Ghost of Christmas Past

My family was just here for a week to celebrate Christmas. Like most families, we possess varying degrees of dysfunction. If you have seen the movie Christmas Vacation, you know how the week went. At least our Christmas Eve supper didn’t turn out like the movie. We did a lot of cooking and made whoopie pies instead of cupcakes. I think the whoopie pie is just an inside-out cupcake. The cake batter is the same but the frosting is on the inside instead of on top. Since we were having a Mississippi Christmas at Lake Tahoe, I made red velvet whoopie pies with cream cheese filling. Those of you who followed the original blog know what is coming….I am extremely picky when it comes to cream cheese icing. I promise not to get on my soap box on the first day of the new blog…so more on cream cheese icing in the days, weeks and years to come.

We talked about Christmases past and the best Christmas presents we ever got. My best present was an Easy Bake oven I got when I was eight. It was yellow and I still remember the smell of the plastic as the two 100 watt light bulbs heated up. The oven came with a couple of cute little cake mixes but replacements were expensive. My grandmother would take a chocolate cake mix and divide it into four parts. She taught me to calculate how much water and oil and somehow she could even split an egg in half. She made icing out of powdered sugar and kept it in the refrigerator so I could use it whenever I wanted – in one of those avocado green tupperware containers so fabulous in the 60s. I guess those little Easy Bake cakes were actually my first whoopie pies (cupcake training wheels).