Some very belated, and very disorganized, and unforgiveably unreciped, tidbits from the past weeks:

Lucky boyfriend got three birthday cakes this year: favorite flourless chocolate, pumpkin cake, and a (very messy but delicious) triple-layer mint chocolate chip ice cream cake with mint chocolate ganache and whipped topping (one layer was another flourless chocolate, so this might’ve had an unfair edge on being the best of the three.)

I flew home for Thanksgiving to be with my family and spent three days straight cooking: multiple loaves of Mark Bittman’s No-Knead Bread (I feel like an idiot for ever having even experimented with bread recipes other than this one). Savory cornbread to turn into a marvelous stuffing and sweet cornbread (for which I made homemade buttermilk for the first time) to bring to a family friend’s Thanksgiving potluck. Melissa Clark’s Mashed Potato Casserole which I worried would verge on Deen-esque and did, gloriously so. Roasted sweet potatoes tossed with olive oil, salt and chili powder. Very garlicky hummus. Brussels sprouts steamed with caramelized shallots. Vegan wild rice pilaf with sauteed onions, apples and raisins and toasted chopped almonds. Turkey. My mom made cranberry sauce, as she does every year, with a recipe I just found out this year is her grandmother’s. She does the pies, too, before the sun rises, and made an extra that my dad and I ate for breakfast and lunch. I made apple yogurt cake, trying to recreate one that I’d invented before but not written down (successfully!). And flourless chocolate cake, again. And vegan pumpkin chocolate cake. And pumpkin butter with fresh-squeezed apple juice and lots of ginger that turned out even better than Trader Joe’s. I couldn’t stop. It was the perfect vacation.

Last night we belatedly celebrated two birthdays. My friend Melissa, who lives in England most of the time and recently landed a fantastic new job (yay) specifically requested cookies and cream cake, and I’d found a bunny cake mold on sale for Easter. I tried making my own colored writing icing for the first time and used a ziploc as a pastry bag, which worked quite well and is not to blame for the fact that Melissa’s bunny cake looks kind of cranky and dour (which is how her real-life bunny tends to look as well, so at least it’s sort of accurate).

Pro tip: I actually just learned this yesterday. If you let a cake cool in the pan for too long (more than ten minutes), it’ll be much trickier to get it out. Run hot water over the bottom of the pan (um, try not to get it on the cake) and then it should pop out perfectly in one piece.

My boyfriend’s roommate isn’t particularly into desserts, but other than that we have eerily similar palates, and are both really into things like Celestial Seasonings Bengal Spice tea, smoked fish of all sorts, fancy mushrooms, and bacon. Rather than make another birthday cake, I decided to create a meat construction in the vein of the infamous meat ship.  

The meat fish was composed of a body of ground buffalo, covered in pork belly scales with fins and facial features cut out of steak. 

The fins got a little disfigured in the cooking process.

Amazingly, the boys actually ate the meat fish. With barbecue sauce. Off of one plate. I mean, I don’t know what I expected. I was somewhere between very proud and totally disgusted. 

Yesterday was my friend Yuli’s birthday party, so I decided to make a last-minute cake. I used this recipe for a delicious and incredibly easy go-to cake, striking the perfect balance between light & fluffy and deep, dark chocolate. The frosting is straight-up buttercream, which my boyfriend mixed by hand for solidly forty-five minutes (what a champ): two sticks of softened butter, a pound of confectioners’ sugar, two tablespoons of milk, and three drops of red food coloring.

Yuli’s general life motto is the more pink & sparkly the better, so I did pink frosting with gold sparkle sprinkles and topped the two-layer cake with all the pink candy I could find in the apartment - Reese’s candy easter eggs, strawberry Starbursts, Sweet & Tart candy hearts, Swedish Fish and sour gummies. I made the bottom layer of the cake in a standard 8” cake pan, and poured the rest of the batter into a springform bundt pan. The bundt layer went on top, which I realized was not the most structurally sound plan once it became clear that the bundt layer was actually a tiny bit wider. Luckily, the frosting succeeded in holding everything together and we ended up with a cake that would’ve done Molly Ringwald proud.

Free cake box courtesy of the Hoboken Panera. Roses courtesy of Flowers by Diane.