chocolate cheesecake
I know what you are thinking, "again with the chocolate?" and to that I say, yes, again with the chocolate. See, I wanted to try out my new spring-form cake pan and cheesecake was the best thing I could think of. However, I don't really like cheesecake, so it had to be chocolate to help mask the cream cheese flavor of classic cheesecake. I hope it will taste really good. (I am still waiting for it to come out of the oven and then it has to cool) Anyway, I made every bit of it from scratch, the chocolate wafers, the crust, and the filling. I already made the chocolate wafers, so just follow the

Thanksgiving (x2)
First, I want to apologize for the late Thanksgiving post. I came home from Thanksgiving sick, so I've been spending my time resting. I had two Thanksgivings this year (sort of). The first one was last week and it was at my house, with my roommates, and their friends and family. It was nice, and a BIG feast! There was pretty much two of everything, and way too much food for about 15 people. I made zucchini bread (cake, really.) and muffins and banana cake. (pictures to come soon.) The second (and real) Thanksgiving was at Benjie's family's house in San Jose. It was nice and there was also a lot of food there. Benjie and I made most of the meal ourselves. I made pumpkin pie and apple pie/cru

Four weddings and...a birthday!
This year was full of weddings (and one "wedding") and of course, my birthday! First up was Jenessa and Mike's on July 4th weekend: lovely summery cake with all of those sunflowers! After that, in the middle of August was my sister and (now) "sister-in-law" 's "wedding" celebration. They didn't have cake, just some refreshing mint ice cream. I heard it was very minty, and therefore, I d

chocolate bundt cake
I bought a bundt cake pan the other day, so it was time to test it out. I got the recipe from allrecipes.com. It's a good site, especially because it has a calculator right on the screen. Just put in the number of servings, and it re-calculates the recipe for you. Of course, since I was making cake, there was no need for this feature this time, but nice to know it's there. Also, I had to chose a chocolate or chocolate chip cake because I am, after all, a chocoholic. This cake recipe was easy, and I am glad I found it because most of the other recipes I found involved cake mix and sour cream, and I wanted one that was made entirely from scratch. I had a slightly smaller pan (9 inches vs 10)

it's a hot, sticky mess...
...not the drunk kind, but the gooey, marshmallowy kind. I got a bag of marshmallows sent to me as part of a birthday present from my mom, and they were all stuck together, so I needed something to do with them, and I couldn't just eat them out of the bag, because, well, they were literally stuck in the bag! So, I looked hard and long (ugh-get your minds out of the gutter!) on the interwebs for ideas and mostly found marshmallows added to brownie or blondies, so I thought a little longer, and I decided that I could probably caramelize the 'mallows before adding them to the brownies, so that's what I did. They turned out to be really good, and it was a literal explosion of a brownie. I