Baking with Blondie

I know this is not really a Thanksgiving-related post, but today is National Cake Day! I wanted to celebrate by sharing one of the two cakes my husband was given for his birthday weekend (okay, I made him cupcakes to take to work, too). He gets spoiled big time. No matter how many times I ask him what kind of cake I should make him, he always says "surprise me!" And still, every year, whatever I make him (no matter how different the flavors were from the year before) he still gushes over whatever I make, and claims it's his favorite. Good man, I tell you!  This year, I wanted to make him something special for when we celebrated his birthday with his family. Ryan and I have been to a restaurant called Magleby's several times when we lived in Provo, Utah, and we loved skipping over to the Springville location to have a nice dinner. No matter what we had to eat, or how much we had to eat, we always made room for dessert. And not just any dessert - the EPIC LEGE...

  There's nothing like a sure-fire recipe. You know it's going to taste amazing, and most importantly - you know it's not going to take a lot of effort to do so. After having made these muffins four times in the past two months, and also wondering how the heck we went through the whole batch that many times without me being able to snap a few photos is proof that these are incredible. We couldn't pause long enough to really do anything! The fluffy banana muffins, swirled with that melty heavenly hazelnut spread... it's enough to drive you mad (in the best way possible, that is).

For Thanksgiving dinner, we usually stuck to the classics. There was always a great deal of mashed potatoes and gravy, turkey, rolls that would blow your minds, and stuffing. For the most part, I think my Mom usually would use that package stuffing mix for the traditional stuffing dish. It tasted alright from what I remembered, but it wasn't until the one year she decided to try something completely new and out-of-our-usual-stuffing-box that my expectations of stuffing were all-the-sudden changed. And changed for good. Wicked style, man.  She served up a giant dish with layers of crisp sourdough bread, spicy sausage, spots of cranberries, and a few random slices of green apple - all soaked together in the bright beautiful flavors of whatever incredible broth she had baked it in. My overall view of stuffing was completely changed, and even to this year, I try to casually request for her to make it for the Thanksgiving table. Today, I'm sharing this very recipe (or as c...

You guys. I have a secret. A dirty, dirty, dirty little secret about mashed potatoes.  Saying that mashed potatoes are a favorite at the Thanksgiving dinner table is a filthy understatement. in our house. For what felt like an entirety of my childhood, mashed potatoes WERE Thanksgiving dinner. They were the star. They were what we all loaded our plates with first, and the other traditional Thanksgiving dinner dishes were just that - sides. The mashed potatoes trumped the turkey in every way, and we always fought over the leftover clouds of fluffy buttery heaven whenever we had the blessing of taking leftovers home after the bounteous meal. This year we have the privilege, honor, and huge responsibility of bringing the mashed potatoes and gravy for my entire family at Thanksgiving. For a family who is mashed potato obsessed, you know darn well I need to bring a batch that will blow their socks off. And my friends, I have that recipe right here for you today.  But t...

It's been a while, eh? I guess since last Wednesday, no too long, but apparently a billion years in the blogging world. Instead of ripping my hair out with the billion things I have on my plate  AND keeping up with blog land, I decided to put the blog on the back-burner for a few days while I got everything sorted out (made it through the primary program, a full week of Utah Wind Symphony rehearsals, and one crisis after another). It was a nice break (although stuffed with other non-blog related things). Blogging isn't the center of my family & social life, so it wasn't a big deal for me, but I truly missed sharing recipes with all of you, and made sure to take a second to at least photograph what we've been munching on.  With the cold weather rolling into the valley on a more frequent basis (we woke up with snow flurries this morning!), my favorite thing to make for dinner is either soup or a really hearty casserole. Of course, we can't have something ...

Sometimes I share recipes that take a long time to make, have a long list of ingredients, and use kind of a lot of dishes to make. For that, I apologize - in their defense, they probably tasted amazing. In all honest, they tasted WAY awesome.  But not all the time before dinner can be sucked into well, making dinner . Sometimes, yes. Most of the time, nope. That's why recipes like this one exist. They're simple, the ingredients are very few, and this dishes it takes to make them can be counted on one hand. So before we all get cranky about how simple this recipe is... make it... and thank me later. :) 

I wasn't going to post these pictures because the lighting came out really funky, but the salad was TOO DANG GOOD to pass up sharing with you lovely friends & readers today!  As many of you know, I love a good salad. I love trying the different salad components together in different bites, and seeing how everything tastes together. The perfect salad, to me, has a little protein (in our case today, yummy eggs!), some light crunch from fresh fruit or veggies, some salty bacon, some toasted nuts, and a little bit of cheese. This salad uses a bunch of amazing ingredients, and when they all came together on the same plate... holy smokes, guys.