Chocolate Fudge Icing

Although this icing is super convenient in that you don't have to have traditional icing sugar to make it, it's the taste that really makes you use it over and over.

Ingredients

1 cup ground raw sugar             1 tbsp cocoa

4 tbsp butter                               4 tbsp milk

1. Heat all ingredients in a saucepan. Stir and boil for 1 full minute.

2. Remove from heat and add 1 tspn vanilla extract.

3. Sit saucepan in cold water (or ice), stirring until icing reaches desired consistency.

4. Spread on cake.

*Note: If icing is spread onto a cold or frozen cake it will set faster. 

The Hope Chest Part Three - Skills to Put in a Hope Chest (a)

There are some preparations for marraige and motherhood that cannot be put inside a hope chest. These are the skills and attitudes of Godly wife and mother. Below are some of the practical skills are essential or helpful to running a home.

Cooking
Food is something everybody needs, and good, yummy food goes a long way towards soothing frayed attitudes and creating a happy, homey atmosphere in a house. Learn how to create simple, healthy meals that taste good and are economical. Cooking is a

huge way of showing people that you love and care for them. Baking is also a lovely way of making someone's day. Who wouldn't love to get a slice of freshly baked brownie with a steaming hot drink on the side for a surprise morning tea? Yum. Depending on how your family eats, learning the art of baking your own bread can also be a wonderful skill to learn.

Sewing
Sewing, some people love it, some people loathe it. But, either way, it is undeniably a very useful skill to learn. You do not need to be an expert to be able to receive the benefits. Just knowing how to sew on a button, sew a straight line and read a basic pattern opens up a world of opportunities for the aspiring homemaker. You can then create extravagant custom made curtains for the price of basic store bought versions, you can sew your own modest formal wear when the stores have nothing to offer and you can make those cute little pinafores for your little girls when they go and play pioneers. If you love sewing, invest in your interest.  If sewing is a chore for you (I can relate), persevere and think about where your work is getting you and that the destination is worth the struggles of the journey (and the cute little dress is worth unpicking that bad seam). Use your skills to honour the Lord and serve your family.

Cleaning
Cleaning a dirty house may not be the most fun thing out there, but living in a dirty

house is terrible. Being able to clean a house well and effeciently is an art and a skill well worth learning. If you start with a good attitude (and a good soundtrack!), cleaning can be almost fun and very satisfying.

Gardening
This skill is practical, economical and can possibly become a fun hobby. Growing your own vegetables is not only yummier and cheaper, it is healthier as well. By growing your own food, you know what has been put on your veggies and where they have been. And, by eating them fresh, you get all the goodness they have. There are a couple of things that make veggie gardening a lot more realistic. First, grow what you eat and eat what you grow. There is no point using up time, energy and ground space for something that will only rot because it doesn't get eaten. On the other hand, be prepared to be creative. For example, where my family lives, our soil and climate are perfect for growing spinach and zucchini, and therefor we grow a lot of them. Now, our family hasn't always liked zuchini and spinach, in fact, we really didn't like them that much at all. But, we believed that it was good food and that God had provided them for us and so we got creative and learned how to cook these vegetables. We found that a bit of spinach cut up and put in your pasta sauce or beef stew or steamed as a side vegetable with salt, pepper and butter to go with your roast was actually quite nice.  And we found that zuchini is very nice sauted with butter and garlic, with a bit of salt and pepper or used instead of pasta sheets in a lasagne or grated up into a moist zuchini cake. Over time, these two vegetables have become two of our favorites. So experiment, and find what works for you. Also, don't forget about growing flowers. You may not eat them, but their pretty faces are beautiful.

Time Management
This is one of the skills that makes all the other skills work properly. Knowing what to do when and how to do things in an effecient and orderly way is so important to running a home smoothly. It doesn't necessarily mean running around like the matron of a hospital, living your life by the second hand of a watch. Good time management will look different for different people depending on how they live and what responsibilities they have. It will also differ depending on what season of life you're going through. For example, if you are a mother of five and eight and half months pregnant, your priorities might be different to when you're a young mum who is just learning how to homeschool. This skill is best learnt by practice. Talk with your mother, organise your responsibilities, organise your time and get started!

Bookkeeping
Counting numbers and adding up totals may be paradise on earth and the description of a perfect day for you. If so, that's fantastic. Personally, it's not my

favorite cup of tea. But this skill can be a wonderful asset if you and your husband ever run a business one day. Or, maybe in the short term you might be able to help your parents with their bookkeeping. Even if you never run a business or hire a bookkeeper to do the books for you, knowing how to file a tax return and knowing the basics for bookkeeping can help you understand what your bookkeeper does and if they are doing things correctly and/or help you fill in when you don't have a bookkeeper. The fundamentals of bookkeeping can be learnt from a few good books and practice or there are TAFE courses you can study externally from home. As a side note, being a licensed bookkeeper can lead to a nice little home business for a stay at home daughter.

Simple DIY
Just picture it, your cooking dinner for your family, waiting for your husband to come home from work, putting the kids through the shower and you've got a load of laundry going in the washing machine. Now, just as you're wondering why your sink water isn't going down when you pulled out the plug, your daughter comes wrapped in a towel to inform you that the shower won't drain and is about to overflow. You quickly run into the bathroom to turn the water off and then you have to make a decision. You know that your drain must be blocked, probably close to the gray water outlet because both the kitchen sink and the shower are blocked, and you know that because of that, the pipe to your washing machine will also be blocked. You have two options; you could turn your washing machine off, bucket out the shower, try and finish diner without a sink and wait for your husband to come home to fix the drain, after which the rest of the children and yourself could have a shower, and hopefully the colours in your washing won't run. That would work, in fact that's a very good option. Or, you could bucket out the shower, turn the washing machine off, go find a bucket, plunger and wrench and then go get hid of whatever gunk is blocking the drain.Whatever you choose, knowing some simple DIY can be very handy. Knowing how to tighten a hinge, change a lightbulb, use a paint brush ect., are all very handy skills for running a home and would be useful if you help your husband do a small renovation or build a house.

Up Next -    The Hope Chest Part Four - Skills to Put in a Hope Chest (b)

Free Chocolate Cake

This cake is egg free, dairy free, nut free and low gluten. I found the base recipe when we were running short on eggs and I needed to make a chocolate cake that didn't use them. The result was so good that it has become the only recipe we use for chocolate cake in our house, eggs or no eggs. It also makes great

cupcakes.

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups fresh whole wheat flour     1 cup raw sugar

1 tspn baking soda                               1 tspn salt

1/3 cup cocoa                                       1/2 cup olive oil

1 cup water                                           a few drops vanilla extract

1 tbsp vinegar

1. Mix all ingredients together until moist and well blended.

2. Pour into a buttered and floured cake pan and bake for 20-25 minutes at

180C. Top with 'Chocolate Fudge Icing'.

The Hope Chest Part Two - What to Put in a Modern Hope Chest

Like this post! Find the updated version and much more at my new online home Godzgear Blog

So, you're intrigued by the idea of a hope chest and maybe you'd like to start one of your own. But, what does a girl in the 21st century fill her hope chest with? Here are a few ideas:

Children's Clothes
Nice, quality children's clothes can be hard to find and often quite expensive, especially little girls dresses. Buying lightly used garments from second hand stores can really cut down on the cost of these items. But, these bargains can be hard to find and the period before you are married is a good time to keep an eye out for those amazing finds.

Recipes
Let the foods that delighted the previous generations

delight the next. After all, someone has spent years perfecting the recipe to make it what it is today. And there are many memories attached to Dad's favourite cake or Mum's signature casserole. So collect the old ones and hunt out some new so that you can bless your family, both present and future, with lovely culinary delights.

Good Books
Good, wholesome books are hard to come by. Satan has practically desimated the fiction industry filling nearly all the novels, including 'christian' ones, with some subtle (or not so subtle) lie. Biographies and true stories, stories of what real people have actually done and ways God has really moved, can also not be guaranteed on for quality literature. Some real people are far from the kind of heroes you should look up to. *Note - Sometimes even learning how God has transformed a life is not worth the innocence you lose when they go into the nitty gritty of what God saved

them from. So, when you find good, wholesome, quality books and literature, grab on to your treasure and save it for yourself and for the future little minds that need to learn the wonder of reading and be inspired by the amazing world and lives that God has created. Also, some how-to and instrution books can be hard to source and so handy to have on hand when you are in your future home (homeschooling, cooking for a family, DIY,craft, ect).


Scrapbooks
The memories that you painstakingly recorded in your younger days will fascinate your children in the years to come. And this way, the lessons learnt earlier in life will not be so quickly forgotten. Letters, photos, diaries and scrapbooks all make wonderful additions to a hope chest.

Handmade Items
Some things cannot be bought and one of those things is items that have been

handcrafted with love. Whatever your skills, sewing, knitting, crocheting, painting ect., use your time while you still have some spare to create some treasures for you new home. If you don't know how to make or do a certain thing, maybe working to fill your hopechest will be the perfect opportunity to learn a new skill. And, as an aside, creating something beatiful doesn't have to be something traditional, your new home with be as unique as you and beautiful handmade treasures will mean something different to everyone.

Specific Expensive Items for Your Future
When you are newly married or have young children it's highly likely that there are going to be some needs or very handy wants that would be a fairly big strain on your tight budget. For example, if you plan on homeschooling, that set of christian readers or those lovely science DVDs might take a large slice of the budget or, if you want to use cloth nappies, setting up a stash for your first baby can be quite expensive. These sort of things are expenses that you can start working towards now and, not only be ready when the time comes, but also help take some of the strain off your budget. These specific items will be different depending on who you are and what you think is important for your new home. *Note - As a word of caution, think carefully about what you buy for your family before you are married. Some things you might want to talk about with your future husband before you buy them or he might want to buy them with you.

This is by no means an inexhaustive list. Nether are they essential to a 'good' hope chest. They are just suggestions. As with all things, a girl must use discernment and selfcontrol when filling her hope chest. It's not good sense buying three hundred little girls dresses not matter how cheap they are!If you want more ideas and guidance about filling a hope chest, ask your Mum, I am sure she has some wonderful suggestions and would love to take the journey of filling a hope chest with you.

- Up Next

The Hope Chest Part Three - Skills To Put In A Hope Chest

My ebook 'The Hope Chest List'

If you like this post you will love my ebook 'The Hope Chest List' which explains the purpose of the hope chest in the past historically, but also emphasizes its relevance for today. It inspires the young woman to not only think about the future, but practice for it in the present. The ideas presented in this book have been carefully collected over time and are now available to inspire any young lady to be wise, resourceful and creative. Most of all, the young woman is encouraged in Godliness.

This book includes lists of items for the hope chest and lists of skills that a young lady might want to acquire. There are some great bonus extras that provide a great read and useful tips.

Available for $2.99 on Amazon HERE.

Super Moist Brownies

Ingredients:

1 cup butter               1 tsp vanilla essence

¾ cup cocoa             1 ¼ cups plain flour                        

2 cups sugar              ¼ tsp salt

4 eggs

Method:

Preheat oven to 180°. Grease a large slice pan. Melt butter. Mix together cocoa and sugar, then add melted butter. Add eggs and vanilla, stir again. Now add flour and salt (nuts

can be added at this point). Spread mixture evenly into the prepared pan. Bake for 45-50 mins.

*Note: If you bake them a little bit less, they will be really moist and will stay fresh for about a week in an airtight container.

*P.S. you can also take out about a third of the sugar without noticing a difference, which is what I now do.