Fancy Fruit Basket Cake

My sister and I grew up on the family farm, and our mom was a good cook who put three hot meals on the table year round. Our desserts were mainly fruit pies and puddings such as tapioca or chocolate, with an occasional cake for a birthday. One that was especially delicious was mom's white layer cake with sliced bananas between the layers and whipped cream frosting.

Our local supermarket has a wonderful cake they call the Fruit Basket Cake. It is a white layer cake with sliced bananas and sliced strawberries between the layers with whipped cream frosting. It is really tall with all the fruit between the layers, and really expensive as well!! We have indulged in this cake for two or three very special celebrations, but you can make one at home for a few dollars compared with spending a small fortune at the bakery.

Here is the cast of characters: Duncan Hines Moist Deluxe Classic White Cake (or any white cake mix), oil, water, egg whites, heavy whipping cream, powdered sugar, bananas and strawberries.

Grease the cake pans including the sides. These pans are my old faithful Bake King pans with the arm that slides around to release the cake after it is baked. Very, very handy!! :D

                                                                         Add some flour...

                                                            Shake the flour around the bottom...

                                                                        And the sides...

Now that the baking pans are prepared and the oven is preheating, let's start making the cake. Open the bag and pour the mix into the mixer bowl.

Add the water...

        
And the egg whites...OOPS! One of the yolks fell in...No worries, it didn't make a bit of difference to the quality of the cake. :D (It's challenging to add ingredients with one hand and take photos with the other!)

                                                                             Add the oil...

                                                             And mix according to directions.

                                                  Pour the batter into the prepared pans and bake.

    Take out the baked layers and set aside on racks to cool while you whip the cream and slice the fruit.

   Pour the whipping cream into the mixer bowl. I used three cups, one pint box and one 1/2 pint box.
It is always better to have more whipped cream than less so you can cover the cake. Any extra can be used in your morning coffee...better than Starbucks!! Oh yummy...

While whipping the cream, add some powdered sugar to sweeten it. I added three scoops, but my family likes it sweet! Gosh, I'm giving away all the family secrets...

Now I can just hear my mother admonishing me to not whip the cream too long or it will turn to butter!
I actually had that happen once...so I had to send my hubby to the store for more whipping cream. You want the cream to be whipped with stiff peaks so it will stay on the cake, but you don't want butter!! :D

Put a doily on the cake plate and start to frost the bottom layer with the whipped cream. As our 9 1/2 year old great-niece Elizabeth said recently, "Everything looks better with a doily on the plate!"

                                                       Ummmm...it's starting to look like a cake...

                                                                Slice a banana thinly and evenly...

           And lay the pieces carefully on the top, then spread a little more frosting over the bananas.

                                                 Put the second layer on top and start frosting it...

                                                   Slice the strawberries thinly and lay on a plate...

                       Shake on a sweetener that you use: regular sugar, Splenda or in this case, Stevia...

                                                Lay the sliced strawberries on the top of the cake...

                                     And frost the top layer with the remaining whipped cream...

                                               Don't forget to do a good job on the sides as well...

When I was slicing the strawberries, I noticed that one of them looked like a red heart, so I saved it for the top of the cake...I made it for my Aunt Dorothy's 97th birthday, so Happy Birthday Aunt D.!!

      
        Be sure to refrigerate your cake until you serve it. Then enjoy, enjoy, and make some memories!

Note: For a red, white and blue cake add some blueberries between the layers. 

Welcome to California, Cousin Eliza

Today is our little cousin Eliza's 9 month birthday!

She is our newest "Girl from Williamsburg," great-great granddaughter of Minnie, who wrote the book of that name. You can see her welcome to our family story on December 17, '08 on this blog.

Eliza recently flew across the country to visit her California cousins for the first time, over the 4th of July week-end. It was so much fun to meet her and be able to hold her in our arms!

It was a very hot week-end, but Eliza is no stranger to heat, being from Williamsburg, Virginia. Here she is meeting my Aunt Dorothy, daughter of Minnie, for the first time. Aunt Dorothy just celebrated her 96th birthday this last May!

Aunt Dorothy lives on the site of our family's homeplace on the farm where we have lived since 1910. Minnie and C.W. established the farm and it has been continuously run by our family for almost 100 years. We will have to have a celebration next year!

We took Eliza on an up-close-and-personal tour of Aunt Dorothy's orchards and gardens.

She loved the holly hocks, and my jewelry!

Here are Aunt Dorothy and Eliza visiting with her family on the front porch of the "new" home built in 1970 by Aunt Dorothy and Uncle Ronny.

Heather tells me that since returning back home Eliza has learned to stand on her own, sit up and crawl with her tummy off the ground.

She loves swinging in the park, riding on the Busch Gardens merry-go-round and going swimming.

We hope you can all return to California soon!

Growing Up With Aunt Dorothy

Today I'd like to share with you the important influence that Aunt Dorothy has had on my life, and on the lives of my sister, Jan, a myriad of Jenkins cousins, and even the two boys who grew up on the neighboring farm, John and Tom.

This photo was taken at our church for what could be called the Jenkins Family Christening Day on October 17, 1950. C.W. and Minnie's adult children, Bruce, Raymond and Dorothy, had all of their children baptized on this day. There were many of us!

Here my sister and I are shown posed with our godmothers, myself and Aunt Dorothy on the left, and Jan and Aunt Myola on the right. Our mom made our matching dresses as she usually did. Either she made them or purchased identical skirts, blouses and dresses in different sizes from the Montgomery Ward catalog. I've seen other siblings dressed in identical clothes from that era~ it must have been a fifties thing!

My very first memory as a toddler involves a family trip that we took to Aunt Dorothy and Uncle Ronny's house in San Diego for Christmas. Amidst all the excitement of Christmas and staying in a different home, I got a cough. I remember standing up in a crib and Uncle Ronny bringing me cough medicine in a spoon in the night. It's funny to think way back to see what our first memory is.

As I grew older Aunt Dorothy's annual trips up to the ranch with her sons grew more and more important to me. Each June she would bring Rob, Ron and Rich to spend the entire summer. Jan, John, Tom and I all waited for the excitement of that day: summer it seemed would not really begin until they arrived.

Aunt Dorothy always had lots of fun and exciting things to do. She rented the old farmhouse during the nine months of school, and then the tenants vacated so Aunt Dorothy could come for three months. There was always a long list of repair projects to be done on the old home, and her boys were kept busy working on those. Our home that my parents built was right across the street from Aunt Dorothy's house, which was the old homestead purchased by our grandparents.

I was usually hanging around watching or helping, as I did when it came time to paint the bedrooms. Aunt Dorothy taught us all how to paint, a skill that has come in very handy down through the years. Then she taught me how to take antiques such as an iron bedstead and paint it white with gold highlights. We did the same with Grandpa C.W.'s old trunk with his initials on the top wooden stave. We turned it into a girls' trunk painted on the metal parts outside with the same colors. Then we removed the old and torn paper on the inside and I learned how to apply wallpaper.

Another craft project we did involved gluing sparkly decorations and rick rack on decorative bottles, then filling them with colored water. I put them around my bathroom and they were in my parent's home for over fifty years, still pretty! I couldn't bear to throw them away until it came time to clean out our parent's home.

I still remember the fun of making homemade root beer in Aunt Dorothy's bathtub. We bottled it up and drank it up fast! I still love root beer, and it never fails to take me back to those good old days...

Sometimes we'd go out on an evening bike ride and find ourselves pedaling by some nearby watermelon patch. Somehow a nice big juicy one would make it's way into our basket, I don't know how! :D Aunt Dorothy had a large oval oak table out on the screened porch where we ate and played cards in the summer. Many a night growing up all of us kids would gather around the table and play Hearts. Occasionally my cousin Ron would "shoot the moon" successfully and win the game, to collective groans.

Right down the hall from the dining porch was the sleeping porch, a screened-in area large enough for a double bed. If the night wasn't too hot, and there was a little breeze, it was a fabulous place to look up at the stars and fall asleep. We didn't have to worry about intruders in those days, we grew up "topsy" as our mom used to say, running barefooted around the ranch, climbing trees and wading through the irrigation ditches.

Someone built a platform high up in the oak tree out in front of Aunt Dorothy's, and little wooden bar "steps" were hammered in the trunk so we could climb up. We had a bucket on a rope we'd lower down for treats. There was no rail around the platform, but somehow we didn't fall!

Aunt Dorothy had a collection of her mother's dresses, skirts and blouses that we cousins were allowed to play dress up in. Then there were the antique dolls and doll buggy that we got to push around. We have some really sweet photos of all of us cousins dressed up in Grandminnie's clothes. Minnie didn't want to be called Grandma, so Grandminnie it was. I didn't even realize how unusual that was until I grew up and realized no one else had a name like that!

At different times Aunt Dorothy invited pairs of cousins to travel down to their home in L.A. with her. This was a huge treat, as we were farm kids who had traveled very little in those days. My cousin Holly and I got to go together one summer, and everything in the big city was new and exciting. First she took us clothes shopping and we got to pick out identical (there it is again!) play suits with zippers up the front. I remember especially a visit to Old Town on Olvera St. The sights and smells were so different and exciting to me.

When we were young the farm was planted in young orchards that were not producing yet, so times were lean for our family. My mom and dad would put our gifts in a pillow case for us to save money on gift wrap. There was nothing extra for birthday parties or anything like that, so it was always exciting when Aunt Dorothy's birthday and Christmas gifts would arrive in the mail. I still have the felt Christmas stockings she sewed for mom, dad, Jan and I, each one different. They have become family treasures...

Our farm goes down to the river's edge, and we had many happy picnics with aunts and uncles, cousins and friends on the sand bar over the decades. Everyone would drive down in their pick up or jeep, and put the food out on the tailgates. Then roasting sticks were cut off the bushes and we'd have a weenie roast with S'mores for dessert.

Aunt Dorothy used to take us blackberry pickin' down by the river, along about the middle of July. We'd have to wear long-sleeved shirts and long pants and go early in the morning before it got too hot. If we were lucky, we'd get enough berries (after liberal tasting, of course) to make up some pies or cobblers. One time Aunt D. came home, made her pie, and set it out on the back stoop to cool. Our dog Joe, a family favorite with all of us, grabbed the pie in his jaws and brought it all the way over to our house and ceremoniously put it down on our step. Unfortunately no one got to eat it!

When we were strong enough swimmers we were allowed to float down the river from up above to our sandbar, using old tractor tire inner tubes to hold on to. We must have grown up with angels on our shoulders as we all thankfully survived these summer escapades!

 Uncle Ronny, myself and Aunt Dorothy dressed up in Hawaiian

hats and leis I brought back from a summer trip in 1968

As I grew older Aunt Dorothy remained a very important person in my life. Through college I always had those summers home to look forward to, and her letters arrived regularly during the school year. Her life became a blueprint for my own, as I married and had children. She stayed home with her children and spent her extra time volunteering with Scouts and school projects as did I.

Then after my children reached a certain age in school I felt it was time to get a full-time teaching position to help prepare for college expenses in the future. I always felt that Aunt Dorothy is a natural born teacher. Instead of teaching in the classroom, she has spent her lifetime teaching all of us!

A formal portrait of Ronny and Dorothy

In 1980 Ronny retired from the Bank of America and they sold their home in San Marino and came north to retire on Jenkins Farms. They demolished the old homestead and built a beautiful new home on the property, continually working to improve the surrounding grounds and gardens.

Their new home has been the setting for countless gatherings of family and friends, all of whom enjoy coming home to the farm.

Aunt Dorothy continues to spend her days writing and researching her many projects, and working in the gardens.

Yesterday when I went to visit her for her 96th birthday she was outside marveling over a new plant that was brought from Raymond Villa in Pasadena, where her parents were married. She had never seen this kind of plant so she's excited about researching its name and learning all about it...

Aunt Dorothy is the consummate family historian. Here she is with Uncle Ronny and my dad, Bruce, in front of the 450 year old blue oak tree just steps from where she was born in the original ranch house.

She has written and published two books, Jenkins Farms, and Under The Blue Oak, about all the peoples who have lived under that tree since it took root.

My dad, Bruce, his sister, Dorothy, and my mom, Mary, in front of my home.

My mom's father, Dr. Higgins, delivered Aunt Dorothy in the house under the big blue oak. When my mom married my dad, she and Aunt Dorothy became as close as sisters.

I've always said that Aunt Dorothy is like a 2nd mother to me, and now you know why.

My mom and dad are gone now, so I'm doubly thankful for her love, all the years of my life.

Thank you Cousin Ron, for the formal portrait.

Happy 96th Birthday, Aunt Dorothy

My father's sister, Dorothy, was born 96 years ago today, May 12, 1913, on Jenkins Farms in northern California. She lives there now, within eyesight of the 450 year old blue oak tree that sheltered the old homestead where she was born.  

My mother's father, Dr. Higgins, delivered her, his first baby case, a fact that he always enjoyed pointing out to people whenever Aunt Dorothy returned home from college, or came back to visit as a married woman.

Dorothy grew up on the farm with her father and mother, C.W. and Minnie, and older brothers Bruce and Raymond. Her father had studied agriculture in college, and both of her parents had taught school, so everything on the farm was made educational and fun.

She learned everything about trees: fruit trees, conifers and deciduous trees, grafting and budding, and how to run a dry yard to process the dried peaches. There were horses and cows, pigs and chickens, and family pets to care for.

Dorothy was encouraged to work and play outside whenever possible, so that she would grow up in the healthy out doors. She and her brothers walked or rode in their pony cart every day to the small country school nearby. The fourth generation of our family, Elizabeth, is now attending the same school!

Every vacation growing up was a camping trip to some area around California. Trees and plants, geology and geography, hiking and studying maps were taught by their parents. One of Dorothy's fondest memories is climbing North Butte in our valley for the first time, when she was about 11 years old. Each spring the family took turns climbing North and South Butte with family and friends. In later years Dorothy climbed both Mt. Lassen and Mt. Whitney with her husband.

As Dorothy grew older, she helped her mother start a candied fruit business where their produce was prepared and packed in special redwood boxes under the Greenwood Tree Ranch label. This operation brought in much needed funds to help send Dorothy to college.

When that time came, a friend encouraged her to apply to the University of California at Berkeley. Her parents put her on the train that runs by the farm, and when she reached the Bay Area, she jumped off in Berkeley and they threw her suitcase down after her. While at Cal she studied Botany and Geography, two life-long interests to this day. She graduated in 1935.

Dorothy met the love of her life, Ronald Ross, when she accepted a blind date for a dance at Bowles Hall. They courted, and married on Sept. 19, 1937 in her family's church, with a reception at home. This was during the time of the Great Depression, when jobs were very scarce. Ronny had a difficult time finding a job, but friends eventually helped him secure a position with Bank of America.

Dorothy in the living room of the old homestead, circa 1930

Dorothy last year at Easter time on Jenkins Farms

Ron was assigned to a bank in San Diego where he worked in financing world-wide transportation such as airlines, steamships and railroads. Ron and Dorothy started their family which consists of three sons: Rob, Ron Jr. and Richard. They raised their sons in much the same way they had been raised~camping and hiking, with family trips all over the U.S.

Twenty years later Ron was transferred to San Marino, in the L.A. area, where he continued his career in B. of A. By this time Ron and

Dorothy were flying to different countries, often connected to Ronny's business trips financing the airlines and other concerns. They visited all over Europe, Egypt, the Holy Land, Russia, China, Indonesia, Central America and Canada. Dorothy often did family genealogy research on these trips where applicable.

Along the way Dorothy was active with her sons in Boy Scouts, taking the boys on nature study trips. She worked with the Huntington Library in San Marino, doing oral family history interviews with people whose families had lived at the San Gabriel Mission. She led bicycle tours of the city and served on many committees.

During the summers Dorothy always brought her sons north to spend the entire vacation on the family farm. There they were kept very busy learning how to work on the old farm house, repairing and doing projects. They also worked in the peaches and the prunes, learning the farming operation from their Uncle Bruce and Uncle Raymond.

In 1980, Ron retired from Bank of America, and Ron and Dorothy moved north to build a beautiful new home where the old farmhouse once stood. They poured their time and energy into creating a showplace of lovely grounds combined with interesting antique farm implements. In the kitchen of their home, mostly for display, is the old wood cook stove that Dorothy's mother, Minnie, once cooked on to feed her family and the ranch hands.  

Over the course of her very active life, Aunt Dorothy has always been a writer. She has written many booklets for the family concerning our genealogy and history. In this last decade she has written and published two books, Jenkins Farms, and Under the Blue Oak, a story of all the peoples who have lived under the historic blue oak where she was born. Both books are sold at the local county museum.

Tomorrow I will share what a wonderful influence Aunt Dorothy has been in my life. Today's posting is but a brief view into an incredible woman's life that has spanned almost a hundred years. Happy 96th birthday, Aunt Dorothy!

Thank you, Cousin Rich, for the photos.