Homemade Yogurt & Chocolate Sheet Cake

Some of this Jack's kitchen adventures/experiments have been low on the to-do-list (along with many other things...) but hopefully the kitchen is back to being inhabited a little more often

Yogurt
Normal store-bought yogurt, if you don't buy plain, is often:
1. full of slightly, if not highly, disturbing ingredients
2. way to sweet to choke down
3. more expensive than I'd like (free would be preferable)

As we happened to be fortunate enough to have a yogurt maker passed down to us, we made yogurt. Actually, Pete made the first batch while I was feeling sick and my mom and I made the second while Pete was working. The pictures are mostly products of the second batch

2

pretty much all you need ingredient-wise is milk (we used skim) and 2 T. yogurt (used as a starter)
We also added some non-fat powdered milk.
Here's the directions we used:
http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Yogurt

I have heard there are ways of using a crockpot to make yogurt although we haven't tried that, yet.

For eating purposes, it is rather bland by itself but delicious with honey.
I like berries on top too.

Cake

Secondly I made this for our church community group

those bumps on top are powdered sugar clumps (I hope!) that didn't quite make it. that was a sad misfortune and only so many could be picked out by a non-perfectionist youngest child (they probably taste real good that way anyways)

OK, honestly, I didn't even try this cake. I am not big on chocolate on chocolate with more chocolate, but some people are. I heard many good "reviews" and am inclined to believe them because I got the recipe from this super fun site which has a lot of yummy recipes on it. Maybe they also liked it because it has a lot of butter, sugar, and chocolate - also a possibility

Not the "healthiest" choice of baking but one should probably not bring whole wheat bran muffins when signed up for snacks - it just might not go over well