Author: Cori Cooper

Or does it?

How do we know? How do we even know what size something is? How do we know if things are big or small?

I’m not trying to reenact my 9th grade Philosophy class here, especially since I lasted about 5 seconds before I high-tailed it to the office for a schedule change.

Here’s what I think. The only way to know what size something is – is to compare it to something else.

Does that ring true?

A pebble would be huge to a grain of sand but miniscule to a boulder. Right? Size is determined by comparison.

So, if I look at the hill next to my house, which is 423 feet, it isn’t very tall compared to the mountain behind it, which is 1,219 feet.

But that hill is still a pretty great hike.

My point?

It can be really tempting to look around us, at all the bright smiling faces, and feel like nobody knows the trouble we’ve seen. We might think other people’s Mountains are Meteor Crater compared to ours.

And they might be. But how do we know? What’s hard for me isn’t hard for everyone else. What’s hard for everyone else might be a stroll in the park for me.

EVERYONE is climbing something that is super mega ultra hard…

For them.

The Moral?

Just love people. Don’t compare mountains. Don’t think no one understands what you’re going through. Big or Small – Everyone understands the climb.

I love the Quaker Proverb that states – “Thee lift me and I’ll lift thee and we’ll ascend together.”

So – Let’s just all link arms and hike out of this together!

First, let’s talk Chocolate Cake – Then we can talk Epically Awesome!

This is a super moist, not overly sweet, chocolate cake. Which to me, means it is practually perfect in every way! You’ll notice notes in parenthesis, these have nothing to do with the altitude and everything to do with the taste! In baking, just like in life, what you put into it matters!

CHOCOLATE CAKE Recipe:

1 C. Water

1/3 C. Cocoa Powder (The higher quality, the better it will taste!)

2 C. Flour (unbleached all-purpose works just fine.)

1 1/4 C. Sugar (I love turbinado sugar in baking)

1 tsp Salt

2 tsp Baking Soda

1 C. Buttermilk (This is not the recipe for substitutions!)

1/2 C. Butter

2 large Eggs

1 tsp Vanilla

Preheat oven to 325.

Prepare two 8 inch cake pans. Cut parchment paper or wax paper to fit the bottom. Place inside. Grease bottom and sides.

Boil water and remove from heat, stir in cocoa powder until smooth.

Combine flour, sugar, salt and baking soda. Whisk together to remove lumps.

With a hand mixer or stand mixer, beat eggs and butter until light and fluffy. Stir in vanilla. Add flour mix, alternating with buttermilk, just until combined. Stir in cocoa mixture.

Divide the batter between the two cake pans and let it rest on the counter for 30 minutes at room temperature.

(This is super important! It allows the leavening to settle so we don’t get a sink hole in the middle of the cake while it’s baking.)

Bake for 30 to 35 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. Place cake pans on a cooling rack for 30 minutes. Invert onto wire rack to cool an additional 30 minutes before icing.

The cake is now done and uniformly baked and amazingly delicious. You can eat it as is, with milk or ice cream, or frost it however you want, OR you can cause a sensation!

Let’s talk EPICALLY AWESOME! Let’s talk four layers… Ganache filling and White Chocolate Swiss Meringue Buttercream! Oh M Goodness! Are you with me?

Let’s do this!

But first, let’s stick those panless, partially cooled cakes into the refrigerator for about an hour so they are ready when we are!

GANACHE Recipe:

3 C. Semi-sweet Chocolate Chips (Again, good quality tastes best-est)

1 1/2 C. Heavy Whipping Cream

4 TBSP unsalted Butter, softened

Use a double boiler to melt chocolate chips with cream. When the mixture is smoother and more gorgeous then Harrison Ford in the 70’s, add the butter. Stir until melted and combined.

Pour the mixture into a shallow pan and let cool until steam no longer rises, then cover it and leave at room temperature until ready to use.

Let’s get those cakes now!

Cut each cake in half horizontally so there are now four thinner rounds. Put a bottom piece down on a cake stand or plate. Cover with 1/3 of the ganache. Continue to layer cake and ganache, make sure the tippy top layer of cake is a bottom piece, placed upside down.

Bottoms up, Bottoms down!

Refrigerate again to set ganache and let’s make some Swiss Meringue Buttercream! This is my favorite part!

WHITE CHOCOLATE SWISS MERINGUE BUTTERCREAM recipe:

3/4 C. White Chocolate Chips. (I don’t like the taste of white chocolate made with partially hydrogenated oils.)

1/3 C. Sugar

3 large Egg Whites, at room temperature

Pinch Salt

1/4 tsp Vanilla

1 – 1/2 C. (3 sticks) Unsalted Butter, softened and cut into cubes

Use the double boiler again to melt the white chocolate chips. Stir until completely melted and smooth. Remove the top part of the double boiler but leave the bottom with water simmering.

Put sugar, egg whites and salt in a heatproof bowl, I use stainless teel mixing bowls, and set it over the simmering water. Whisk until the sugar dissolves and the mixture is very thin and warm, around 115 degrees.

Pour into a stand mixer with the whisk attachment. Mix on high until stiff peaks form. Reduce speed to low and mix until cooled, about 10 minutes.

Continue on low, add the vanilla. Put in the butter cubes, one at a time, until blended. Add melted white chocolate slowly. Now increase speed to medium and beat until buttercream is smooth and shiny.

Lovely!

Now bring that cake back out and crumb coat it.

That’s just a fancy way of saying thinly ice the cake so the final icing job doesn’t have any flecks of cake in it. It’s more purdier!

After the crumb coat, refrigerate the cake to set that first layer of icing. Bring it back out and apply the final coat with the remaining Buttercream.

Minus what you snitched along the way. Don’t worry. I won’t tell.

All done! Ta-da!

The most Epically Awesome Chocolate Cake ever!

Here is the reality of living in the mountains.

There are a lot of trees.

Stick with me here, don’t give me a teenage eye roll, this is an important thing to note because with lots of trees come fires. It’s a classic combo, like peanut butter and jelly, fudge and ice cream, or as my fourteen year old just informed me, sour cream and onion chips with caramel syrup.

Right?!

Yikes.

Anyway… Sorry, can’t get that out of your mind now, can you? Me neither. I think I threw up in my mouth a little bit but, I’m going to press forward because I can do hard things.

🙂

Fire danger, in the summer before monsoon hits, is real. It is a BIG DEAL. There are always a few tense weeks, no matter how much snow we got that winter, where people start to wonder if our town is going to burn to the ground and we are going to end up in history books a thousand years from now like Pompeii.

Fire danger signs dot the side of roads all over town. We breath a collective sigh of relief when we see it on LOW. As it creeps across the board to HIGH we start to fidget. Round about the time it makes the jump to EXTREME, we hit our knees and start praying for rain.

It’s unsettling, feeling like your fate is in the hands of something you can’t control. We humans love being in control, don’t we. There are a few brave souls who declare themselves control freaks, with or without some measure of pride. Really, every one of us should own it. We want things the way we want them. And some of us, I’m not pointing any fingers but we know who we are, get a little cranky when things don’t go the way we want. Some of us, again, not judging, on occasion throw a good old fashioned tizzy fit when things don’t go the way we want them to.

Is it bad to want control?

That’s a good question. What do you think?

When pondering a question like that, I have to consider how it feels when I’m trying to control everything, and everyone, in my world.

Because the whole point of doing the things we do in this life is to feel something, don’t you think? We want to feel happy, we want to feel accomplished, we want to feel loved, we want to feel needed. Basically, we want to feel good.

But know what I’ve decided?

Controlling things – or rather, trying to control things, since actually doing it is dang near impossible – is the just… the worst.

It’s exhausting.

I THINK I know what will make everything perfect and shiny and cotton candy flavored, but I really don’t. I’m not that smart y’all.

And that’s okay.

I’m not supposed to control everything.

I’m supposed to learn to let it go.

(No, I’m not going to break into song, but admit it, you almost did, didn’t you??)

I’d rather let things be what they will be. I’d rather leave it all in the hands of someone wiser, who knows exactly how this world should turn. Someone who loves us all perfectly and therefore will give us exactly what we need.

Even if those things are hard. Even if they are wild and volcanic and super stinky. Even if the heat is on as the fire is raging and I am sweating bullets. Even if disaster feels imminent.

I’d rather choose to believe everything that happens is part of the plan and that it is going to work together for our good.

There is good in everything.

Everything can be beautiful.

Have you ever gone online to read reviews?

I would assume that yes, yes you have. But as my high school economics teacher taught me… There is no such thing as a free lunch. Oops, wrong one, I mean, You know what happens when you assume? You make (another word for behind) out of U and ME.

So, I don’t want to do that. Hence the question.

I’ll admit it first, and then you can if you want.

I read online reviews. Here’s my tried and true system for getting the most out of reading online reviews. Call now and I’ll throw in a monocle at no extra charge.

Not really. I don’t have a monocle. But I will give you my permission to say the word monocle. Out loud. Ten times. Monocle. It sounds kind of cool. Go on – you know you want to.

Fun huh?

Okay, enough nonsense, here’s the dealio:

First – I read the rotten reviews. The one star. The lowest of the low.

Next – I read the 5 star. The winner winner chicken dinner reviews.

Then – I make an educated decision about whether or not to buy or do the thing.

Here’s why – one star reviews are very informative. Did you know that the majority of the time someone will rate something one star because they got a paper cut when they opened the package or because the mail person gave them a funny look when they dropped the package off? True story. Once in a while there will be a legit reason why they didn’t like it.

Either way, super helpful.

Five star reviews are similar, you just have to wade through the sunshine, butterflies and gushing to find reviews that apply to the thing.

So. That’s my strategy. Feel free to use it if you want to, it isn’t copywrited. Copywritten. Copywrit.

The reason we are talking about this is because the internet give us a plethora of information. Tons of opinions. If I want to do anything I can look it up in two seconds and find out what everyone else thinks about it.

But here’s the thing –

Not everyone thinks the same.

There is a possibility, no wait – hear me out – that I may not feel the same way about something as you do.

Right?!

I know, I know. I would never have thought it possible.

But it’s true.

Example: I wanted to hike a new trail with my husband, one that the city opened up not too long ago. I went online and read the reviews. Want to know what happened?

Expectations is what happened.

The trail didn’t get great reviews.

Instantly my attitude plummeted. I started envisioning the worst hike ever. Like, EVER. I thoroughly expected to have a thoroughly miserable experience. Because my husband, brilliant man really, didn’t read the reviews, he still thought it was going to be super fun and still wanted to go. I dragged my feet. Drug my feet. Drugged my feet.

Hm, those can’t be right.

Anyway, what I did was whined a lot. Up until the moment we parked the car.

And you know what? Despite the last little bit of trail that winds behind the sewage plant, complete with expected stench, the hike was amazing. It was beautiful. It has actually become one of my favorites.

Despite the smell.

Really, it’s just for a small portion.

So, bringing it all home, here’s what I know: There have been many times in my life when I have avoided something because I heard or gathered or read or assumed (gasp) that it was not a good experience for someone somewhere sometime.

And I know, I can feel it in my bones, I’ve missed out on a lot of amazing things.

Dream with me for a moment. What would happen if we heard the good and heard the bad and DECIDED to find out for ourselves what to think about it. Sure, we might hate it. It might be miserable or, well, stinky.

But… it could be fun though.

Read the reviews my friends, but don’t let them stop you from seeing for yourself. There’s gonna be good and there’s gonna be bad but… maybe not. Maybe bad isn’t real.

Maybe it’s ALL good.

The cute little mountain town where I live is about 7,000 ft elevation.

Let me tell you what that means:

*Sometimes the temperature will increase or decrease 20 to 40 degrees, throughout the day.

*It feels 10 to 15 degrees cooler in the shade.

*The sun BEATS down. If you go out in the sun for more than 15 minutes at the height of the day, you can practically feel yourself burning lobster style.

*The clouds move fast! You better point out that fluffy white one shaped like a bunny super quick. It’s going to disappear into wisps of cotton after a couple of blinks.

*If you don’t like the weather, wait 5 minutes or drive 5 miles. For reals! Here’s an example: Once upon a time, we were driving home from the store and the sun was shining. Without any warning at all, it began pouring rain. Torrential! It was like we drove through a veil or something. We could literally see the line between sunny and rainy, right there in the middle of the road.

Crazy, right?

Crazy Cool!

Now that you know some background, let’s talk about cloud cover.

I was hiking on the San Fransisco Peaks with my family on a beautiful summer day in June. The temperature when we started was perfect, 70 degrees with a cool mountain breeze.

It was heavenly.

As the day, and the hike, went on, the sun rose in the sky, the breeze disappeared and we started removing layers.

(Mountain living 101: ALWAYS wear layers)

There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

Which wasn’t a big hairy deal, until the trail jumped out of the shelter of the pine trees and we were facing about a mile of open land and praire grass.

All uphill.

I stopped at the edge of the trees and looked back at the forest, wondering if it would be worth it to turn around and go back the way we came, through the trees.

I knew it would take way longer if we did…

But the trail through the meadow looked like a dusty, barren wasteland!

I gave my feet, and my kids, a peppy pep talk and off we went into the blazing white sunshine.

About 2/3 of the way I seriously thought there was no way I was going to make it.

You know how your brain does that sometimes?

Silly brain.

I just kept putting one foot in front of the other, because that is how to climb a mountain, but it felt really, really hard.

Almost impossible.

Then, it got dark.

I looked up and there was one, big, fluffy, white cloud hovering all alone in the clear blue sky above my family.

That cloud was like magic!

We all straightened our backs, adjusted our packs, took a sip of lukewarm water and picked up our feet a little higher.

We could totally do it now.

And we did.

Cloud cover changed everything.

It changes everything.

Let’s be analogical! Let’s talk about life. When you are going through something stinkin’ hard, cloud cover would be the things or the people that bring you relief. Here are just a few ideas to get you started thinking:

*A smile from a stranger.

*An encouraging text or phone call from a friend.

*A song on the radio.

*A meaningful act of service.

When I am squelched by the heat of the mountain sun, I look for cloud cover, it is always there, and it is exactly the boost I need to keep climbing.

Then I try to be cloud cover for someone else.