Welcome to the CAKE House

There is great meaning behind the name CAKE house. It all started when I was pregnant with our second child. Baby names were on the brain constantly, and we had to have a boy and girl name picked out since we decided to keep the gender of our sweet baby a surprise. We agreed on a girl name pretty much right away, Evalynn Kristine. The boys name, on the other hand, was debated up until the last couple months of my pregnancy (too bad we didn't know the gender, because our lives would have been much easier!). We finally settled on two names, Nolan or Ethan, for a boy baby... leaving it to "what the baby looks like" if it came out a boy.

I was thinking about names and decorating my house and many other things one day. A good friend of mine has little metal letters representing their last name and their first names.... I like the letters and I have wanted to get letters to represent the same such thing. So, I pondered "What if we had a girl?" "What if we had a boy?" what would our family's initials look like... And then it hit me.... If we had a girl, we would most definitely name her Evalynn... and we had an "E" name for a boy. Our initials would spell out the word "CAKE". What is even cooler about it, the initials are in descending order from oldest to youngest.

Once our baby girl was born, it was official! Our family was then known as the CAKE Family. Our little name evolved into the CAKE House thanks to my wonderful Sister-in-law. It has become a tradition that when she visits her hometown, her first meal is at our house. Of course, when she goes home she raves about the awesome food she has, dubbing our home "The CAKE House". People kept asking her "Where is this CAKE house you talk about? Is it some new restaurant in your hometown?" She laughs and says, "No, it's my brother and his wife's house".

So, I have been inspired to share my recipes (which often times are taken from other online recipe sites, like allrecipes.com, and the food network shows) with the world. Cooking doesn't have to be hard or take a lot of time to deliver a fantastic meal. Many of the meals I cook are simple, and take an hour or less to make. The result is good, healthy, home-cooked meals that my family can enjoy. We save money, eat better, and get to spend quality time around our kitchen table almost every night.

Our goal as a family is to eat home-cooked meals 300 out of 365 days. We started our challenge on August 1st, 2011 and from this point on I will be blogging my meals, recipes, and my own personal reviews. Join us on our adventure, and feel free to share recipes with us, and steal ours if you want!