Hershey's Perfectly Chocolate Cake and Ranch Dressing

I have a great week as far as cooking. I made a delicious chocolate cake and finally made Ranch. I have been wanting to make Ranch dressing for a long, long time. It just never came up in my recipe rotation. 

So let's start with chocolate cake. I love a good chocolate cake! I've made a few here and there but not as a layer cake. I just cheat it and make something smaller and use whipped cream. But I had icing leftover icing from a couple of weeks ago that was hanging out in the freezer and I really wanted to use it up. It was the pink icing from these cupcakes.  I just defrosted it and whipped it with cocoa powder and had chocolate icing. As for the chocolate cake itself- I did pick up Hershey's Cocoa Powder specifically for this recipe. I had doubts because I usually use a different brand and I HATE Hershey chocolate bars. But...this was surprisingly good. Not the deepest chocolate flavor and still pretty sweet. But a really basic, easy and good chocolate cake recipe. You literally stir the ingredients together and bake. It had the BEST texture. I did half the recipe and made mine in a 6 inch size. I love a small cake. My Dad had jokes and said I never got over my Easy Bake oven and the small cakes it made 😩.  I did run out of icing but I think it still came out pretty good looking! 

Then...the Ranch. I love Ranch dressing...or at least I did back in the day. But the bottled stuff just hasn't tasted the same so I never buy it. Also I read the ingredients on it...and usually just pass on it. I've also been making my own salad dressings lately since that's the section I'm in for my Vitamix. But this is the last dressing recipe. And the best. I didn't make it in the blender. You can just stir the ingredients together. I know you can get the packets and make ranch and I always picked those up- read the ingredients and then put it back. You really don't need those. I just did equal parts mayo and sour cream. Add dried dill, dried parsley, a dash of onion powder, a few dashes of garlic powder. I did have some frozen chopped chives and also frozen parsley. So I did add that. I also had buttermilk powder too. So I also used that. But you can skip it. And....in only a few minutes you have addicting Ranch. Made any veggies taste a billion times better and was so good on my salad. I even made crouton from the olive herb bread I made that was going stale. 

And that's all! Guess I had better get started on my list for the coming week....