Thanksgiving and my assistant bakers

For Thanksgiving this year we stayed in PA and celebrated with Patrick's family. I had a couple of assistants to help with the baking this year. We were in charge of desserts, including a birthday cake for cousin Evan. For the grown ups, we made key lime cheesecake. (Wow - it was intense!) We have been trying out some fun non-traditional recipes for the past few years because some of us don't like pumpkin.

They love to help!

We also made a chocolate cake and then made a batch of cupcakes - I needed a little extra cake to build some ramps for Evan's monster truck cake. Here's what we did with the rest of the cupcakes:

(not my photo - I forgot to take pictures of them)

I made Evan's cake the night before, and set out everything to finish assembling it when we got there. Unfortunately, when we got to Diane's house for Thanksgiving, we realized we had everything with us EXCEPT the cake! I knew my kids were looking forward to celebrating Evan's birthday, to say nothing of poor Evan's disappointment if we didn't have a cake for him, so during all the craziness of preparing Thanksgiving dinner, I also made another cake and did my best to replicate the original with the supplies Diane and her helpful neighbors had on hand. I didn't get a picture of either version of the cake, but I will try to get the video up here sometime soon.