Guest Dishes-Strawberry Cake

Caroline

We are starting a new series today featuring “guests” to share recipes. It only made sense for our first guest to be the woman we owe it all to, the woman who gave us our blog name, Christina.

Before we get to her recipe, let me introduce you to her. By the end of this, you’ll want her to move next door to you.

When I first moved to Little Rock in 2015, I didn’t know a soul. My new husband wasn’t even there because he was off galavanting in Afghanistan. God put me at the best school with the best people that immediately welcomed me, and Christina was one of the those people. She had worked at the school in the first grade classrooms for a long time and all of her kids attended there as well. The first time I met her she was so nice and asked me all about my family, my life back in GA, etc.

I also found out that day that she is a jack of all trades. Christina would take “hair appointments” after school and dye and cut people’s hair in the nurses’ office. Yes, that happened. She would also put up sign-up sheets in the teachers’ lounge about once a month to get your eyebrows waxed in the nurses’ office after school.

I’m not proud to tell this story, but I’m going to tell it anyway. Parent conferences were coming up, and I had a parent that couldn’t make her scheduled time, so we scheduled it for one day after school. Well, I don’t know how, but I completely forgot about it and scheduled an appointment with Christina to get my gray hair dyed right after school that exact day. During the middle of my “appointment,” the teacher I taught across the hall from came to get me to remind me the mom was there and ready for our conference. When she first walked in to tell me, she burst into laughter. I COULDN’T HOLD A PARENT CONFERENCE. I WAS COVERED IN HAIR DYE. Anyways, I had to reschedule for a time I didn’t look like I had fallen in a grease pit, and she was very gracious.
Moving on to Christina. Here’s a top 5.

1. She has a story for everything, and they’re always hilarious.
2. If you go to her house, she will most likely feed you something. If she doesn’t feed you, then she will probably send you home with a bag of peaches or something. She’s the best kind of Southern.
3. If you ever need anyone to sit with you in the ER,(I tried to count, and I think she’s been with me 5 times…) drive you to the hospital when you have to leave work and you’re about to have a baby, or bring joy into a hospital room when you’re 20+ hours into labor, she’s your girl.
4. Her children are proof that life just isn’t fair sometimes. They are the most beautiful people; it’s really sickening.
5. She doesn’t have the letters ‘MD’ after her name, but she’s a doctor. She knows everything. I don’t know that I’d trust her to do brain surgery on me, but I’d trust her to tell me a story about it.

She is a woman who wears many hats, and one of those hats is cooking and baking. She does it well, so of course I wanted her to share a recipe with the blog world, and her strawberry cake is what she chose.

If there was ever a special occasion at school, she would often make a cake for it. When people found out her cake was in the teachers’ lounge, it was every man for himself. You had to move quick if you wanted a piece.

Now you have two tasks today:
1. Make this cake
2. Get a Christina Wren in your life