Happy Thanksgiving!

Ok...haven't posted anything in a while, but I've also been crazy busy with work and baking. My new kiddo at work can turn his tantrums on or off in an instant, which makes my mornings rather exhausting. I've also been working on revising lie 80% of his programs because the woman who wrote them didn't do so great with them.

On the baking side of things, I successfully made gluten-free apple-spice doughnuts! But failed miserably with the cake doughnuts....which I'm ok with, I do NOT like making doughnuts.  Frenchie nailed down what she wanted for Thanksgiving just last Friday....not leaving me much time to prepare. So, get get over the stress, I made 4 dozen mini pumpkin pie cheesecakes with brown sugar toasted pecans....my camera charger is still MIA, so no pics :( Baking for Frenchie started Monday night with 6 dozen mini pumpkin cupcakes, and continued through Tuesday (thankfully a snow day), with 6 dozen mini dark chocolate hazelnut cupcakes and 4 dozen mini flourless walnut cupcakes with a honey whiskey glaze. Then came the coffee cake...by far the easiest, but the one that takes the longest to bake...so while it was doing its thing in the oven I was able to get most of the decorating done. It was all going swell....till I went to remove the coffee cake. And ran the knife around the edge. And missed a spot. At 9:30 pm. Long story short(ish), called mom, she brought more blueberries and came to help assemble the pumpkins. It all turned out fine, (thanks mom!) and the goodies were delivered to Frenchie yesterday morning.

So that's it for now, seeing as how it's Thanksgiving morning and I'm supposed to be over at my parent's house oh....20 minutes ago.

Baking-induced insomnia

So much baking and so little posting. I made the cake for Frenchie...used an old family recipe (how cliche does that sound?) that I've always liked, but found the flavor a little flat. So I personalized it a bit with dark French chocolate and buttermilk....fabulous. Made a divitinty icing and a chocolate ganache to top it off...

Sadly...that was the last picture before my camera battery finally called it quits....wouldn't be so bad if I could find the darn charger. Since the cake, there have also been successful chocolate pumpkin cupcakes with a cream cheese/whipped cream frosting as well as yesterday's amazingness: a spiced honey pound cake with a honey liquer syrup. So very very good.

So this weekend's baking is actually serving a purpose. I recently joined The Daring Kitchen and the Daring Baker challenge for this month is donughts. I have 2 ideas in mind so far, and a potential 3rd....so there might just be copious amounts of frying in my house this weekend.

I'm also toying with a frosting idea (based on the frosting used for the chcolate pumpkin cupcakes) for the chocolate hazelnut cake Frenchie wants...I previously topped the cupcakes with Nutella and a piece of chocolate, but will need something a bit lighter for an entire cake.

So that about sums up my kitchen activities till now...more pics to come once I find the damned charger.