One of the most affecting things I learned while in college was that there is evidence of the gospel everywhere. It shows up in every aspect of life no matter how obvious and grand or how seemingly small and discreet.
Afterall we are commanded in 1 Corinthians 10:31-- "So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God."
Every single thing is for God's glory.
Well, tomorrow is AW's 26th birthday and Saturday morning we celebrated by having brunch with friends. It was wonderful! We are so blessed with great friends!
I decided that for brunch I would make some carrot cake cupcakes with cream cheese icing. YUMMY! Carrot cake is a wonderful fall dessert and AW's birthday has given me an excuse to bake, bake, bake!
I got up early on Saturday morning after a late evening of football to get to work. I found a seemingly simple recipe online and had all the necessary ingredients. But apparantly you can't use a regular cake recipe to make cupcakes...or maybe you can...either way, the first batch went WAY wrong.
So, I decided to use the remaining batter and divide it between to round cake pans and just bake the batter that way. I figured the cakes would turn out a little flat, looking more like torte than cake but maybe it would all work out.
The morning progressed and time got ahead of me and the cakes looked weird and had a weird top layer to them. I didn't have time to fix them for brunch so I just left them. After brunch we went to Oxford for our annual family reunion and had a great time hanging out, eating food and watching football. We got home late and I looked at my poor carrot "cakes" and just left them in the pans. I was a little discouraged, I must admit.
The next morning our plans were unexpectedly changed so we decided to go back to O-town for round 2 of the family reunion! Well, I suppose I woke up with a renewed spirit because I was determined that the carrot cake would not go to waste. Also, as AW can attest, I have a hard time letting things go and this is just physical evidence of that trait =)
So, I made the cream cheese icing hoping that some kind of idea would come to me. Any idea. AW suggested I crumble up the cake and that sounded fine except that left me unsure of how to incorporate the yummy cream cheese icing I had just made so I took one of the cakes and crumbled it up and dumped the pieces into the mixing bowl with the icing and mixed the cake pieces and icing all together.
It kind of looked like vomit.
Now, I really wasn't sure what to do...
I decided to use my square casserole dish and put a layer of the throw-up looking icing mix on the bottom and then crumble the other cake still in the pan. While I was working I was thinking about how Jesus had taken my life (a messed up carrot cake) and made it into something purposeful. Wow!
I love those moments when the Lord really opens my eyes to Himself and I see what he has done for me.
What a gift these little earthly pictures of the gospel are! Jeremiah 18:6 -- "O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter does?" declares the LORD. "Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.
Well, it ended up being a layer of the icing mix, layer of crumbled cake, layer of icing mix and a top layer of crumbled cake.
Presentation is a MAJOR part of food so I used some leftover scrapbook paper from previous mod-podging projects and made a cutsie little sign for my dessert and called it "Carrot Cake Crumble with a cream cheese filling".
Afterall, "cream cheese filling" sounds much better than "vomit-looking-icing-mix".
We arrived at the reunion with dish in hand and set it out with all of the other "real" desserts.
The final word was that carrot cake crumble was pretty good and tasted just like regular carrot cake with cream cheese icing. YAY!
Here's a pic of my "presentation":
Here's an encouraging thought for today:
"being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus" -- Phillipians 1:6
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