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This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie is Gingerbread Baby Cakes and is hosted by Karen, who has the recipe at her blog.

I was excited to try these because I love gingerbread, and because I had just gotten the awesome ramekins I used for the pot pies a couple of weeks ago. The ramekins worked perfectly for the cakes, and there was just enough batter for all six.

However… no one really liked these 🙁 They smelled amazing while they were baking, and I couldn’t wait for them to cool enough to give them a try. I served them up for dessert night with some whipped cream, and only one kid finished hers (actually, I cut them all in half because each cake was pretty rich).

I really can’t say what it was that put us off. Maybe we’re used to overly-sugared gingerbread cookies? But it just tended too far on the bitter side of things.

I thought it might have been the coffee extract I used in place of the instant espresso powder (I have never been able to find instant espresso powder), but I only used 1-1/2 teaspoons for the whole batch, so I don’t think that was the problem.

Anyway, so I’ve got three cakes left that I can’t stand the thought of tossing. I’m thinking I might freeze them and add them to a batch of homemade ice cream — I think the ice cream could temper the richness of the cakes. I guess we’ll see!

I know everyone hates it when bloggers come back after some time away and say “I’ve been gone so long! I’m so sorry! Wow, I’ve been so busy! I need to get things rolling again!” so I won’t 🙂 (but it’s true!).

We haven’t actually been so much busy as we have been contaminated with plague.

Someone who may or may not work at Mike’s place of business may or may not have decided to head into work sick a couple of weeks ago, and it’s ripped through our household like wildfire. We’ve had two separate rounds of antibiotics, prescriptions for coughs and sore throats, and as many over-the-counter pills available for sneezing and runny noses. And we’ve been dealing with this alongside a pretty sick 13-year-old dog as well.

In other words, it’s been loads of fun around here.

Anyway, I had meant to do this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie (brownies!) but just didn’t have the stamina to stay upright in the kitchen over the weekend, so I had to give it a pass.

And today has taken any energy I’ve had in reserve since it’s my oldest daughter’s 14th birthday. It’s been a caffeine-filled day as I’ve not only been baking for Thanksgiving tomorrow, but juggling the above birthday cake and birthday preparations as well.

Can you tell what she (we) is currently into? It’s an interest I am trying to encourage since I’ve wondered if any of the girls would be bitten with the science fiction bug (they all have!). The cake was heavily inspired by this picture, and as you can see I’ve got a little bit of temporal distortion happening along the bottom there. That blue is strong willed.

Anyway, I just made a basic old pumpkin pie alongside the cake (but I did get my spiced pumpkin cheesecake fix a couple of weeks ago),

And we’ve got the turkey prepped and ready to be lowered into some Alton Brown brine,

And tomorrow I get to wrestle with stuffing, potatoes and all the rest of it.

I hope all my American friends have a safe and happy Thanksgiving!

This week’s Tuesdays With Dorie is French Strawberry Cake, hosted by Sophia and Allison.

I’ll be honest, I was a little wary about this one. I was happy because strawberries! But it’s got a lot of steps, some of them fiddly, and though the information with the recipe says that French chefs makes these over and over again to become comfortable with it, this was my first time and I was definitely not comfortable with it.

Case in point: I totally forgot the butter step. I had the two tablespoons of butter melted in a bowl, sitting on the counter waiting for me while I did the rest of the cake. And I completely forgot it. I thought I was doing so well, too.

But aside from it being a bit on the drier side (and to be honest, I’m going to keep using my angel food cake recipe), it was good and no one would have guessed it was missing anything. And as you can see, I didn’t manage to cut the cake into three layers, either. I got the top part off okay, but when I went to saw into the rest of it it just wasn’t having any of that (even though I had frozen it as others had suggested). So I shrugged and said, eh, good enough. I just loaded up the strawberries in one layer and of course that didn’t affect the taste. Oh, and I couldn’t get the strawberries to mash so I just piled them on.

I couldn’t find my couplers for my piping tips (where are they???) so I just squeezed the whipped cream out of a hole clipped in the corner of a plastic baggie to keep things fancy. And I did too many dollops on top and had to improvise with the five strawberries I had set aside.

Also, this was the best whipped cream I’ve ever had and I will now be using it for everything.

And I don’t like the tops of strawberries to still be on top of the strawberries when they’re used for decoration. It looks gross to me, so they had to go.

Otherwise, exactly like the recipe! 🙂