The Lifegiving Woman

Thai Chicken Salad

This is my favorite all time best salad.

It is simply delicious. Feeds a crowd too. Double the dressing and serve on the side. I also fry up the chicken in butter, olive oil and a little garlic salt to get the outside crunchy. It is super amazing.

Thai Chicken Salad

For Dressing:

½ cup veg oil

1/3 cup soy sauce

1/3 cup White Wine Vinegar

3 tablespoons sugar

¼ teaspoon pepper

½ teaspoon salt

2 cloves of garlic

1 large tea of fresh ginger

1 tablespoon dark sesame oil

 

For Salad

6 ounces bowtie pasta cooked

4 cups cooked chicken (fried up to get the outside crunchy)

1 cup chopped green onion

2 large bag of spinach or field greens (romaine works nicely too)

¼ cup toasted Sesame seeds

3-4 carrots sliced

3-4 chopped celery

1 small bag of snow peas

2 large cans mandarin oranges

Top off with dry salted peanuts

 

Declare Dignity

A homeless man, God, and treating others as if they matter.

By Tammy Hanson Maltby

Featured in Today's Christian Woman Sept/Oct

 

Declare Dignity

I assume he was homeless, though I don't really know. All I know is that he was shaggy and dirty, and he was knocking on the door of the Gold and Silver Buyers office where I work.

Buying precious metals is a new and fascinating experience for me. My friend Tom Davis has been setting up stores in our area as a ministry-based business. When he asked me to help, my response was, "I don't know anything about gold and silver—except that I like them!"

Well, I know more now, and I thoroughly enjoy the business. I meet people from every walk of life, and every one of them has a story. But I never had a homeless guy as a customer—until now.

Respectful Response

I spotted him through the glass door, standing with a friend, smoking a cigarette, and holding up something for me to see. Per our security setup, I had to decide, as I do with every customer, to buzz him in or not.

I had a sense of peace about this man, so I let him in. His friend stayed outside.

He smoothed his hair, walked over to the counter, and showed me what he had in his hands: a little locket that looked as though it had been run over by a car.

"I'd like to sell it," he said. "It's silver, miss."

I looked at the locket. Probably silver, but very small. My newfound expertise told me it was worth about a dollar.

I opened my mouth to tell him so, then shut it, feeling the need to pay attention to what God wanted to do with this encounter. And the words that became clear to me in that moment were, Declare dignity to this man.

Declare dignity. That's what so many of us need, isn't it? The dignity of knowing that we matter to God and to others, that we're taken seriously. The question, of course, was how to declare dignity to this man in this particular moment. I didn't have an answer, except to treat him the way I would treat the customers who come in with thousands of dollars' worth of jewelry. They're hungry for dignity too.

Sensing God's Presence

"Sir, I have some cookies and water. Would you like some?"

Surprised, he answered, "Thanks." He walked to the nearby table, took several cookies and a bottle of water, and returned to the counter.

"Can you tell me about this piece of jewelry?" I held up the mangled little piece.

He shrugged. "I found it. Thought it might be worth something."

"Well, let me see what I can do for you." I searched for marks and weighed it. "This is sterling, but it doesn't weigh much. I could give you, hmm, three dollars for it."

"That would be just fine."

I counted out the money, and he picked it up from the counter. I held out my hand to shake his.

Click here to Ccntine reading: Todays Christian Woman

James and Betty Robison and Life Today!

Hello Friends!

I wanted to share some of the interview I did with Randy Robison with Life Today TV. Life Today

I will also be on Life Today with James and Betty Robison tomorrow Tuesday September 8th. I hope you will join in and share the lifegiving message of The God Who Sees You! Life Today with James and Betty

Every Person You Meet 

 

Jesus called it the Great Commandment—to love God with all we have and to love our neighbors as much as we love ourselves. But it’s not always that simple, is it? Some people are easy to see and to understand, easy to love. Some people invite our compassion and make us want to reach out. But what about:

•     that woman at work who just won’t stop talking.

• the pushy phone solicitor.
• the guy on the corner, holding up a “will work for food” sign.
• the tattooed, pierced teenager hanging out at the coffee shop.
• the kid who beat up your kid at school.
• the ditzy teen who just cut you off in traffic because she was texting.
• the frumpy, middle-aged woman ahead of you in the grocery line.
• the woman at the rest stop that you suspect is a prostitute.
• the young man with Down syndrome.
• the old woman with Alzheimer’s.
• the guy who stole your identity.
• the IRS agent who audits you.
• the self-righteous Christian you encountered at the church you’ll never, ever visit again.
• the out-of-control young mother you had to sit next to in the emergency room.
• the rude clerk who messed up your bill.
• the hotshot who always manages to make you look bad at work.
• your friends when they get involved in their own lives and neglect you.
• your mother when she’s being needy and demanding.
• your father when he’s being stubborn and dictatorial.
• your husband when he’s acting clueless.
• your wife when she just won’t let it drop.
• your children when they push every button you have.

Every encounter with another human being brings a test. And with some of them, the test is really a challenge. Will we choose to see this person as God does? As our neighbor? As someone to love? Can we really get it through our heads that God sees every person we encounter exactly the way He sees us?

Each one was created in the image of God and bears a divine spark within him or her.

Each one is a sinner—just like you and me.

Each one has been sinned against—just as you and I have—and bears the scars of that sin. Each one suffers and struggles in ways we probably don’t know.

And every single person you and I meet is someone Jesus died for. Someone God loves passionately. Someone He wants to provide with a future and a hope.

Can you get your mind around that? Can you manage to look that way at every single person you meet?

Probably not. I know I fail at it all the time.

I have absolutely no difficulty seeing my husband or my kids and grandkids or my brother and sisters that way. (Well, most of the time.) But seeing people as God does becomes an uneasy choice when it comes to the people who make me uncomfortable. People who push my buttons. People who are tiresome and boring. People I don’t approve of. People who intimidate or hurt me. People I fear. People I just can’t stand.

I’m sure that’s true for you, too. So how do we learn to see those people as God sees them?

First, I’m convinced we won’t be able to manage it until we understand how God sees us. We can’t love others unless we know what it is to be loved. And we’re going to have a hard time seeing others unless we take it to heart that our heavenly Father takes notice of us and cares for us.

Second, I’m convinced we need to depend on the Holy Spirit within us to show us what we can’t easily see on our own. Our human empathy and understanding can only go so far. We need Christ within us to be able to see with God’s eyes.

And we won’t get it perfectly, of course—not here on earth. Just as we can only see God through a fog, we’ll always struggle to see other people clearly as well.

But every time we manage it, each time we shift our perspective to view another person the way God sees him or her, a little miracle happens.

Maybe even a big one.

 

Adapted from The God Who Sees You by Tammy Maltby (with Anne Christian Buchanan). Copyright 2012 David C. Cook. Used with permission. Permission required to reproduce. All rights reserved.  The God Who Sees You

Confessions Of A Good Christian Family

What Sin Does to our Families

The older I get, the more I find myself grieved by the way sin distorts and disrupts human lives… especially by the way it perverts the good gifts of God. And family has to be one of God’s more inspired gifts. From the beginning, it’s been part of His provision for our comfort, for help, for safety and intimacy. He intended it as a laboratory for learning, an organized and protective structure where his people could help each other, support each other, learn from each other, experience intimacy. He even modeled it in his own being—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—all fulfilling different roles but living and working together in unity. (Have you ever thought of the Trinity as a working family?)

Then sin came along. And I’ve told my children again and again—also, sadly, shown them vividly—sin never affects just one person. Just as sin corrupts individual lives, it warps whole family systems (and nations)—causing them to either fail in their purposes or perverting those purposes to cause actual harm.

God made family as a place of emotional closeness and safety, where men and women and children can have their physical and emotional needs met, where we don’t have to be alone. Instead, we use our closeness to wound each other, exploit and abuse each other, to take out our pain and alienation on those who have chosen to love us and, even sadder, those who have no choice but to live closely with us.
God set up family as a forum for teaching and transmitting information and knowledge—including knowledge of him—from one generation to another. Instead, we pass on habits of blame, anger, laziness, abuse, addiction…from one generation to the next. We teach our children how to lie and keep secrets, to live in shame. At the same time, we fail to pass on important truths about God…or we load these truths with such pain and emotional baggage that they are distorted in the transmission.
God gave us roles and structures to help us work together in harmony, to balance and complete and help one another, to work together in unity of purpose. Instead we live together in chaos and confusion. We lord it over each other, rebel against one another, sneak and manipulate, lock ourselves into power struggles, even use coercion and violence against one another. Or we may we fall into that familiar dynamic of tearing each other apart, then just as fiercely defending each other against someone on the outside.
God also created families as strong, resilient, self-protective organizations. (He invented family dynamics, remember.) But under the influence of sin, that self-protection turns into denial and secret keeping. We internalize our shame, cover up our collective sins, hide what we really are from outsiders or even ourselves. We do our best to present a strong, happy, united (and good Christian) face to the world.

And what about the church?

 The family of God? God created families to live in close fellowship with Him and with others—families gathered together in community, ministering to one another and reaching out to bless the world. Jesus founded his church on the family principle, insisting that those who share faith in Him are related more intimately than even those who share blood.
But our Christian communities and organizations so easily fall victim to the same sinful dynamics as our families do. At worse, we succumb to pride and hypocrisy. We concern ourselves more with preserving our witness and our influence than with confronting our relational realities. We practically idolize “the family” while putting up stumbling blocks for real, hurting families in our midst.

This is exactly what Jesus nailed the Pharisees for doing—accusing them of being “whitewashed tombs…filled with dead men’s bones and everything unclean” (Matt. 23:27, NIV). Sadly, it still happens in our Christian communities . . . except we often like to pain our whitewashed tombs with the label of “good Christian family.”

It really is a mess, isn’t it? Sin always makes a mess.

Aren’t you glad sin never has the last word with God?

 

It Begins with You
But what does all this have to do with you?
If you’re a Christian and you’re in a family…or from a family…or want to be part of a family…it has everything to do with you.
If you’re a Christian son or daughter, brother or sister, husband or wife (or ex!), parent or grandparent, aunt or uncle, grandchild, niece, or nephew…it has everything to do with you.
In fact, it begins with you.
Chances are it’s you as an individual who is reading this blog. It’s you as an individual who grapples with sticky or confusing family issues. You as an individual who wonders if you’ll ever be free of the family secrets and family-related shame that make you mutter, “I wish” or “Yeah right” when you think about your picture of a Good Christian family.

If you’re like so many good and sincere Christian people I know, you’re wrestling with genuinely tough issues:

• How do I honor my parents when my parents beat you or neglected me. . . or worse?
• How do I live in peace with brothers and sisters who manipulate and criticize me—or worse?
• How do I raise up children the way they should go when they defy me at every turn?
• How do I respect a husband who spends entire weekends in a LazyBoy…or love a wife who is angry and resentful?
• How do you hold a family together through a bankruptcy…or a sexual addiction…or the death of a child…or years and years of no communication and simply growing apart?
• How do I deal with the shame and disappointment of realizing my actual family doesn’t even come close to the family I always wanted…not to mention what God expects?
• How do I possibly share the realities of my home . . . or my financial circumstances . . . or my marriage with all those good Christian families in my church?
• How do you I counsel and support for my family-related pain without feeling I’m exposing or betraying the ones I love?
• How do I love my family when I feel like I don’t have any love left in me?
• How do I cope with my feelings of family shame…and the fear that others might condemn me because of it?

We all need grace.

And by grace I mean more than mercy, more than kindness.

I mean our Lord’s ability to change those things in our world that are totally beyond us to change.
His ability to make straight what once was crooked.
His ability to restore righteousness where sin once reigned and establish his kingdom in the very midst of a fallen world and society.
His uncanny, almost unbelievable ability to heal distorted family legacies, to bring function to the dysfunctional, to bind up the brokenhearted (Isa. 61:1) and heal the seriously messed-up—including our family failures, our complicated issues, our generational nightmares, our impossible relationships.

To do now what he promised to Abraham so many thousands of years ago and kept reiterating over the centuries—to make your family and my family a blessing to the world.
It’s hard to believe, I know. Hard to trust when you’ve been hurt or disappointed…again and again.

Hard to peek behind the good Christian family façade.

But we serve such a loving, merciful, eternally able God. He can do so much with our families, no matter how faithless, failed, fallen, fractured—or fearful—they are. And whether or not they fit your particular community’s or church’s or society’s picture of a Good Christian Family.

It may not always work the way we think it will, however—or the way we think it should.

Sometimes the process of healing takes years or decades of pain and struggle. Sometimes it takes generations. God’s grace doesn’t negate the consequences of sin, and it doesn’t guarantee the restoration of specific family units or relationships. And it certainly doesn’t keep us from failing again…and sinning…and letting our particular family dynamics transmit and exacerbate and protect that sin. Yet if we look for it, if we keep listening for God’s voice in the middle of our messy family realities, we discover that His amazing grace is always there for us, moment by moment, moving us forward toward healing and redemption for our beloved, fallen families.

Word of Grace: Never forget—God loves your family more than you ever can. He specializes in blessing the world through the messed-up and the brokenhearted. Trust him.

 

 

Tammy Maltby the author of The God Who Sees You (with Anne Christian Buchanan). Copyrighted material. Used with permission. Permission required to reproduce. All rights reserved. 

http://www.amazon.com/The-God-Who-Sees-You/dp/143476799X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1342027875&sr=8-1&keywords=tammy+maltby

The Best Fudge Sauce. Ever. Perfect on Summer Fruit!

The Best Fudge Sauce

This fudge sauce is so easy and so good. Dark, chocolatey, and not too sweet, It makes wonderful ice cream sundaes—instant dessert!—but try it on purchased pound cake or angel food cake too. Pour on fresh summer berries. Divine.  It will keep well in a covered container in your fridge—if you can resist those midnight ice cream urges.

4 Tbsp. butter
6 squares of unsweetened chocolate
2 cans (5 oz each) evaporated milk
2 cups sugar

1 Tbsp. vanilla or 1½ tsp. almond extract

Melt butter and chocolate together in saucepan over low heat, stirring constantly. (Watch carefully to avoid burning—it should take about 12 minutes to melt.) Add evaporated milk, sugar, and vanilla or almond extract. Cook over medium-low heat until mixture thickens (about a minute).

 Do ahead: Sauce can be easily and quickly reheated in the microwave for 15 to 30 seconds. Stir and it will be shiny and even again.

 Makes a wonderful gift. I love Mason Jars- useful, reusable, and charming.  They were way green before green was cool. (Thanks MOM!) You will be a star I am telling ya!

When You Can’t See the God Who Sees You

 It happens, you know.

You can do everything right. You can ask God to reveal Himself, can believe that you will see Him, can stay alert and look for God in every corner of your life. You can choose, to the best of your ability, to have eyes to see and ears to hear and a mind to perceive the God who sees you.

And sometimes it just doesn’t work—or it doesn’t work the way you expected.

And there will still be times, sometimes long periods of time, when you just don’t see any evidence that God exists, much less that He’s close to you and working in your life. When everything looks ordinary or everything looks awful or everything just goes dark. When you’re stuck in some waiting room, wondering if your heavenly Father even knows you’re there.

What’s the problem? There are many possible reasons—some you can control, and some you can’t:

• You’re only human. Living in a flesh-and-blood body—complete with hormones, hungers, emotions, and physical/emotional illnesses—by definition clouds our spiritual eyesight.
• You’re too close—or, more accurately, God is too close for you to perceive Him. As Leonard Sweet puts it, “Jesus can be so close (‘closer than a brother’) to us it is like asking a bird to see air or a fish to see water.”*
• Your faith is faltering. “Without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him” (Heb. 11:6).
• Sin gets in your eyes. Sin (your own or others’) brings with it selfishness, pain, anger, rebellion—all of which can blind us to the presence of God in our lives.
• You’re determined to do it your way. Rebellion, disobedience, and willfulness all constitute a special variety of sin.
• It’s all about you. Self-focus may be blocking your ability to really see things as they really are. All you can see is how people and events affect you, which is never anything close to the real picture.
• You’re hanging on too tightly. Your need to control what is happening in your life might keep you from recognizing and accepting something new that God is doing.
• You’re busy and distracted. It’s easy to move so fast and make so much noise that you just can’t notice God’s quiet coming.
• Your expectations are too narrow. Like the people who demanded specific miracles from Jesus, you may be expecting God to show up in a certain way and refuse to recognize His presence in any other form.
• You’re forgetting what He’s already shown you. You’re not taking account of meaningful times in the past when God has been close and real to you.
• You’re in denial. You can’t see God because at some level you’re refusing to recognize some basic dynamic in your life (such as an addiction or a problem you need to solve). You can’t see God accurately because you’re closing your eyes to something in yourself.
• Fear skews your vision. The emotion of fear—or stress, anxiety, or depression—can keep you from seeing clearly. You may also be a little “resurrection phobic”—nervous about the power of the living God in your life.
• Double-mindedness makes it hard to focus. Wanting more than one conflicting thing (like God and money) may be keeping you from focusing clearly enough to see Him.
• Tears blur your sight. If you’re broken emotionally, you may have difficulty seeing things clearly, at least for a while.
• You’ve got a pride problem. A proud person is always looking down on things and people. And when you are looking down, it’s hard to see Someone who is above you.
• God chooses to remain unseen. The Bible makes it clear that there are times when God hides Himself from us, for reasons of His own.

Perceiving God’s presence, remember, isn’t always our choice. It’s always God’s prerogative to reveal Himself to us or not. And sometimes, He chooses to hide Himself.

When that happens, we’re left with a completely different set of choices.

We have to choose how we’re going to live when we can’t see the God who sees us.  

 

Adapted from The God Who Sees You by Tammy Maltby (with Anne Christian Buchanan). Copyright 2012 David C. Cook. Used with permission. Permission required to reproduce. All rights reserved. 

http://www.amazon.com/The-God-Who-Sees-You/dp/143476799X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1342027875&sr=8-1&keywords=tammy+maltby

* Leonard Sweet, Nudge: Awakening Each Other to the God Who Is Already There (Colorado Springs: David C Cook, 2010), 75.

 

God sees you my friend. Pass it on.

God is deeper than all your disappointments, failures and discouragements.

He is the God who steps in and delivers.

 

The Discipline of Restoration

Do not pity the dead, pity the living and above all those who live without love"

- Albus Dumbledore

What does it take to move forward after a time of trauma and crisis? In my experience, it takes both grace and discipline. Restoration is truly a gift of God, but it also requires effort and intention on our part. They are deliberate choices that really make a difference. The following “disciplines” have helped me tremendously as I tried to recover from devastating difficulties in my life:

• Discipline #1: Hope. The discipline of hope involves saying yes to your restoration and actually asking for what you need. It also involves choosing hope as an attitude when it’s far removed from what you’re actually feeling.
• Discipline #2: Trust. It’s always a conscious choice, a true discipline, to remember what you know of God’s character and to hold on to the reality that God sees you. During hard times, it’s even more of a challenge, but it’s the key to experiencing God’s comfort. The Psalms often speak of God as a refuge, a hiding place. But you can’t experience this great gift unless you choose to trust Him.
• Discipline #3: Waiting and watching. This involves listening in stillness, waiting on the Lord, trusting His timing, actively looking for the signs of His presence and His activity. . . . For me, this kind of watchful silence is sometimes the most strenuous discipline of all.
• Discipline #4: Honesty and transparency. In the aftermath of trauma, that could mean shouting at God and telling Him how you feel. It can mean refusing to put on a happy face or . . . insist that everything is all right when it isn’t. There are certainly times when you need to control your feelings for the sake of others. But your restoration absolutely depends on finding a place to confess your honest thoughts and feelings—at very least, in prayer, in a journal, or with a few friends who are close to you.
• Discipline #5: “Controlling the wild horses.” I love the way my friend Emily Davis, who has endured more trauma than most people I know, describes this. She’s referring to that tendency we all have, but trauma victims have more than most, to let our “vain imaginations” run away with us (see Romans 1:21–22 KJV). If we give in just a little to fear and panic and worry, those emotions can quickly take control of our lives. So while we need to be honest with our feelings, we also need to be alert to the ways our thoughts can run away with us and learn to rein in the runaway thoughts.
• Discipline #6: Obedience instead of instinct. Our instincts can serve us well in the early moments of trauma. A “fight or flight” response could actually save our lives in an accident. But as we move from survival toward restoration, our instincts can begin to get in the way of what God wants to do with our lives. Your instinct may be to pull away and withdraw when you need to press in to relationships. . . . Because I am an active, “can do” type of person, I tend to rush in instead of waiting on God’s timing. But I’m learning (slowly!) that obedience sometimes has to trump instinct in this, too. We have to act on the light we’re given, do what we know to do. And all this takes both courage and discipline.
• Discipline #7: Forgiveness. This is perhaps the most difficult of the disciplines … and the most healing. It’s not something you can accomplish all at once or something you can do without God’s help. But the more you move toward forgiveness, the more you free yourself to move forward in your life.
• Discipline #8: Gratitude. This means simply looking for signs of God’s presence in our lives and resolving, by an act of will, to give thanks in all things (see 1 Thess. 5:18). Doing this even when it feels forced or artificial has a way of opening our eyes and shifting our perspective to see what God is doing.
• Discipline #9: Modeling faith and integrity. This absolutely does not mean faking a faith, covering up doubts, or sacrificing our integrity to our witness. But it’s good to realize that the way we live our own restoration can have a powerful impact on other people’s relationships with God. The more honestly and trustingly we can walk, the more integrity we manage, the more we confess our mistakes but accept forgiveness … the more others will be blessed and helped, and the more full our own restoration will be.

 

Adapted from The God Who Sees You by Tammy Maltby (with Anne Christian Buchanan). Copyright 2012 David C. Cook. Used with permission. Permission required to reproduce. All rights reserved.

A Miracle You Choose

 Several years ago I conducted a television interview with a man who was struggling with cancer. I asked him a fairly typical Christian interview question: “Are you trusting God for a miracle?” And I have never forgotten his reply: “Tammy I’ve learned that sometimes the greatest miracle is just a perspective change.”

That man said a lot of insightful things that day, but it was that one phrase that kept echoing in my mind. It’s still echoing, in fact, because it has proven true so often in my life. I’ve learned never to underestimate the power of changing the way I see. And I’ve come to believe that often in our lives, we won’t be able to perceive the God who sees us until we’re willing to see things differently.

I believe it’s perfectly possible to spend an entire lifetime looking at ordinary things and events—family, friends, fear, and disappointments—and never have the smallest hint that God is there or that He is active in our lives.

It’s easy. Happens all the time.

It’s possible to look back on a life—all the things that have happened up till now—and not see any kind of pattern. It’s also possible to look into the future and see more of the same. It’s even possible to have an occasional glimpse into another dimension, a one-time spiritual awakening, then lapse back into the ordinary and never really be changed.

But here’s the alternative: We can choose to spend life in the same circumstances, the same places, among all the same people, and continually be struck by the wonderful truth that God is there, that He’s in control, that He loves us and is aware of us and wants us to be part of what He’s doing in the world.

There’s a kind a miracle, in other words, that we can choose. We can choose the miracle of a perspective change.

Does that mean that seeing God is just a matter of personal choice?

Not exactly.

It’s always a little difficult to sort out what we can choose and what we can’t choose in this life. Theologians have been trying to sort it out for centuries, juggling concepts of God’s sovereignty and human free will, delving into the mysteries of what is up to us and what is up to God.

It’s a mystery, a paradox—that God is in control of the entire universe, yet He gives us freedom of will. And that paradox is fully in play when it comes to seeing God.

Because ultimately, it is God’s choice to reveal Himself to us.

But we must choose to see what God reveals. We must have what the Bible calls eyes to see and ears to hear and a heart to perceive what the God who sees us is doing in our lives.

 

Adapted from The God Who Sees You by Tammy Maltby (with Anne Christian Buchanan). Copyright 2012 David C. Cook. Used with permission. Permission required to reproduce. All rights reserved.

 

Coconut Cream Easter Cake

You will either love or hate me for this one!

This cake is just the best thing around. And a easy dessert for this Easter.

Ready for this?

You start with a boxed cake mix...and yes it is that easy. This cake is moist, rich and feeds a crowd! I top the cake with malted chocolate Easter Eggs! It is an easy and beautiful Easter Dessert!

As told by Tammy Maltby on Focus on the Family’s Your Family Live! webcast 
http://www.focusonlinecommunities.com/docs/DOC-1934 

Coconut Cream Cake
1 pkg. white or yellow cake mix 
1 pkg. (4 serving size) cheese cake flavored instant pudding  
1 1/3 cups water 
1/2 cup vegetable oil 
4 large eggs 
2 tea vanilla 
1 1/3 cups Baker’s angel flake coconut 
1 cup chopped nuts 
Berries of all kinds
 
Combine cake mix, pudding mix, water, eggs and oil in large mixer bowl. Blend; beat 
at medium speed for 4 minutes. Stir in coconut and nuts and vanilla. (You can omit 
the nuts and added ½ cup more coconut.) Pour into greased and floured 8 or 9 inch 
cake rounds. Bake at 325 degrees for 35‐40 minutes. Cool 15 minutes in pan. 
Remove from pan. Fully cool on rack.    

Coconut Cream Cheese Frosting: Cream 1/3 cup butter; blend in 2 pkg. of 3 oz cream 
cheese, Add 1 box (16 oz) confectioners’ sugar, alternately with 4 tsp milk, beating 
well after each addition. Add ½ tsp vanilla or almond extract. Spread frosting over 
top and sides of cake. Sprinkle with 2 cups Baker’s Angel Flake Coconut over frosting.