Five Years Coming! Month 6

Halfway through the year and another delicious treat!  For my work Christmas party I whipped together a pumpkin Cheesecake I improvised along the way. 

Here's the recipe:

For the crust I used crushed gingersnaps and melted butter and baked it off and cooled it before I made the cheesecake.  Enjoy!

Five Years Coming! Month 5

This Cake a Month is very easy and very delicious!  It's called Apple Pie Upside-Down Cake and unfortunately Martha (yeah we're on a first name basis!) doesn't have a link to this recipe anymore.  If you'd like it, leave me a comment and I'll e-mail it to you!

Upside-down cakes always make me nervous, because in the end, until you flip it out, you aren't quite sure what to expect the top to look like.  But the moisture (from brown sugar) in this cake and the beauty of the cinnamon sticks alone take care of that problem!

Happy Halloween!!!

Of course I procrastinated making the Cake a Month until the last day...and boy was it a doozey!  While I was making my 30th crepe, I definitely thought to myself - "self, what the heck are you doing?"  But thankfully the results of this crazy tower of power were worth it!  You can get the recipe here.

The best part was making the candied hazelnuts for the topping.  They turned out so well and were so easy that I'm sure I'll use this technique again for another cake topping!



Five Years Coming! Month 3

This month was a fun one - a fall basket of bake sale cookie cupcakes!  I chose to do the peanut butter cookie cupcake first and they turned out great!  Not too sweet and much more like a soft cookie than a cupcake. You can find the recipe for them here.

The recipe made 2 dozen and there was enough frosting to make 4+ dozen...what to make with the leftovers?  The next cupcakes in the basket are oatmeal-raisin cookie cupcakes and chocolate chunk cookie cupcakes.  I'll be attempting them soon, but for my monthly challenge (and my waistline) I'm crossing September off of my list! 

Five Years Coming! Month 2

 

This is month 2 of my "Cake a Month" challenge that I've set out to do.  You can find the recipe for it here.  It was a very easy cake...just tedious as you had to wait in between each of the three ice cream/sorbet layers for them to harden before adding the next.  It turned out deliciously!  If I had it to do all over again...I wouldn't have just bought vanilla ice cream to put peaches in...I would have just bought peach ice cream!  The local peaches here were hit or miss!

Five Years Coming! Month 1

Before Fender was born five years ago I received a Martha Stewart Living magazine in the mail celebrating her 15 years of the magazine.  (I know, I know everyone has their opinion of Martha, but I love her - sorry!)  In it she celebrates by baking a cake a month for a year.  I was intrigued.  I would come across the magazine and think - I should do that!  I tried knitting a sweater a month last year and didn't get past February...but cakes - those are doable!  So since starting a resolution in January tends to flop for me, I'm starting with July!!!

The cakes for July are simple - two pound cakes covered in whipped cream and berries.  One raspberry and one blueberry, trying to fight the rain here in Washington!