Honey Mayes is my mother-in-law, and she has been cooking for over 70 years. She grew up on a farm in western Oklahoma, wearing dresses made from feed sacks (it takes three 100-pound feed sacks to make a dress), picking potato bugs off the plants and dropping them in kerosene, milking cows and gathering eggs in the mornings, killing chickens for dinner, and using an outhouse to do her business. She knows what it really means to be a pioneer woman.
Blarney Stones are tasty little sweet and salty nut-covered cakes that everyone loves but no one understands why they are so darn good.
This is one of those unsophisticated basic-ingredient recipes that is simple but tastes
irresistible.
Ingredients
Box yellow cake mix
Powdered
sugar/milk/vanilla icing
24 oz.chopped dry-roasted
peanuts
Bake the cake according to
package directions. When cooled, cut into
2 x 2” sections. Place cake
sections on baking sheet, cover with plastic wrap and foil, and freeze. The freezing makes the cakes easier to handle
during the icing stage.
Prepare icing. With a hand mixer, blend 4 C powdered sugar, 1/2 C milk, and 1 tsp vanilla until smooth.
Chop the peanuts in the food processor.
Remove about eight cakes at a time from the freezer. You don't want them all to thaw out while you are icing them.
Ice all sides of each
cake and sprinkle with nuts on all sides.
It’s kind of a mess, and the icing gets all over your hands. Challenge yourself by trying to lick the
icing from your elbows.
Place one layer of iced, nut-crusted cakes on a cake plate, lay a sheet of wax paper on top, and stack the next layer of cakes on the wax paper.
It's an unpretentious little recipe and a messy process, but everyone loves these Blarney Stones.
Place them on a plate in a circle and call it
Blarney Stonehenge if you are feeling particularly silly.
Don't give up. Write more!
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