cake decorating class

My mother and sister are cake decorating masters while I'm lucky enough to have the patience to get the cake iced before I eat it. Luckily my sister taught me a few tricks and we made this cake. We used her key lime cake trick so decided to tint the icing light green.

recipe: little sister's lime cakes

I've been home the past week and enjoying time with my family. It's been fairly relaxing and besides a few meals and the Harry Potter premiere, I haven't left home. What I have been doing is eating lots of lots of these tiny lime cakes my sister made. The radio silence will continue while I head off to the beach for the next week. It's a darling little cottage with no internet or cell service. I will be bringing a stack of books instead.

Lime Cakes
1 box yellow cake mix and ingredients listed on box
1/3 cup key lime juice
whipped cream
raspberry sauce

Make cake according to box, substituting lime juice for 1/3 of the water called for. Bake sheet cake, cut out circles of cake. Top with whipped cream and a dallop of raspberry sauce.

pumkin overload

A few weeks ago my roommate and I made a trip to Farm to Family and purchased a large blue pumpkin. Yes, blue. It was a lovely shade of pale blue and we were told it was the best for cooking. We had no interest in carving this pumpkin. Instead, we precariously chopped it into sixths and roasted it. Since then, I've read recommendations to roast whole and then chop, but this was a large pumpkin so we chopped then roasted.


To roast the pumpkin, we rubbed the outside with olive oil and the inside with butter then roasted it for about an hour at 450 degrees. We ended up with about 12 cups of pumpkin puree. I've used some it, including this amazing Pumpkin Cake with Mexican Chocolate Icing that I made for my family's Thanksgiving (see below.) But what else should we make to use up the last 6 cups of pumpkin?

[Pureed pumpkin]

[Thanksgiving Pumpkin Cake]