Making the Internet My Accountability Partner

I love baking, but living with just me and my roommate (who’s not a huge dessert person) it gets hard because we end up with so much that would be wasted, so I hadn’t really baked much in the past two years. Thankfully, I can now pass the majority of the results onto my boyfriend’s family and coworkers. With the holiday season I have volunteered to make two desserts for Christmas dinner. I have also decided to make a dessert as a gift for his grandparents and homemade hot chocolate mix for his mom’s present.

The easiest to manage was the snickerdoodles made for Christmas dinner. The dough was super simple, it’s something I made before, and everything went according to plan. I followed this recipe from PioneerWoman.com.

The other dessert I agreed to make for the dinner was a Boston Cream Pie, again recipe from PioneerWoman.com. I was supposed to make it for Thanksgiving, but I got sick the day I was supposed to make it so my boyfriend and his mom took over. This was my first time making it, It was definitely an adventure, but I had a lot of fun. To address the picture, yes Boston Cream Pie is supposed to have a chocolate ganache on top and it will be added before we sit down to our meal after this post is published.

For the hot chocolate mix gift I made two batches, one gingerbread flavored and one pumpkin spice flavored. I found a bunch of variations among recipes, many of them intended for super large batches. So I really only took inspiration from them. It took some trial and error to get the flavor right but who would reject a bunch of hot cocoa on a snowy day?

The other gift was initially a more discouraging trial and error process. I wanted to make cannoli inspired cookies from this recipe on SnappyGourmet.com. As you can see the first attempt became less a series of cookies and more a goopy sheet. The edges were starting to burn but the centers of the cookie lumps were still raw.

The next attempt was going to be putting the dough in a cupcake paper to make bites. But I remembered as I was writing this that I didn’t honestly remember adding any flour or any real dry ingredient like that. So I looked back at the recipe and I do genuinely think I missed adding the flour. That’s how attempt number two became adding the flour and seeing if I could now make cookies. Thankfully that solved the problem of their shape, I just hope they still taste good.