Food Traditions at the Cottage

We spent the last week of summer at our cottage before the kids went back to school.  I already mentioned our 30 some odd year ice cream tradition, but we also have a few newer traditions surrounding food! 

One of those newer traditions is bread baking. A few years back (actually it was probably more than a few now at this point) I bought a bread making book for my sister and one for myself.  I enjoy making bread from time to time, but my sister really took to it.  And I must admit she is way better at it than I am!  So it has now become a tradition for the kiddos to make buns with Auntie Behbes when we are at the cottage with her!

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Another tradition is celebrating my mom's birthday during our August visit.  Now that my sister and I both live around 6-7 hours away from my mom, we can't be with her to celebrate on her actual birthday in September, so we have started celebrating it early during our August lake trip.  Naturally this requires cake!  As part of this tradition, we have also started making a small cake for her and my dad to put in the freezer that they can get out on her actual birthday.  This year we split one cake recipe and used it to make one small cake and about 1.5 dozen cupcakes.  The small cake went in the freezer and we ate the cupcakes!

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Here is a link to the cake recipe we use.  This is seriously the best chocolate cake recipe.  I would never use another one now that I've found this one!  And here is the link to the Nutella frosting we made, which took us multiple trips to multiple stores to make.  When I went to make the frosting I was 1/4 cup of cocoa short.  I was able to get the 1/4 cup I needed from the diner that is walking distance from the cottage.  But then the one recipe was only enough to frost the cupcakes.  I needed to make another recipe to frosting the cake.  So I asked our neighbours and they had just run out of cocoa.  So my mom drove to the nearest town with a grocery store and got cocoa and a few other items.  And guess which item they forgot to bag?  The cocoa!  So then my sister and I had to drive back to the store to get the cocoa!  The cupcakes were very good, so it ended up being worth all the running!

And now it's fall, and the kiddos are back to school and the cottage will soon be closed for another season.  Time to get back to healthier eating!