This is an awesomely delicious and easy recipe. Great for breakfast, after school snack, or dessert. A 13 x 9″ cake doesn’t even last 24 hours in our house. Yep, our kiddos can scarf this down in no time flat.

Ingredients
Filling:
2 tablespoons brown sugar
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 cup chopped pecans
Glaze:
1 1/2 cups confectioners’ sugar
2 1/2 tablespoons milk
1 teaspoon almond extract
Cake:
1 package yellow cake mix
4 large eggs
1 cup sour cream
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1/4 cup water
1/4 cup sugar
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour

Directions
For streusel filling, combine all ingredients and set aside. Blend glaze ingredients and set aside.
For cake:
Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.
Combine cake mix, eggs, sour cream, oil, water, sugar and flour in a large mixer bowl. Beat at medium speed for 3 minutes with electric mixer. Pour 1/2 of batter into a greased 13 by 9-inch pan. Sprinkle streusel filling on top and swirl the filing. Spoon remaining batter evenly over filling. Bake for 35 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool in pan 25 minutes invert onto serving plate, cool completely.
For glaze:
Combine sugar, milk and almond extract in bowl. Whisk until smooth. Drizzle over cake after cool.

The term of going “green” or being “sustainable” is a new definition of an old concept.   We, in our human arrogance, tend to think that if we go green, we are doing what the rest of our society is catching on to.   In fact, our depression era grandparents and great grandparents were probably more sustainable than us, but they never wrapped it in green.  They used all three of the concepts of going green in their purest forms; Reduce (didn’t/couldn’t satisfy their desires), Recycle (they would re-use about everthing such as bread bags, clothing, etc.) and Renew (always giving back to what they took).  Through effective conservation, they can be one component of our model in going green.  Think about your own conservation practices that are already green for the next week.  It will be an enlightening moment!

The piggy flu is once again visiting our house. Topher had it two weeks ago and was down for 5 days. Now little Miss Meghan is laying about on the couch, coughing, running a high temp and feeling miserable overall. Poor babies. We’ve been treating ourselves, all of us, with elderberry syrup, homemade by a dear friend of ours and it is keeping the worst of it at bay.

Some interesting things we have learned about it. First and foremost, it’s blown way out of proportion by the media! When Topher was first diagnosed with the swine flu, TJ and Meghan came home from school and I told them what their brother had. Poor TJ burst into tears, saying, “He’s going to die! We’re all going to die!”. Took me a few minutes to talk him back off the ledge. My goodness. The fear the media can instill and it’s power is just amazing to me. Another thing we learned is that if anyone has the ‘flu’ right now, it is almost certain that it is the swine flu as the ‘regular’ flu season has not even started yet. Something else of note is that the CDC has recommended, just very recently, to not treat initial symptoms, within the first 48 hours of onset, with Tamiflu in people without high risk factors. (I wonder if that will change now that there was a recent death of a teenager here in NC who started exhibiting symptoms but whose doctor followed the CDC protocol and did not treat him with Tamiflu because he didn’t have risk factors, but then ended up dying from complications. I hope they do reconsider their policy!). I’ve also done some more reading and thankfully, it appears that you can only get H1N1 once because your body builds up immunities to the virus, so that is good to know.

I do believe all in our household are going to be downing daily doses of elderberry syrup this autumn and winter as it is an amazing natural remedy that helps with immunity building, respiratory strength, asthma and many other things!