A Delicious Chocolate Malt Cake and Happy Holidays!

Hello all and happy holidays!

These past few months of mine have been filled with busy schedules, exciting milestones, fun, new experiences, and not so much blogging. To remedy that, I have a lot of new posts planned for the new year, but before that, I'm going to squeeze in a final post for 2016!

It's that time of the year - the holidays! So much fun, joy, family, and holiday cheer to go around. It's also true that many, MANY weddings happen in December. My husband and I just celebrated our fourth wedding anniversary on December 16th a few weekends back.

Triple Layer Chocolate and Mousse Cake

This chocolate mousse cake is amazing. A friend invited me over for a baking date and suggested we make a healthy avocado mousse to fill in a cake. I showed her a pic of this ambitious triple layer mousse cake and she thought that it would be perfect for our date. We used the black forest chocolate cake recipe from the King Arthur Flour website. The amount of substitutions we made was hilarious but the result was the most delicious chocolate cake I have ever had. I am the harshest grader of myself but even I agree that it was the best cake ever.

Chocolate Eclairs

I know. Its hard to believe that these impressive looking pastries actually came out of my kitchen. I'm just as surprised as you. In fact, everything that could have gone wrong with these eclairs did! My first batch of eclairs fell a little and the pastry cream was really thick. Despite all these setbacks, I pushed through and the final product looked amazing and tasted even better! All this honesty is to encourage you to make eclairs. They may look daunting and it may even seem like you are failing but you might be surprised by your results.

Double Chocolate Banana Bread

This chocolate bread is amazing. It is exactly what I needed to pick me up during the first snow of the season. The first snow in MI didn't even stop at an inch or two. In fact, we got eight depressing inches of snow. I won't deny that the first snowfall is always beautiful but being locked up indoors because of the cold, and the muddy brown snow of the next few days is a pretty bad side affect that comes along with it. So of course I needed to make something yummy to cheer my mood up. 

Molten Lava Cake

Molten lava cakes are a chocolate lover's dream come true. For those who aren't familiar with them, they are cakes that have a chocolate sauce on the inside. They are decadent and rich. Ooey gooey. Fudgy. And best of all chocolate-y!