Pumpkin and Spice

I love Halloween. I love vampires (though not so much Twilight-y vampires...) In honor of the holiday, and my beloved gothy bloodsuckers, I created a bloody cheesecake for our Halloween party this year.

A hazelnut flavored cheesecake with a red chambord (raspberry liqueur) flavored swirl is topped with with a "bloody" splash of frangelico spiked raspberry coulis. The flavor is smooth, rich and creamy, and the sauce offers a tart, bright note. In fact, it's really lovely enough that if you left out the red food dye in the cheesecake, it would make a delightful dessert for any occasion.

When I have some time to kill, I love to visit the blog Cake Wrecks. Have you been? It's side-splitting. If you haven't been, go right now and poke around a bit. Don't worry, it'll open in a new window. I'll wait here... Back? Funny, right? Anyway, the premise of the blog is essentially that people send in photos of professional cakes gone horribly and hilariously wrong.

It's obvious from most (like, 98%) of the pictures that the cakes came from grocery stores. Okay, I live on planet Earth. I've been to a grocery store. I've seen half-heartedly decorated cakes sitting sadly in bakery cases and thought, "Man, oh, man. What jerk made these?" I don't fool myself that those cakes are made by highly experienced pastry chefs.

If you're like, well... everyone else everywhere, you're feeling the pinch of the economy. (If you're not, send me a job application for where ever it is you work!) While I know better days are on the horizon, I'm impatient and don't like postponing fun "splurge" activities like fabulous vacations. I love vacations, but we just don't have the funds right now to visit luxurious and exotic locales. As a result, I'm becoming a master (mistress?) of the mini-vacay.

I define a "mini-vacay" as a short (ususally weekend or 3-day weekend), local-ish (driving distance), vacation. Cheaper than a "real" vacation, but we still get the change of atmosphere and pace that make vacations so refreshing. Recently, Kyle and I took a long weekend to enjoy St. Petersburg, FL.