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.

I have resentful memories of late October weather as a kid, investing hours conceiving a perfect Halloween costume only to have it ruined by the parental enforcement of an unmatching puffy winter coat. My birthday is the 29th, and this year I spent hours trawling thrift shops on the evening of the 28th to find a perfect white trenchcoat to match my Holly Golightly costume in anticipation of the unseasonal snowstorm that hit New York last weekend. Waking up on Saturday morning at 6 a.m. to construct a beehive and shellac it with enough hairspray to resist the elements, I roused the rest of the household by practically jumping on the bed until the remaining inhabitants were enlisted on an 8 am trip to Alice’s Teacup for breakfast tea. When I say “the rest of the household”, I mean that we brought stuffed animal friends and ordered scones for them. I take my birthday seriously.

By the time we’d returned from breakfast, heavy, thick flakes had started to fall, coating the view outside my window in a slushy sheen of white. So I did the only logical thing: cued up some Christmas music on Spotify and got to baking.

I’d initially planned to bake pumpkin cookies, by request for a Halloween party later than night, but in an effort to make something a little more festive looking than misshapen orange blobs, I turned them into miniature pumpkin whoopie pies, with pumpkin buttercream filling and the edges rolled in gold sugar sprinkles.

I began with this recipe for the cookies, doubling all the spices (as I always do in pumpkin desserts), adding nutmeg and ground clove, and omitting the vanilla and ginger since I was out and not planning to head to Trader Joe’s mid-blizzard. Instead of cream cheese filling, I beat together butter with confectioners’ sugar and a touch of Trader Joe’s pumpkin butter to make buttercream frosting. Each whoopie pie got a daub of pumpkin butter, then a healthy spoonful of frosting before another cookie was sandwiched on top and the edges were rolled in sprinkles. Tiny, adorable, festive and surprisingly portable.

Pumpkin blondies notwithstanding, this was the first pumpkin cake of the season, made on a whim after a healthy vegetarian tofu dinner and for no occasion in particular, although we did end up taking the remaining third of it (after putting away 2/3 ourselves in 24 hours. yep. that’s right.) to my boyfriend’s parents’ house for pre-Yom Kippur dinner last night. I have two go-to pumpkin cake recipes as holdovers from last fall: this one and the one inscribed on the back of the Trader’s Joe’s Pumpkin Bread and Muffin Mix box, doctored with extra spices and TJ’s pumpkin butter. This pumpkin cake started with the Trader Joe’s box, but instead of two eggs, oil and water, I added a whole can of pumpkin, about a cup of milk, and tons of cinnamon, nutmeg and clove. Then I made streusel topping, enough for a very generous layer on top of the batter, with crumbled graham crackers, butter, brown sugar and more cinnamon.

I still had some leftover butterscotch chips from the blondies, and had been thinking about mixing them into the batter when my boyfriend, whose cooking advice generally comes from what-seems-like-it-might-work rather than experience, suggested making butterscotch sauce to go with the cake. “Put some butter in it, too!” he directed, “and scotch!” So I’m pouring a half-shot of Johnnie Walker Black Label into the mixture of melted butterscotch chips and milk I’m stirring in a saucepan on the stove when it occurs to me to ask. “Hey, is there actually scotch in butterscotch?”

“No idea,” he says. (turns out butterscotch is traditionally the alchemy of butter and brown sugar. According to Wikipedia, “Food historians have several theories regarding the name and origin of this confectionery, but none are conclusive. One explanation is the meaning “to cut or score” for the word “scotch”, as the confection must be cut into pieces, or “scotched”, before hardening^. It is also possible that the “scotch” part of its name was derived from the word “scorch”.)

Here’s my super professional chef pro tip: it is definitely a really good idea to assume flavors go together if you think an ingredient is part of the name for another ingredient. Definitely always do this. Or maybe just with anything and scotch, because this butterscotch sauce was out of this world and I literally was drinking it by the spoonful.

I first made this cake on New Year’s Eve of this year, so I think of it sort of as my good luck charm of two thousand eleven, symbolic of how far I’ve come in my relationship with food this year. It is to 2011 what pumpkin cake was to my 2010 (see top of page 2 in the link): representative of what kind of cook I am, and what I want to feed people when I cook for them. Despite my haphazard history with baking, it’s somehow impossible for me to screw up, and people like it, they really do. It’s the Sally Field of my recipe repertoire. Also, when you cut it into squares, it makes the best possible brownies you can imagine. The quality, obviously, depends on the quality of the chocolate you use. I made them for our housewarming party on Friday, along with chocolate-chip-Kit-Kat cookies and pumpkin blondies with butterscotch chips and white chocolate chips, which were not particularly good-looking but tasted fantastic. Homemade garlic hummus, peppers in red wine, a cheese plate with Zabar’s rye and 7-grain bread, dry aged monterey, goat brie, camembert and New York cheddar, vodka-orange sparkling punch, and Magnolia Bakery cupcakes rounded out the menu. Apartment officially warmed, just in time for the chilly weather.

A coworker’s last day in the office before leaving for her wedding, so I picked out this black-and-white cake: a layer chocolate cake and a layer yellow, with chocolate ganache in between and buttercream over the outside and pink icing flowers on top. Way to step it up, Whole Foods. It was beautiful and yummy. And, since she’s having peach crisp at her wedding this weekend, suitably traditional.