As you may know, we love Jamie Oliver and his Food Revolution. And we all know that eating healthy is hard, and that cooking after a long day’s work is even harder – especially if you have family to feed, errands to run, a commute, and maybe want to exercise every day, too. Right?

So we thought we’d combine a few strategies that we’ve learned both from Food Revolution and from running a blog in general to make cooking healthier, easier, and faster. And, we put them in an infographic for you to pin away onto your Pinterest boards to help you remember to follow these easy steps.

We hope you enjoy – and let us know if you have other tips for making healthy cooking easier!

Whoever invented sprinkles was really onto bottling happiness right up. We love sprinkles over here at GMS, and we’re always itching to put them on anything we can get our hands on…or IN anything. So a funfetti bundt for Mary’s birthday? Definitely doable.

For this bundt, we made our normal vanilla bundt (sans vanilla bean and with vanilla extract instead) and then we added an entire cup of sprinkles. The recipes we found kept saying “add a third of a cup” or “add a half of a cup” but let’s be serious, is that enough? Absolutely not.

Then, we decided that we needed some perfect white frosting so we used one teaspoon of vanilla, some powdered sugar, and then added heavy cream until the frosting is JUST starting to run – it should be about two tablespoons of heavy cream for every cup of confectioner’s sugar.

Here’s my advice about the frosting, you guys. Are you listening? THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT. OK: When you make frosting, start small. Start with one cup of sugar. See if that’s enough. If it’s not, make another. But don’t think you need three cups and then make three cups worth and then have leftover frosting. Because you know what? You don’t use that leftover frosting. You leave it in your fridge for too long and then you waste it. So, start small.

Here’s what your delicious sprinkle cake will look like on the inside. It’s a party in your mouth. It’s a party on your plate. It’s the perfect birthday cake.

All your friends will love you probably, if you make this cake, even more than they already do, which will be hard.

What’s your favorite way to use sprinkles? In a cake? On a cake? Donuts? Let us know – we have a jar of them now, so maybe we’ll use them on a suggestion!

We have a little trick up our sleeve to help you get more bang for your avocado buck. Next time you can only get your hands on that one last truly ripe avocado in the grocery story, but you’re hoping to make guacamole for more than just 2 people, we’ve got you covered. The trick is to add yogurt to the mix!

First, make your own guacamole recipe (these things are intensely personal, so we’ll leave the details up to you). Then add enough plain or greek yogurt to get a 1:1 ratio of yogurt and avocado. I would add about 1 cup of yogurt for every two avocados.

Greek yogurt will add a bit of tang to your guacamole, so proceed with caution if you’re serving picky eaters. On the other hand, plain yogurt is almost impossible to detect, so use the plain stuff if you’re trying to fool party guests, and let us know if it works for you!

We at Garlic My Soul don’t find it difficult to eat our daily dose of veggies, however we understand that isn’t always the case. We’ve posted several yummy dishes on the blog over the years involving “secret vegetables” such as spaghetti squash and recently avocado cookies. Here is another recipe to add to your repertoire.

We started with this Orange Spice Zucchini Walnut bread recipe from Canadian Living. Be sure to use the cups measurements, as we began with the millimeter measurements, but 625ml of flour was WEIGH more than 2 ½ cups (pun intended!)

Mix the dry ingredients – flour, brown sugar, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, and salt – together in a mixing bowl and set aside. Grate about two small unpeeled zucchinis with a cheese grater. Add the butter, milk, eggs, and orange rind. Mix the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients. At this stage, we realized there was not quite enough liquid to incorporate all the flour, so we added the juice of the orange that had just been zested to add some flavor and solve the liquid issue.

We also forgot the walnuts at this stage… oops!

Divide the dough between two greased bread pans and cook at 350°F/180°C until a toothpick comes out clean.

Now hopefully you have an extra orange lying around to make the tasty glaze, but if you don’t, not to worry, this bread is delicious sans glaze (and walnuts!)

Do you get your daily dose of vegetables or do you need to use “secret vegetables?”

Today is Jennie’s birthday! We make a lot of decadent cakes for this blog and for our friends, so Jennie and I have an unwritten rule that we keep things a little simpler on our own birthdays.

This year, Jennie requested a particular kind of coffee cake made with sour cream to keep it moist and rich. Lo and behold, our newest King Arthur cookbook had the perfect recipe!

Few people love coffee cake as much as Jennie, and I really can’t believe it took her this many years to choose it as her birthday treat. When we celebrated at a local Los Angeles brewery, this simple cake was a hit with both the birthday girl and our friends.

Be sure to send Jennie some happy birthday wishes today!