find mine so in a pinch I found these “pool skimmer socks” (random, I know) and the material is almost identical to cheesecloth. So I decided to give it a try and it worked out! So if randomly you love the SHAPE of these as much as I do, you can find them on Amazon here. You’ll see in the final step that these actually ended up being super handy for working with mason jars!

This second step of filtering is VERY important because if you have any small particles left in your final lard, it can cause it to turn rancid. So you really want to be careful with that and follow the rules. You can see from the photo above that this step did capture more bits!

Saving to Store

Once I had processed all of this gorgeous amber liquid I had a few large bowls full and I decided I would fill a few quart jars but I also wanted to try freezing some “chunks”. So I filled a muffin tin with the melted lard and stuck that in the freezer.

I don’t have photos of that next step but after 24 hours I popped each out and put them in a ziploc bag together and put in the freezer for individual uses.

With the amount of lard we ended up with I filled 2 quart size jars other than the muffin pan. The type of mason jars I use I often get on Amazon (link here) but I also often find decent ones at thrift stores and yard sales!

You want to leave the jars out on the counter overnight to come down to room temperature. But you do not want to seal these jars just yet so I got 2 more skimmer socks and covered them just to make sure no dust particles or anything fell into my freshly rendered lard. So you can see these little skimmer socks worked great as temporary, breathable covers!

Rest Overnight

By the next day the lard had solidified as it came to room temperature and at that point you can add your lids and rings!

This final product can be left on the counter but if that makes you nervous you can refrigerate it and it’s good for up to a year there. On the counter I’d guess a few months but I’ll also keep an eye on it. I opted to leave one on the counter a few feet away from the stove so it doesn’t get too hot. And then the second jar is in the fridge as my secondary back up!

I have already begun using this to cook with and it’s really just like the habit of keeping bacon grease on the counter. So if you’ve already started that habit to reuse and be less wasteful, then starting to use lard you’ve rendered yourself is just the next logical step in your self sufficient development.

If you’d like to read my personal story, you can find it here!

Please do follow my blog or subscribe to my newsletter to be notified when I share new recipes or health & fitness tips! <3

Xoxo, Elizabeth

I’d love if you’d subscribe to my newsletter to get updates on new articles!

About the Author: Elizabeth Richey, living and thriving in rural Arkansas, Aquarian and iced coffee enthusiast. When she’s not writing, gardening, playing with her chocolate lab Maple or sharing videos on YouTube (Elizabeth’s Many Adventures) you can find her enjoying time with her family or traveling somewhere new! Most of the time she’s dreaming of being kicked back in her hammock in her cottage garden listening to the birds sing.