Fall is the season for baking...

Fall baking usually starts with Halloween.  This year I didn't bake any Halloween cupcakes, but I did make some apple strudel cheesecake bars.  Apples are big during the fall season, usually in apple pies.  I happened to be in the cake store buying more boxes for cakes and saw a sign that they were selling caramel apple cheesecake. It sounded soo good, so I wanted to make it. Only, instead of caramel apple cheesecake, I ended up making a strudel cheesecake recipe that I found online.  I think it turned out okay.  I do want to make the caramel apple cheesecake though. 

I was too lazy to take it out of the pan, cut it up and take pics of it

I was hoping to make sugar cookies in the shape of star wars characters, yoda, darth vader... I bought the cookie cutters from William Sonoma, but something went wrong when I baked it.  It spread out losing its shape.  I was reading something about how using butter doesn't really work since in the heat the butter melts and so you'll get cookies that spread, but the recipe called for butter.  =\  It could be that for the flavoring I used oils instead of real fruits.  I made a key lime sugar cookie, a lemon cookie, a regular sugar cookie and a chocolate sugar cookie.  The chocolate one didn't make it though, it was too hard that I couldn't roll it out after keeping it in the fridge overnight.  The key lime tasted really good, and the lemon, well, I needed more lemon flavor.  The sugar cookie I didn't bake.  FAIL!  

The next holiday is Thanksgiving.  I don't know that I want to make anything for the in-laws.  No one seems to want to eat desserts, so I think I will pass.  I might make something for my family's thanksgiving... we'll see. I need to do some recipe searching.  I was watching Giada make turtle candies, which look easy.  Maybe I will make a turtle cupcake or something.

A couple of weeks ago I was watching cupcake wars and thought what inventive cupcake would I make. I'm sure this is out there somewhere, but I came up with a Sundae Cupcake.  I wanted it to taste like a banana split sundae.  So I thought of the different components, banana, vanilla, strawberry, chocolate, whip cream and a cherry.  I don't remember the last time I had a sundae, so I wasn't too sure what goes in it.  Anyway, I made a banana cupcake, put a vanilla pudding in the middle, made whip cream, drizzled chocolate sauce and I tried to drizzle strawberry sauce but it wasn't really saucy, and added a maraschino cherry on top.  I heard it was pretty good, but I don't know.  The next time I wanted to add nuts, but got lazy and just basically made a chunky monkey type cupcake - banana cupcake with walnuts, vanilla pudding, whip cream and chocolate drizzle.