Thanksgiving Sweets!

Yum! I love baking from scratch and I had lots of fun making all these with my older daughter last night! Here's what we made, with recipes, so you can make them too!

* We made the strawberry cake in the front for her friend's birthday today.
* The chocolate truffle cake on the left is soooooo thick and rich. More like a brownie. You really need vanilla ice cream with it.
* That's a tiramisu in the back. I should have taken the springform off so you could see all the little soldiers standing up in a row. I used the new instant coffee Via from Starbucks to soak the ladyfingers. It was really good! It's the new thing for when you need coffee flavor in baking.
*And finally, that's a sugar and spice pumpkin pie on the right. I had never made it before so I can't tell you if it's good yet. It had a ton of spices in it, including black pepper!


Enjoy your day!

Edited to say: What is it about pumpkin pie? It always tastes the same, no matter what you put in it. The pie was very good, but no better than any other pumpkin pie from the store or homemade! I did think, however, that it needed a 1/4" layer of bitter chocolate over the top - that would have made a flavor splash!

The Orange Baskets of Doom

Happy Thanksgiving ya'll! Hope you're enjoying the day with love and family.

Today for your viewing pleasure I have the famous, dreaded orange baskets of doooooom!!! My mother has made these every year for what, like 25 years now? She fashions the baskets from a whole orange, puts sweet potatoes and marshmallows in and bakes them. We've teased her about them our whole lives, mercilessly ragging on how awful and horrifying they are, and how much we dread seeing their little faces appear on the Thanksgiving table, but she continues to visit them upon us as a form of torture for making fun of them. Oh, the humanity!

(Actually, I kind of like them, despite an aversion to orange peel. Shhh, don't tell her.)

She sent me this photo to fill me with dread as a preview of dinner. I have no clue what's going on in that third basket, maybe she'll comment and tell us. It might be blackberries, but knowing her penchant for torture, it's probably stewed prunes. Yeah. Definitely the prunes.

Turkey Cupcakes!

No, not cupcakes made FROM turkey, cupcakes made to look like A turkey! Silly! If my sister in law makes it to Thanksgiving with her kids, I will totally make these with them. I promise! Except I will steal an idea from another internet site and make the tail not with cut outs from fruit roll ups, but with a row of point-down candy corns.

Hop on over to cakespy.com and check out the tutorial in the guest post from Meringue Bake Shop.