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.

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.

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.