Pecan Tassies and ~Happy Thanksgiving!~

Hi everyone!!  Sorry for this late post on Thanksgiving...A day after it passed, but here goes!  Happy Thanksgiving everyone.  There are many things I am thankful for.  However, I feel like I don't always appreciate all the things I have.  This is something I have to work on.  The things I am thankful for are the usual: family, friends, house, food, and clothes.

For this year, the things I am especially thankful for is being able to find a fellowship at school that I feel like I fit really well in.  Another thing I'm extremely thankful for is meeting 4 international students who have changed my life.  I've been helping them improve their English, but I have also learned a lot from them too.  Also this year I'm living in an apartment as opposed to the dorms, so I have been cooking for myself.  I'm thankful that I am finally forced to learn how to cook because I never really liked cooking before.  I'm starting to enjoy cooking now too.  You know, the first time I actually cooked in my apartment, I set off the fire alarm.  T_T  To my credit, the alarm was really sensitive...but I can't believe I used Pam on a really hot pot and it just started smoking.  So now, I have started to use regular oil.  I'm also thankful for having a job so I can spend my own money on things I want without having to ask my parents for money.  Most importantly of all, I'm thankful for my readers!  Thanks for your support and advice.  I really do appreciate it. :D

So this year for Thanksgiving, I went over to S's house just like last year.  We had lunch at her house and the food was just delicious.  I really missed her and her family because the last time I saw them was last Thanksgiving.  Unfortunately, S. was extremely busy with her schoolwork so I was only able to see her for 15 seconds...literally... LOL.  I knocked on her day, asked her how she was doing, and then left her alone.  However, I talked to her mom instead.  It was quite funny.  Her mom was like, "I never imagined a day where I would be having a conversation with you like this."  Her mom had seen me grow up, so that's why it was so "weird".  Anyway, I really enjoyed this Thanksgiving lunch with her family and several other families present at the potluck.

I made pecan tassies for the potluck.  They were all polished off. :D  Some people couldn't resist going back for seconds and thirds.  I actually made these pecan tassies the week prior, with one of the international students (J.)  It was quite funny because he had to help me with making the crusts and stuff and I usually bake with my girl friends. XD  I brought the pecan tassies to a potluck too the past week and got rave reviews.  Whenever people say that something I made tastes good, I'm not really sure how I should react because it's not like I created the recipe.  But yea, these tarts are really good.  I ate some and had a very hard time keeping myself from eating more.  Also, even my brother ate them!  (He dislikes nuts.)

These pecan tassies are super time consuming.  They take around 3 hours to make (from the very start to the very end).  I figured out that the best way to make the crust was to make the dough, then just roll the dough into balls, use one end of my rolling pin to squish the dough into the cupcake pan and press the ball into the edges of the pan.  Everything else is super simple.

Pecan Tassies

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cake

I think close to a year has passed since I bought a can of pumpkin puree.  At that time, I had found a few pumpkin recipes that I really wanted to try out.  What I didn't realize was that those recipes required pumpkin spice, nutmeg, or several other spices.  So I never used the pumpkin puree I bought until now, when I finally bought some pumpkin spice.

This chocolate chip pumpkin cake was pretty good.  It was a little bit too sweet for my taste, and I'm someone who really likes sweets.  I had already adjusted the amount of sugar used in this recipe too.  Another tweak I made was decrease the amount of chocolate chips to only one cup because two cups would, in my opinion, overwhelm the cake.  Even when I only added only one cup, each bite of the cake had several chocolate chips in them.

I liked how the cake turned out though.  If you are someone who likes pumpkin pie, then you will like this cake because it tastes like pumpkin pie in cake form.  I gave some to my friend A. and she said that her family enjoyed it.  However, my brother, on the other hand, would not even taste the cake because he dislikes pumpkins. 

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cake
Recipe slightly adapted from Tracey's Culinary Adventures

Zebra Cake

As seen in my previous post, I attempted to make the Rose Ombre Cake for my grandma.  I wanted the cake to be something really special because it was her 80th birthday.  For my dad's birthday, I wanted to make something simpler and healthier (because the previous cake was super rich!).  So after changing my mind several times on what recipe I should use, I somehow remembered a recipe that I really wanted to try: the zebra cake!  Although I really wanted to make the cake for a long time, I never had the courage to make it.  Today when I finally made it, it was so much easier than I thought it would be.  This cake would be really difficult to mess up.  The cake wasn't grossly sweet because I cut the sugar down to 3/4 cups.  The texture of the cake was normal.  It was moist enough, but not super moist.  The bad part was that this cake was a bit bland, so you might want to make the zebra cake with a different cake recipe.  On the bright side, this cake is very pretty and I am sure that people will be impressed by all the stripes this cake has. 

Zebra Cake
Recipe slightly adapted from King Arthur Flour.

Red Velvet and Light Cheddar Cheese "Ombre" Rose Cake

The month of September is always a busy one for me.  Lots of my friends have their birthdays in this month.  This week it was my grandma's birthday on Sunday, then Tuesday was my uncle's birthday, today is my dad and K's birthday, on Friday is my best friend's birthday and on Saturday is another close friend's birthday.  So many people I know are born in this month!

This year was my grandma's 80th birthday.  So in order to celebrate this significant event, my parents and close relatives decided to have a surprise birthday party for her.  After several weeks of planning, the special day finally arrived.  For my grandma's birthday, the reception was held at my Uncle's church and several trays of food were ordered from a buffet.  Around 40 relatives showed up to celebrate her birthday.  Because it was a surprise party, my mom and I had to trick my grandma into getting on the car with us so we could bring her to the place.  My mom told her that she needed help with choosing some meat at the supermarket to barbeque.  At first, my grandma argued that it was too late to bbq meat among other things, but then after my mom's persuading she finally relented.  Then I had to bring this cake onto the car and because this cake was too difficult to put into a box or container, I had to hold it on my lap.  Bringing a cake on the car was suspicious because my grandma had no idea that there was going to be a surprise party, so I had to make up a story of how I wanted a special decoration for the cake and we needed to go to this particular store to buy the decoration.  Luckily, she fell for the story.  When we finally arrived at the church, everything was revealed to her and she had a blast at the party.  She was really happy and that was awesome.  All the lies were worth it. ;)

In order to celebrate her special day, I decided to bake a cake for her.  I quickly found this recipe on Honey Bee Sweet's blog.  It was not a hard decision to make because I had seen a few ombre rose cakes on tumblr and I really wanted to try making that type of cake.

Although this cake took me around 4-5 hours total to make it, it was worth it.  The cake is delicious!  Although I kind of messed up on the cheesecake part, many people still complimented me on the cake, saying that the cake tasted amazing, etc...  Also, the roses on the cake really impress people.  However, mine were a bit sloppy because of the hot weather and my hot hands.  At one point, the frosting was so soft that it wouldn't stay on the cake and slid right off like this.  In addition, I wasn't able to make my cake an ombre rose cake.  I was able to make it two different colors, but ran out of time to tint the frosting darker. 

Red Velvet and Light Cheddar Cheese "Ombre" Rose Cake
Recipe from Honey Bee Sweets.  Please refer to her blog for the recipe.

Funfetti Cupcake

So remember how I was supposed to post all my recipes from the Crazy Day?  Well, I haven't finished posting all those recipes yet.  One of the things I made on that day was funfetti cupcakes.  They turned out surprisingly well, even though they were the cupcakes that required 3 egg whites and I typically don't do so well with recipes that require egg whites.  Anyway, I didn't take any good pictures of the cupcake and only got a picture of a half eaten one. :P  So yesterday I decided to make some funfetti cupcakes again, except with a different recipe.  Something I didn't like about the first funfetti cupcakes I made was that they were too sweet.  In fact, they were sickening sweet.  Unless you have a major sweet tooth, you will not like that cupcake.  I'm really happy with the funfetti cupcakes I made this time though.  They were soft, moist and not too sweet.  I also made some frosting that turned out alright.  The cupcakes look really cute with the sprinkles in them.

Funfetti Cupcakes
Recipe from Sweet Tooth