cinnamon roll cake + maple cream cheese glaze.

inside-out german chocolate cake.

So I have awesome friends. Who I do awesome things with. And who also make me awesome birthday cakes! I'll let Danielle do the rest of the talking - yuppp. This is a guest blog post!!

I'm in the black dress; Danielle's wearing red!

Hey friends!  This is Yat's suitemate, Danielle, and she asked me to do this guest post… she likes to show me off sometimes.  Not really, but after helping bake her birthday cake, I have been given the honor to make an appearance on here (so much pressure!). 

Celebrating Yat’s birthday is fun, because her birthday is over winter break, so we try to make it a surprise.  And when’s the best time to make a massive cake?  Obviously in the middle of finals when we’re all stressed to the max and can use the cake to 1. Honor our friend’s birthday, and 2. Eat all our feelings away. We’re nothing if not efficient.  Andrea found a recipe for this beautiful inside-out German chocolate cake, and we decided we would bake it in the small time frame between our organic chemistry final and our friends’ holiday party.  So to give an idea of what went into baking this masterpiece, I will tell it in the form of a dramatic narrative.

whole wheat molasses bread.

I figure what with all the delicious things I have been eating, with zero shame, in massive quantities, I should at least have something healthy on standby. That's where this bread comes in.

I was browsing different blogs for some inspiration and came upon this recipe on joythebaker's site. The pictures drew me in - the loaf looked really nice & hearty, with a gorgeous crust. I wanted it.

And so, in literally 10 minutes, I mixed the dry and wet, added dry to wet, and quickly greased a pan to bake it in. Then I ran to watch Midnight in Paris. Have you ever seen that movie? Owen Wilson, Marion Cotillard, and Rachel McAdams are in it .. I like them all. And it got all these awards/nominations .. I feel like maybe, if analyzed, it would spur some great life revelations. However, surrounded by my brother who kept trying to provoke me into attacking him by poking me, my dad who was fiddling with his videocamera, and my mom, who I could tell was on the brink of passing out, I did not find it that awesome.

cutout cookies.

It was hard not putting an exclamation after the name in the title - these cookies are so attractive!

I almost had a heart attack when my mom told me she'd given away all our Christmas cookie cutters, as I was rolling out this dough and ready to bake up some Winnie the Poohs dressed up as Santa ... #firstworldproblems. I survived, you'll be glad to hear.

peppermint bark medallions.

Oh hai thur! I'm home for good, fellas. Fellas makes me feel like I'm from a Spaghetti Western, the genre of Western films that were produced by Italians, namely Sergio Leone, who also went by Bob Robertson in order to appeal to a larger American audience.

I took a History of Italian Cinema final a couple days ago, if you can't tell. That's an immediate side effect of finishing finals - your brain, now saturated with copious amounts of information, starts making relations of mundane things to things you learned in class. 

Someone said "rules" yesterday .. immediately thought of cadherins. Thank you, cell biology. I still feel a need to wholly understand how those proteins work ..

More importantly though, are peppermint bark medallions, which might be the easiest things you could make in the history of ever.

pumpkin pie.

I'm aware it's December (isn't that crazy?! it's already the end of the year!) and that pumpkin pie is a more fall thing. Frankly, I don't give a damn.

Look at me going all Rhett Butler.