Hola! This griot is officially done with her graduate program. I am so excited... and so scared! (#Savedbythebellmemories) I just made up that hash tag I think. But as that line is from the BEST SBTB episode ever (EVER!) it was totally worth it. How did I commemorate my accomplishment? I baked of course! A few weekends ago I spent some time out to hang with the family. Before leaving I made a coffee cake with chocolate struesel to share with my peeps. I also bought some challah (holla!) to make awesome French toast (which my grandpa referred to as "Freedom Toast" ha!) for breakfast. But, I am not a morning person and thus not with it enough to take pics in the AM so alls you gets is a foto-montage of the cake making process. You can't always get what you want... but sometimes you get what you get.






Chocolate filling mix (bittersweet chocolate, pecans, brown sugar and sugar) about to get chopped!










Struesel ingredients (pecans not shown)


















Struesel all mixed up.














Ingredient of the moment: I bought this butter-vanilla emulsion at the store. I wanted this cake to have extra buttery flavor.


















Pre-layering of awesome ingredients.
















Coffee cake with chocolate struesel!







We had enough "left over" that people were able to take some home for dessert after dinner on Sunday!

Hey ya'll. So it seems as if I haven't lived up to my resolution to bake one thing each week. But. I have done some baking recently and I've got two kitschen experiments for you. A few weeks ago a friend came to visit and Devin (my friend from Real Good Food) and I both got to get busy in the kitchen. Devin is a savory kind of guy so he made dinner. Since no dinner is complete without dessert I brought cake! There was a multi-layer cake recipe I'd been wanting to try but didn't have anyone to share it with so this visit and friendly dinner was prime opportunity. Full disclosure... the cake is supposed to be 8 layers but my free hand layer cutting wasn't as smooth as I'd hoped so in the end mine had only 7 layers. It was still HUGE though! Also I'd like to say a many thanks for my buddy Mosaic Geek for letting me borrow her cake pans. I literally couldn't have done it without you!

What's the other story morning glory? Well it's the end of term and I've got presentations to do for final projects. I hate PowerPoint slideshows- I feel like they have become the basic minimum for any academic presentation but in reality they just invite people to tune out. Thus, I like to give my classmates a little edible incentive to make sure they're energized and paying attention. So, I made some cupcakes! I pulled out an old recipe I have for Mexican chocolate cupcakes because it's a small batch recipe. Believe it or not but sometimes you can't even GIVE homemade cupcakes away and I cannot eat them all! So I used this butter based recipe instead of my usual vegan chocolate cake batter. And because it was Mexican chocolate flavor I decided to use a mini-churro as garnish.