Pumpkin and Spice

As promised, I made sure I had fresh batteries in my camera at work! I was going to try to backtrack and get pictures of the stuff I did yesterday, but a lot of it had been wrapped/frozen. So, no pictures of the apple brown sugar coffee cake, or the meringue mushrooms. However, a few things I made yesterday became parts of things I made today!

For example, yesterday I baked chocolate chip cookies. Once they were cool, I layered them on sheet trays and froze them. Today, I made those cookies into massive ice cream sandwiches. Freezing the cookies made them firmer, so they didn't break when I sandwiched them together. It also kept everything as cold as possible so the ice cream didn't melt. Even so, I had to work fast, and have several trays going at once- so I could rotate in and out of the freezer as the ice cream softened. Aww, yeah, look at that. I know there's nothing in the picture for scale, but it is a seriously huge sandwich. You can't go wrong- two made from scratch cookies, ice cream with flecks of vanilla beans... Yum.

My other big projects were making several German Chocolate cakes and Chocolate truffle cakes. The German Chocolate is chocolate cake filled and iced with a carmel coconut pecan icing. The icing is so thick and sticky that you can't spread it with a spatula- so here I am, "icing" the cake by pressing the icing on with my fingers. (My co-worker was making me laugh... I can't remember what she said. I think it may have been something about me spackling the cake.)

The Chocolate Truffle Cake is chocolate cake filled with rich chocolate mousse, iced with chocolate ganache (which I made yesterday!) The sides are then masked with grated chocolate. If you were confused by my description of masking the other day, here's a picture of me masking my cake...

And, a (blurry) picture of a slice of each of the cakes.

Tonight, as I was riding the bus home from the gym, and "Silver Bells" was playing on the radio, we drove through a neighbourhood with Christmas lights on the houses, and I thought about how I don't really feel like it's the holidays yet. Maybe because I'm not home, doing all the things that make me think of Christmas- decorating, hosting/attending parties, shopping... I'm not sure, but it made me a little melancholy. Luckily, my family and my Kyle will be arriving on Tuesday! Hopefully seeing everyone will lift my holiday spirits!

Also, I have a special post coming up- Kyle has been keeping busy with a manly foodie project, and he sent me pics, and all the dish on it. It's going to be so fun!