The Rainbow Cookie Cake...

I love rainbow cookies, and my friend JT loves them as well. They are more easily found in the NYC area of New York. I was extremely disappointed to discover they were nearly impossible to find in the Buffalo area. You could easily find a dozen at the nearest Stop and Shop on Long Island, but you'll never spot them in the Wegmans or Tops up here in Western NY. I was very upset and told my Western NY friends of this deliciously almondy, moist cake-like cookies that did not exist in this area.

When I met a friend who loved them as much as I did, we made it our goal to find these cookies. JT was the one to finally find them in a small bakery about 20 minutes from where I live. We were in rainbow cookie heaven.

I read several cooking blogs, and came across a recipe for Rainbow Cookie cake (Always Order Dessert). At the time of discovery, I was unable to make it cause I lacked the right tools and recipes: 3 9" cake pans, a box grater, and the key ingredient almond paste. Lucky for me, I got the pans for Christmas, I bought the box grater for $4, and JT found a bakery near his job that sells almond paste by the pound. We set a date and made the cake.

Though I looked confident as I gathered all the ingredients and assembled the cake and JT did the dirty work, I was nervous about how the cake would come out. My few epic failures have come from baking, not cooking. I would have been devastated if I couldn't handle this cake. The process wasn't difficult, but I was still afraid to waste all the deliciousness in front of me. We put the cake in the oven and waited for the results...

I'm very messy when it comes to using flour.

After the cake was done baking, everything looked cook. The almond smell that consumed my apartment was heavenly. The cakes themselves did not get stuck inside the pans. All was going well.

Once we finsihed icing this bad boy we were ready to dig in. It was torture waiting for the cake to cool so we could frost it and dig in. I've frosted a cake before when it was still warm. Did not work out well at all. The final product looked gorgeous and luckily enough, it tasted just as good as it looked. The cake was a little dry, but that was our fault since we ate dinner and watched a bunch of The Big Bang Theory in the middle of preparing the cake. We should have just eaten first. I'll definitely be making this cake again in the future. JT wanted to do this every other week...but we'd sweel up real quickly is we ate that much cake.

The best way to start off the fall...

It's apple season. My boyfriend's mom makes a delicious apple pie, and it's his goal to make us compete to make the best apple pies. Last week, I made my first apple pie. I was excited and decided to start off easy. I've never made a baked pie (I make a mean no-bake peanut butter pie), and apple pie is simply a classic that almost everyone enjoys. I grabbed and easy recipe off the internet and hoped for the best.

We, me and my boyfriend Ben, wanted to go apple picking to get the apples for our pie. For the past couple years we have gone to a apple orchard in Weedsport, NY that is near Ben's town. It's the perfect little place. It has a variety of apples that can be handpicked. It has a cider-mill right on the orchard, so we would always by mass amounts of the delicious cider and drink it easily within 2 days. They also made donuts fried in the apple-cider they make. They are absolutely delicious. I also get my fill of caramel apples and honeycrisp apples. It has the perfect combination of everything I could want from an apple orchard.

Both of us live in Buffalo now. I work close to full time and no longer have the ability to take off whatever time I want. I work retail and have bills to pay. Since we cannot go to Weedsport whenever we have time off from school, I looked for orchards around the Buffalo area. I was highly disappointed in what I found. Some orchards had apple picking but no apple cider, or vise versa. The ones that did have apple picking did not have a decent variety of different kinds of apples for their customers to pick. Not many places had honey crisp apples to sell and I need my favorite apples at some point in my 2010 autumn experience. In the end, we didn't go anywhere that weekend. We went to Wegmans and just bought a bag of apples. They had honeycrisp cider there, so I was happy.

My pie was super easy to make. There was really only about six ingredients to it, and I brought a pre-made pie crust to keep my life simple. I prepped everything and put my pie in the oven with high hopes. The recipe said to only have the pie cook for a half an hour which I thought was odd, but I went along with it anyway. When the pie was ready, I was in for a surprise. The inside of my pie was super watery and the crust wasn't golden brown and crisp like I was hoping. The apples didn't have the perfect soft texture I like within anything that has cooked apples included within. It all still tasted alright, but in the end it was pretty much a failure.

I have come to the conclusion that I'm better with cooking than I am with baking. I've made plenty of cakes and cookies that were baked perfectly and tasted amazing. My personal favorite is meringue cookies, which are time consuming and tiring. The foods that I have made that have turned out badly have all been desserts though. I made a chocolate rice pudding once and it was completely dry and had no flavor. I attempted a chocolate mousse once too. Tasted lovely, but it was very unmousselike. It was hard and we all had to scrape it out of the bowl (I plan on reattempting this for Thanksgiving this year). And now I have my watery apple pie to add to the list of failed recipes.

I won't let this bring me down though. The recipe I chose was not a good choice. I need to pick a more in depth recipe that makes more sense pie-wise. Ben won't let me give up either. The more I strive to better myself in the world of food, the more yummy treats he gets. I really do enjoy cooking and baking. I want to get to the point where I can make a decent amount of my own recipes that I can hopefully share with the world. I need a bit more experience and money to do this, but my time will come.

In the meantime, I'll follow recipes and watch the Food Network religiously so I can keep learning to keep the hungry people in my life happy. The fall is far from over, and I'll have plenty of time to make plenty of pies. The leaves have barely started turning different colors. I'll get myself to an apple orchard, and I'll make my fair share of apple pies. Living in Buffalo means I can enjoy oven season for quite a long time.