A Happy Birthday Cake

Happy birthday to my best friend.

Triple layer chocolate cake with chocolate raspberry ganache

Made with lots of love and lots of chocolate

Recipe from Sky High: Irresistible Triple-Layer Cakes via 17andBaking

Fresh Berry Gratin

Adele, this one's for you.

Delicious.

Recipe from Cook's Illustrated.

The leftover sauvignon blanc made a great sangria!

1 750mL bottle Sauvignon Blanc

1/2 orange, sliced

1/2 orange, juiced

1/4 cup Grand Marnier

1/4 cup sugar (or to taste)

1-2 apricots, halved and pitted

A handful of grapes

Mix sugar, orange juice, orange slices, and Grand Marnier together. Muddle the orange slices a little with a wooden spoon. Add the apricots and grapes and wine. Give it a few good stirs and chill in the refrigerator for a couple hours.

Chocolate Pasta

I finally made the chocolate pasta that I bought at Pike Place Market from my trip to Seattle. I threw together a berry sauce and reheated the leftover chocolate ganache to serve with the pasta. The pasta itself doesn't have much flavor to it even though it certainly looks chocolately, so the chocolate sauce really helped boost the taste. 

Caramel deLites Cupcakes

Happy birthday, Wojty!

Caramel deLites (not Samoas) cupcakes for my friend Ben W. 

The cast: brown sugar butter cupcakes, chocolate ganache, caramel, toasted sweet coconut topping, and toasted coconut flakes.

Caramel filling

Chocolate ganache poured on

Plenty of coconut topping

Recipe from cupcakeblog.

Pizza Bites

Clank Works has been busy getting their store/apartment ready for move-in. I usually like to join in the fun with painting, putting up drywall, and spackling. But today, I thought it would be nice to make a hearty dinner to keep them fueled, since they often start right after their day jobs and work late into the night. Pizza bites were a perfect option: easy to transport and no utensils required.

Recipe adapted from Tastefully Done.

I made my own pizza dough, used fontina in addition to the mozzarella, and substituted the pepperoni with Trader Joe's chicken sausage (a much tastier - and healthier? - variation, in my humble opinion)

Before. Parsley/parmesan/spices mix to sprinkled on top.

After the oven. So tasty with marinara sauce!

Stuffed French Toast

Cream cheese and strawberry jam stuffed french toast topped with fresh strawberries

(recipe from Minimally Invasive)

This is what I made for breakfast one morning for a hungry group of nine at the beach house. D and I went out to pick up some missing ingredients, including the star of the show Challah bread, but the first supermarket that we went to had no Challah bread to offer! So we went across the street to the brand new Harris Teeter to try our luck. Oh, were we lucky. They had exactly two fresh loaves of Challah bread about to come out of the oven, so we wandered the aisles for a bit while the bakers prepared the steaming hot loaves for us. How heavenly it smelled during the car ride back... well, the blessing of fresh bread turned out to be a bit of a curse as well when it came time to make the french toast. Soaking the slices of Challah in the egg mixture made it soggy as hell. Cooking the french toast made the outside nice and golden brown, but when I cut a piece open, a soggy mess of cream cheese, jam, and bread. So, in a last ditch effort, I popped them in the oven to try to dry them out. Either it worked, which I'm pretty sure it did (at least for the piece I ate) or I was in very very polite company =) Lesson learned: let the Challah bread dry out a bit before making this recipe for soggy-free french toast!