Spiced Applesauce Cake

We've been going seasonal for this cooking season. Fall has a lot of great flavors -- pumpkin, apples, sweet potatoes, ginger (not sure that's seasonal, but I certainly associate it with fall). We found a recipe on smitten kitchen for a spiced applesauce cake with a cream cheese frosting and ended up with a very crowd-pleasing cake. After spending about 10 minutes in the grocery store trying to decide between two different applesauces, we eventually just came up with the idea of making two cakes -- an endeavor that only required the purchase of an extra cream cheese packet. We were attending a "Brunch of Doom" Halloween brunch party the next day and figured this cake would make a good addition to the spread.

We got home and lined up our ingredients for the day. I started measuring out the flour and dry ingredients in two different bowls. Meanwhile Chris was taking about twenty pictures of the ingredients trying to get the framing right, at which point I told him he was no longer allowed to take photos.

I noticed at some point there appeared to be more flour in one bowl than the other. Chris looked at it and said it was probably just that the bowls were different sizes. He looked at it again, then decided it was too off to be a trick of the eye. We systematically went through and remeasured the approximate amount in each bowl until we came to the conclusion that I had added another cup of flour to one of the bowls. I have no idea how, but apparently counting was an issue for me. I took a little flour out and changed up the ingredient amounts to get the same approximate effect. At this point I was told I was no longer allowed to measure things.

We compensated by adding more applesauce to the second cake and I must say it made the cake better. We referred to it as the "failure" cake, but with the extra applesauce it was a lot moister and the texture was superior to the one following the recipe. The failure cake was also bigger, so this was the one we brought to the "Brunch of Doom".

Chris at one point was wondering what we were going to do with all the extra cream cheese. My response was "What extra cream cheese?" He pointed out the recipe only called for 5 ounces and we had easily twice that per cake. I politely informed him that the recipe was wrong and that more cream cheese frosting was required.

If we made it again, we'd probably add maple syrup to the frosting. It needed a little something for flavor. As it was, I was very happy for the addition of different sugars. We added some Muscovado sugar to the cakes and it added some extra panache.

Rustic Almond-Strawberry-Peach Galette

We've never made a galette before and kiss my spatula posted a great recipe for one about a month ago. The original recipe was an almond-plum galette, but we modified it to go with incredibly ripe strawberries and peaches.

The almond added a really great texture and flavor. The dough itself was quite finicky. We threw out the first batch of dough ingredients making it because the texture was completely off -- way too much water.

The final product was a nice, crispy golden brown crust encasing some very juicy fruit and perhaps my only complaint was the amount of time it took to make. We multi-tasked making the galette and some carrot cake cupcakes at the same time, but there was about an hour where we needed to just sit around waiting for the dough to cool down in the fridge.