Found Treasure

When I was back "home" in Alabama in the fall, my mom gave me a box full of recipes. The box had been at my grandparents' house when it was cleaned out after my grandfather died in 1999. I took the box thinking I could go through the recipes and make a scrapbook of them.

My grandmother passed away in February, and since then I have been craving her Mississippi Mud Cake. I found a recipe for it when I Googled "Mississippi Mud Cake", and I made the cake, but it just wasn't my grandmother's mud cake. The icing wasn't right, and I don't think she cooked the marshmallows, because that makes them tough. Her marshmallows were creamy.

I remembered the box of recipes yesterday. I had completely forgotten that I owned it. It's been tucked away in a closet since October.



I sat on the couch last night and went through the box. The kids and I had a few laughs over some of the stuff in the box. There were old vacuum cleaner ads from the 70s, grocery store flyers, recipes written on the backs of deposit slips. And oh, the pie recipes. Doris had a sweet tooth, and it was never more evident than in that recipe box. Of the hundreds of cards and clippings we found in the box, I'd say about 15 were for meat or side dishes. The rest were pies, cakes, candies, fudge, or homemade pickles. (The woman made a mean homemade pickle. I wish I still had a few jars of her sweet pickles. Maybe I can get my mom to help me make some pickles this summer...)

After just a few minutes of searching, I found an envelope addressed to my grandmother from a friend of hers. Inside was one single sheet of notebook paper with a recipe written on it. The recipe was for Mississippi Mud Cake. I don't know who the friend was or why she mailed the recipe to my grandmother, but there it was.



Later on in our recipe box dig we found an index card with the same recipe rewritten in my grandmother's handwriting. THAT was a treasure.



I can't wait to try her actual recipe for Mississippi Mud Cake. I can almost taste it. I can see myself sitting at her old Formica kitchen table in one of her sparkly vinyl chairs, enjoying that delicious cake. She always had a cake or pie on the table. Sometimes it was homemade, sometimes store bought, but she always had something sweet there.

And no, she didn't cook the marshmallows when she made her Mud Cake.

"Pour marshmallows on top of hot cake and let them melt slightly, then pour icing over the top."

I guess she didn't like chewy marshmallows, either. My kind of gal.