Jennifer Bohnhoff's Blog, page 32

Cake Mix Cookies

My granddaughter spent the night this weekend. We have fun when she's here. We read a lot of books, play games, and we always, always make cookies.

This time we made chocolate snow drops, but we made them the easy way. We started with a cake mix.

If you've never made cake mix cookies, this is a good recipe  to try.
As you might expect, cake mix cookies use a box of cake mix as a base. We used a box of Pillsbury Devil's Food cake mix for these cookies.

In addition to the boxed cake mix, you need two eggs, 1/2 cup of vegetable oil, and about 1/2 cup of powdered sugar to roll your cookies in. 

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees before you start mixing ingredients.

Also have on hand cookie sheets and a cooling rack.
Dump the cake mix into a bowl. Add the two eggs and the cup of oil and mix with a spatula until the mixture is well blended.  Form the dough into balls a little smaller than a golf ball. Roll them in powdered sugar and set on an ungreased cookie sheet about 2 inches apart.

Bake 10-12 minutes, until lightly browned. Let cool completely before removing from the baking sheets.

These cookies had a rich, deep chocolate flavor and they were so easy that a 6 year old could do them all by herself, with a little help getting the dry mix off the bottom of the bowl and a little help with taking the sheets out of the hot oven.
If you made these and liked them, try other flavors of boxed cake mix! You can add in a cup of chocolate chips, chopped nuts, or dried fruit bits. The variations are only as limited as your own imagination!  Would you like me to post more box cake mix variations? * Indicates required field Choose One * No, I think I can figure this out on my own. Submit

Speaking the Lingua Franca

The author coming out of a French tunnel near Hill 64. I recently returned from a tour of World War I battlefields. It was a wonderful, exhilarating ten days, and I will be sharing a lot of what I learned here over the next few months. Yes, all this information will end up in at least one historical novel. 

My husband booked this trip in January, as a gift for my 60th birthday. I don't know a whole lot of women who would swoon over a trip to see WWI battlefields as opposed to a romantic getaway to, say, Hawaii or Paris, but I am one of them. I love to learn, and the tour my husband chose was led by experts and historians whom I could pepper with questions to my heart's desire. A WWI soldier's kit Wanting to take full advantage of the trip, I began checking out Learn to Speak French CDs from the library. I downloaded others from Audible. I dutifully listened to them, babbling along, on my drive between school and home, and nearly every other time I was in the car. Sometimes my granddaughter would be with me and she would happily babble along, too. After six months, I still felt a little shaky on my conversation skills. I'd learned to discuss food, shopping, and the weather, but didn't have the vocabulary to discuss World War I battle strategies. But I was anxious to try out my new found skills. I thought I could order a bottle of beer or a glass of wine with the best of them. Turns out, my reading skills were pretty good. What little French I'd learned, combined with an ability to use cognates, words that are similar in both languages  because French and English both originate in Latin, helped me read most signs in French. I ended up reading and translating many signs on monuments and in museums for fellow travelers. One, who didn't believe my interpretation, typed an entire plaque into google translate, then announced that I'd gotten it right.

My listening skills were pretty good, too. I was able to follow directions and get us places, and I could follow along with the audio in museum displays, getting about half of what was said and guessing another quarter.

But my ability to speak with the French? Every time I tried, whether to ask a question, order that glass of wine, or purchase something, I got the same response: 
"What?" I ordered a café au lait, and I got a café au lait! Huzzah! Turns out, while my brain may be able to come up with the words, my tongue wasn't able to form them properly. One shopkeeper asked me, in French, if I was English. I told him no, I was American. He replied that was strange, because I spoke French with a very heavy English accent. I don't know if the CDs I was using to learn to speak were created for an English audience or if what appeared to be an accent was just my tongue muddying what I said.

Some people bore with me, patiently asking questions and letting me work through my tortured French until we'd reached an understanding. Others swiftly switched to English. All, however, we kind with me. The French are by nature a very polite people, and I appreciated their forbearance as I mangled their lingua Franca.

I hope to be able to do it again soon. In the meantime, I will continue to try to improve my wayward tongue's ability to speak French.

My favorite mugs, part 2

Do you have a mug that makes you feel happy every time you fill it? I have several. This one was given to me by good friend and fellow author Patrice Locke, 

Patrice's writing makes me happy. She's got three novels out, and all three are lighthearted, clever romances that make you laugh out loud.

But her faith in me and my own writing isn't anything to laugh about. Patrice is the kind of friend who will give me a completely honest appraisal of a chapter I've written, but deliver it with so much kindness that it doesn't hurt, even when it isn't what I was hoping to hear. Her suggestions are spot-on, and her belief in me buoys me up when I'm feeling down.

Do I like it when people ask me about my books? You bet! If you want to know more about them, click here. 

Red, White and Blueberry Muffins!

Declare your independence from grocery store baked goods! Show your patriotism and your good taste by starting the day with a basket of these delicious muffins. Especially appropriate for Independence Day, Flag Day, Memorial Day and all those national holidays, these are easy enough to whip up even if the government hasn’t seen fit to give you the day off.

This recipe begins with my basic manic muffin mix, which you mix up and store in your cupboard. The mix makes it easy to create a variety of muffins quickly. Don't have any sitting around? You can find the recipe for the mix here. 
I make blueberry muffins all the time. Strawberry muffins, however, can be a little trickier, because strawberries can have more water content in them. That water can "bleed" out when the muffins are cooking, making soggy pockets that contained cooked bits of strawberry. Not good. My solution: use freeze dried berries instead of fresh ones. Trader Joe's has yummy ones. If you don't use them all in muffins, they are great sprinkled over cereal or eaten by the handful as snacks.  Don't eat the desiccant! I measured out a little more of the strawberries than the blueberries because each slice was bigger. It doesn't take many dried strawberry slices to fill up a third of a cup measure! Make sure you take out the desiccant packet before you dump the berries into your water/oil/egg/extract mixture! 

Leaving the berries in the wet ingredients for a few moments gives them a chance to soak up a little moisture without becoming too soggy. When your muffin tins are ready, dump the muffin mix right on top and mix for a few minutes with a spatula. Try to incorporate all the dry mix, but don't worry too much about a few lumps. Fill your tins 3/4 of the way full, stick them in the oven, and it 20 minutes your mouth will be celebrating! Strawberry Blueberry Muffins Preheat oven to 350.
Mix together in a large bowl.
1/3 cup freeze dried strawberries
1/4 cup freeze dried blueberries
2 eggs
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
1 cup water
1/2 cup oil
Let these wet ingredients sit while you put muffin papers in 12 standard-sized muffin cups, or grease the cups with spray oil.
Add 2 1/2 cup manic muffin mix to wet ingredients and stir with a spatula to mix. The batter should be slightly lumpy.

​Fill muffin cups 3/4 full. Bake for 18-20 minutes until the tops of the muffins are golden. 
These muffins freeze well. If your family is small, I recommend putting single muffins in sandwich bags, then putting them all in a ziplock freezer bag so you can pull them out one at a time. Frozen muffins are ready to serve after being reheated in the microwave on high for 30 seconds.

My Favorite Mugs

I'm a teacher, which means I have a lot of mugs. They, along with Starbucks cards, seems to be favorite gifts from students. 

Some of my mugs, though, are very special to me. I reach for them over and over. This is one of them. 

In 2017, my husband and I sold our house in Albuquerque and moved to the other side of the Sandia mountains. Because what had been a five minute commute was now going to be a 50 minute one, I decided to leave the school at which I'd been teaching for a decade and find a new job on this side of the mountains. When someone left this in my cubby hole during the first week of school (with a sweet welcoming note!) I knew that I had made the right decision. 

This is my go-to weekend cup because it's huge. I can fill it up and dare myself to have a complete scene done before the coffee's either gone or cold. Most of the time I don't win, but the challenge goads me on.
Jennifer Bohnhoff writes novels for middle schoolers, young adults, and up. In her spare time she teaches language arts to 6th, 7th, and 8th grade students at a middle school out in New Mexico's eastern plains. You can learn more about her and her novels here. 

Inspiration in an old Bottle

When my mother in law passed away a few years back, my husband was left to sort out a lot of her belongings. There were clothes and furniture and household items, many of which were sold in a garage sale or given to charity.

But there were also boxes of old papers and pictures to be sorted through, and so many told stories that my husband and I hadn't known. We'd known that my father in law had been turned down for service in World War II. We hadn't known that he'd then joined the Minnesota Home Guard, nor what that service entailed. We found receipts for wedding rings and hospital visits, and other little chits and scraps that hinted at the long and interesting life that had come to an end. 
The jar sitting on the author's desk with all her notes and notecards. We also found things that either didn't give away their story, or whose story were - and remain - a complete mystery. A small white jar falls into this last category. This jar has a metal screw-top lid and a red and green label that says that it once contained Peredixo Cream, a greaseless massage requisite that was sold by the American Druggists Syndicate Laboratories of New York City. The back of the label says that it is an exceptional toilet preparation that is cleansing, soothing, cooling and refreshing to the skin, that it should be rubbed into the skin twice a day, and that it will not grow hair.

The real mystery to me is that this jar wasn't packed into the box with my mother in law's hairnets, brushes and toothpaste; It was tucked into a box of papers and receipts. This led my husband and I to conjecture that perhaps it once held paperclips, or rubber bands, or push pins. I'm sure many of you have a repurposed jar on your desk corralling these kinds of small items. The jar ended up sitting next to our printer, waiting for one of us to need a small jar for some purpose. It sat there for about a year and a half. This spring, I began research on my latest book, which for right now, at least, has the working title The Determined Will, a phrase taken from Into Battle, a poem from the English World War I poet Julian Grenfell. My story takes place on a ranch in southern New Mexico, and in a World War I casualty clearing station in France.

In my search, I came across a digitized copy of Everybody's Magazine. ​It had short stories by Frank Norris and O Henry, poems, articles on childcare, politics, and health issues. And in the back were lots of advertisements. To my surprise, one of the ads was for Peredixo Cream!

Further research told me that this was a very popular cream in the 1910s and 1920s. It was touted as "the original Peroxide Cream," and claimed to contain a healing agent   called peredixo.

Harvey Washington Wiley, an American chemist known as the father of the FDA, reported that it was nothing more than soap, water, and starch. Eventually the public caught on and the cream stopped being a best seller.  Having something from my time period sitting right on my desk seemed far too serendipitous not to utilize! I felt compelled to write this little jar of cream into my novel. It shows up in Chapter One when my heroine comes in from riding fence. Agnes is a spunky, rough and ready cowgirl. She is not the type to keep face cream on her bureau. But her older sisters, who all married and moved away from the ranch are. They are also the kind of sisters who, concerned for the welfare of their tomboy sister, just might give her a jar of a miracle working cream. Agnes uses it not to catch a husband, but to sooth her sunburned, chapped skin.

Now, I look at the little white jar on my desk, and I don't think of filling it with paperclips anymore. I am filling it with stories, and letting it fill my stories with an interesting new layer of authenticity.
Jennifer Bohnhoff lives and writes in rural New Mexico. She is the author of several historical novels set in different periods ranging from the middle ages to World War II.

She is currently working on two: the one discussed above and one set in New Mexico during the Civil War. Her books are available in paperback and ebook versions from Amazon and other online booksellers.

You can read more about her and her books on her website.

Eating Morning Sunshine

Eating lemon-flavored sweets is kind of like ingesting pure sunshine. There is no brighter, sunnier food than one that is laced with the sweet-tart essence of lemon. Making these muffins is sure to guarantee a bright start to your morning. Just don’t make them on the day that your office will be running drug tests on their employees: poppy seeds can leave dreadfully incriminating markers in blood and urine samples.
​ Lemon Poppy Seed Muffins ​ 2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup oil
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup lemon juice
 
2 3/4 cup manic muffin mix
1 pkg (3.4 oz) instant lemon pudding mix
​1 TBS. poppy seeds
 
Mix the 3 dry ingredients together. Add wet ingredients and stir until there are no dry spots.
Fill muffin cups that have been lined with papers 3/4 full of batter.
Bake in a 350 oven for 20 minutes.

Movies to Commemorate D-Day

June 6 is the 75th anniversary of the D-Day invasion. One way to commemorate this historic day is to watch a movie about it. Here are a few recommendations. Ike: Countdown to D-Day This 2004 movie, which originally aired on the A&E Channel, stars Tom Selleck as General Dwight Eisenhower. Instead of the day itself, this movie tells the story of the three months leading up to it. Operation Overlord was quite an undertaking. The weather, other leaders, and sheer luck seemed to be against this invasion ever succeeding.  The Longest Day If you want a bullet-point detailed list of events that occurred on D-Day, The Longest Day is the movie for you. Filmed in 1962 and based on the book by the same name written by Cornelius Ryan (the book is well worth a read, too! Ryan's sources include eyewitness accounts, journals and diaries, and lots of official records), this epic movie covers the big picture while at the same time giving enough personal vignettes to make the story personal. Plus, just about every body who was anybody in Hollywood appears in this movie. The Big Red One This isn't a movie about D-Day per se. Rather, it follows one sergeant of the First Infantry Division through World War II, including its landing on Omaha Beach. Lee Marvin plays the sergeant, and Mark Hamill, fresh off attaining stardom in Star Wars, plays a private whose conscience forbids him from killing the enemy. This epic war film was Samuel Fuller, whose Hollywood bread and butter was B grade movies, and it shows. Saving Private Ryan This 1998 movie is also not about D-Day, but the invasion comprises its opening scene. Much more graphic and realistic than the three movies above, this one supposedly left veterans in its screening audience in tears. I can't say that it won't give you nightmares, but watching the first half hour of this movie will make you appreciate what our soldiers and sailors went through that day in a way that the others won't. Did I miss your favorite D-Day movie? Tell me about it and I'll add it to my list of movies to watch next D-Day.  Jennifer Bohnhoff is an educator and writer. Her novel Code: Elephants on the Moon is set in Normandy at the time of the D-Day invasions. You can read more about her book and the trip she took through Normandy to research it on her website. 

Surprise! Muffins for May

May kind of snuck up on me. Between teaching (I'm a middle school language arts teacher), track (I'm also a track coach at the middle school), and life in general, I missed my self imposed deadline of posting a new muffin recipe on the first Monday of each month.

I am writing this on Mother's Day, and naturally I am thinking about my own Mother and how great a cook she was when I was a kid - and still is.
My mother made a lot of baked goods. One of my favorites were surprise muffins. They were a basic muffin with a little hidden surprise inside: a spoonful of jelly. Mom made them with lots of different kinds of jelly, and all were good. If you wanted to try making muffins similar to the ones I loved as a kid, you could start with my basic Manic Muffins and add a spoonful of any jelly that struck your fancy.  Instead of just copying my Mother's recipe, I decided to create a little variation. What goes well with jelly? Peanut butter, of course! I used chunky peanut butter because someone in this house thinks it's the only kind worth eating, and I liked the little chunks of nuts in the muffins, but you could use smooth peanut butter in this recipe instead. You could also use a different type of jelly. Strawberry would be good, and apricot or orange marmalade would all be worth trying.

​Give this quick and easy muffin recipe a try. I think it might become as common on your breakfast table as - peanut butter and jelly! PB&J Manic Muffins 1/2 cup chunky peanut butter
2 eggs
1 cup water
2 2/3 cup Manic Muffin Mix
Grape jelly
Put peanut butter in a microwavable bowl. Microwave 30 seconds.
Add water, eggs, and mix thoroughly.
Add muffin mix and stir until there are no dry spots.
 
Fill muffin cups that have been lined with papers half full of batter. ​ Add 1 tsp. grape jelly to the middle of each muffin.
Top jelly with enough batter to bring each muffin cup up to the 3/4 mark.
 
Bake in a 350 oven for 20 minutes. Let cool on a wire rack, or serve immediately.

Spring Muffins

Spring is here! No foolin'! Here in New Mexico, March came in like a lion and went out like a lion, but there's no denying that plants are budding and spring will eventually rule out over winter.

To celebrate, I made a batch of muffins that are a little lighter and have some ingredients that I, at least, associate with spring. These muffins would be great for Easter brunch, and would be a good accompaniment to ham.

I started with my basic Manic Muffin Mix. Don't have any mixed up and stored in your cupboard? You should! It makes getting muffins on the table quick and easy. You can get the original recipe for the mix here.
Spring can be a little tricky for finding fresh local produce. The Farmer's Market here doesn't open for another month. So instead of fresh, I used two dried items that I picked up at Trader Joes: pineapple and coconut. Okay, I admit it: neither of these items are ever fresh and local here in New Mexico. But really, I don't need an excuse to pick these two items up. This coconut has no added sugar to it and it adds a nice crunch to the muffins. The pineapple adds a bright spike of flavor and nice, chewy chunks. Whatever's left over in the bag are great for snacking. Because they're still pliable, I chopped the pineapple for these muffins on a cutting board using a bit of flour on the knife to keep them from clumping together and sticking to the knife. And what  would spring be without bunny food? I added one carrot, shredded in my food processor, to the batter for a little bit of color and some added interest. I added the chopped pineapple, coconut, and carrot to the dry ingredients and stirred them around.  Coating them with flour this way keeps them from sinking to the bottom once the wet ingredients are mixed in.

Then I mixed the wet ingredients together in a 2 cup measuring cup before I stirred them into the dry ingredients. The batter will remain slightly lumpy, but make sure you don't have any pockets of completely dry mix left before you spoon it into your muffin tins.
To finish them off, I mixed up a topping of butter, brown sugar, and sliced almonds that I mixed up in the same measuring cup I had used for the dry ingredients. (no sense in making too much of a mess to clean up!) 

I added just a little to each muffin by scooping it up with a spoon and sliding it onto each muffin with my finger. The topping made the muffins look pretty and added a little more crunch.  Carrot Muffins Preheat oven to 350.

Mix together in a bowl. 

2 3/4 cup of Manic Muffin Mix 
1/4 cup shredded coconut
1/4 cup diced dried pineapple
1/4 cup shredded carrot

Add the following ingredients, which have been mixed together in a 2 cup measuring cup or small bowl:

2 eggs
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
1 cup water
1/2 oil

Line muffin tins with paper. Fill tins 3/4 full. 

Topping: Mix together in a measuring cup or small bowl, then sprinkle over muffins:

1 TBS melted butter
2 TBS brown sugar
2 TBS sliced almonds

Bake at 350 for 20 minutes or until lightly browned.