Death By Chocolate

This is a perennial favorite of everybody’s no matter where I take it. I stole the recipe from my Great Aunt Dimple at a family reunion a million years ago and have made it so many times since then that if somebody punched me awake from a dead sleep and said, “DEATH BY CHOCOLATE!”, I could probably recite the ingredients and instructions without too much hesitation. The recipe in its entirety is at the bottom for printing.

Your Ingredients:

A large box of Jell-o can be substituted for the 2 small boxes but they didn’t have a large box at the sto’ so there ya go. You can also make this slightly less heart-attack inducing by substituting fat free/sugar free Jello-o, Cool Whip and candy bars. You can use any chocolate bars your heart desires and any dark chocolate cake you want.

Mix the cake per the instructions on the cake box. You do not have to use a genuine antique McCoy mixing bowl but it would taste better if you did.

Bake in a 13 x 9 casserole dish or a rectangular metal pan, again, according to the directions on your cake box.

If you’re A.D.H.D. like me, set your timer for 35 minutes. Pop that in the oven and while its baking, mix up your Jell-o according to the instructions on the box. Again, you don’t have to use vintage 1970’s Tupperware but it would taste better if you did.

Put a lid on it and pop that in the refrigerator to set.

Now comes the therapy. Get a gallon Zip-lock bag, freezer bag is best, unwrap all of those candy bars, put them in the Zip-lock and seal with all of the air squeezed out. Grab your trusty hammer.

Imagine the person’s face you hate the most, be it a government official, your ex-boss that fired you, a step-parent or your mother-in-law. Imagine that person’s face on your Zip-lock and beat the tar out of it. If you do it correctly, everything on your counter should be bouncing around, clanging together and your significant other/children should be asking you what in Gawd’s Name is going on in the kitchen. It should turn out looking like this and you should have a smile on your face. I have gotten carried away to the point of losing most of my candy through holes beaten into the bag… stop yourself before you go that far.

If you live anywhere south of Memphis, put that beaten chocolate in the fridge while you’re patiently waiting for the cake to bake.

When the cake is done or the timer goes off, cut cake into manageable pieces and LET COOL THOROUGHLY. You may have to take some of the cake out to let it cool but if you go to slapping all of the other ingredients in there without letting it cool completely, you’re have a melted mess instead of pretty layers. Don’t ask me how I know that. I just know.

 

Get the largest bowl you own. At our house, we use the punch bowl. Seriously. Put a layer of COOLED cake in the bottom. It doesn’t have to be perfect and it doesn’t have to be bumper to bumper. There can be spaces. (Also, this cake stuck on the bottom. This is the one recipe where that doesn’t matter at all. I scraped up all of the crumbs and dumped them on the last layer of cake pieces. Nobody’s gonna see cause its covered with pudding and Cool-Whip so who cares?)

Put a layer of chocolate pudding over that, then a layer of Cool-Whip. The Cool-Whip needs to be defrosted. Mine wasn’t defrosted all the way so I stuck it in the oven.

Top the Cool-Whip with beaten chocolate bars.

Keep layering cake, pudding, Cool-Whip, candy until you’re at the top of the bowl. Cool-Whip and candy should be the top most layer because it’s prettier that way.

Fight off the other people in your house, put some Press-n-Seal over the top or some Saran Wrap and refrigerate. Feeds one herd.

Aunt Dimple’s Death By Chocolate

1 dark chocolate cake mix (and all the ingredients needed to mix it)

1 large Cool-Whip

1 large Jell-o Chocolate Pudding (and all the ingredients needed to mix it)

Nestlé Crunch Bars

Instructions:

Bake cake according to instructions on box in a 13 x 9 casserole dish or rectangular baking pan. While baking and cooling cake, mix pudding according to directions on box. Refrigerate. Unwrap chocolate bars, put in zip-lock and beat with hammer or put in food processor. Set aside.

In a punch bowl, put one layer of cooled cake on the bottom, a layer of chocolate pudding, a layer of defrosted Cool-Whip then a layer of chocolate crumbles. Keep layering until you reach the top of the punch bowl with the uppermost layer being Cool-Whip and chocolate crumbles. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate.

Lamar County Courthouse Part I

I am so excited.

First of all, I’ll tell you why I feel that I have a personal stake in this, just like every other person that’s lived in my hometown for more than a generation. My great grandfather, George Washington Elliott, was born in 1890 and was a long time Lamar County resident (Marion County back then), back before Purvis was even a town. He and his brother owned a sawmill in Lumberton and he drove oxen for logging. I do not know if George was born here because I haven’t researched the family tree back that far yet but I know that my grandmother grew up in Lamar County, my father grew up in Lamar County and I grew up in Lamar County. That’s a hundred years of being in one place.

Back a few years ago, I discovered that Hattiesburg had a Wikipedia page which just blew my mind. For some reason, I thought only large cities had them but then I got to thinking…if Hattiesburg has a page, Purvis might have one. We did but honey, it was pitiful! No photos, no history, no dates, no nothing except information about the Climate and the Tatum Salt Dome. So, I fixed it. Photos, history, viola! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purvis,_MS That’s when I got really interested in our old buildings.

Our poor courthouse, the old one built in 1905, not the new one, was just in deplorable shape. It was in great need of a huge, ripped-it-down-to-the-studs renovation and what county has the money for that these days? I started foaming at the mouth back in 2010 when I saw an article in the Hattiesburg American about Lamar County receiving a grant for renovations for it. The grant was for less than $500,000 and the total would be MUCH more than that but…I love old things. I love This Old House. I love antiques. I love renovations and before and afters. I love history so I hoped. They scraped up enough money to get some preliminary scouting done. Guess what! ASBESTOS, that’s what! Three millions dollars to do the complete renovations and to do them right, that’s what!

Needless to say, progress has been slow going due to money issues and the county has decided to spread the renovations over a few years so they would have more budgets to work with. They moved everybody out of the leaking ramshackled place, tented it and removed the asbestos then it sat empty. And sat, and sat, and sat.

This is our Lamar County Courthouse kinda from the side, back before they started doing anything to it.

The original building was an octagon shaped Art Nouveau glorious thing with a clock tower, hardwood floors, hand-carved moldings and double curving staircases. Then life happened. A tornado, a fire, two wings, drop ceilings with Styrofoam tiles, fluorescent lighting, a gawd-awful red metal roof, bushes so big you can’t see the front windows, etc. *sigh* I scoured the news each day searching for information about what would happen to it as it sat there empty and lonely. Then, in the fall of 2011, I started seeing articles. “Courthouse is on track for renovations in 2012”, “Courthouse project moving forward”… YES YES YES!! According to the articles, they’ve hired an historical architect to renovate it and not only will all of those drop ceilings never come back, the hand-carved moldings will be refinished, the wings will be removed and the clock tower will be rebuilt.

So now I’m driving by it every morning and I’m noticing the magnolia trees coming down (Hallelujah), construction fencing going up around the building, a couple of trailers being moved onto the lawn. I’m getting so excited!!! This morning I drove by and work had begun on the roof so I, being your Roving Reporter, stopped to take a few photos.

 

I’m thinking I need to take Betty Stevens up on her offer of joining the Lamar County Historical Society now because I need an excuse to give when they ask me why I’m photographing them on a daily basis and for when I accost Chuck Bennett, County Administrator, for permission to go inside when they start working on it. I’m way too nosy to not have a title of some sort.