After a busy, food-filled day on Saturday at my mom’s house, we decided that we were going to skip dinner and go straight to desserts.  OK, I confess that some of us actually did end up having dinner, but the real geniuses saved LOTS of room for dessert.

Note that there was SUPPOSED to be apple pie, but SOMEONE who’s name will not be mentioned (he reads this blog and knows who he is), created a ruckus on Friday night which led to it being served prematurely.  Harrumph!

The cuz made a fantastic carrot cake – I’m usually not a fan of carrot cake, but this one hit the spot.  She swears that it was a healthy, “good for you” recipe, but I’m not convinced that something that tasted that good could actually be good for you.  All that being said, it didn’t stop me from sneaking leftovers the next morning…and the next afternoon.  It was especially delicious with the Pumpkin Spice Lattes I made the next day – stay tuned for that from-scratch recipe!

My favouritest baker in the whole wide world made two types of fantastic cupcakes – lemon and chocolate peanut butter. The chocolate peanut butter was in the form of a creamy filling inside a chocolate cupcake – pure heaven. And somehow, having a cupcake tree to stack up all the cupcakes made them taste just so much better.

I pulled out a classic Alton Brown recipe for this evening – his Mooless Chocolate Pie is always an amazing treat. I used a combination of Equal Exchange’s Fair Trade Organic chocolate flavours to make this recipe. We found this chocolate at the local Bulk Barn. I love Bulk Barn in Canada – they always have the neatest products! This recipe works best when you use darker chocolate in order to have it set properly – that being said, if you used a milk chocolate, I’m sure the recipe would make a fantastic mousse-type dessert. Instead of Alton’s chocolate wafer crust, I opted to make a graham cracker crust – only to realize my mom was out of graham crackers. I ran a pack of tea biscuits through the food processor, and disaster was averted.

I also decided to make a blueberry cheesecake – for this, I turned to one of my favourite blogs, The Kitchen Witch. There’s always such fantastic recipes on this blog, and the cheesecake did not fail me. That being said, there were many areas for improvement in my technique, but I think that was more related to how difficult it is to cook in someone else’s kitchen. But, the end result tasted good, so that’s all that mattered for our dessert extravaganza.

Here’s a shot of our dessert table before it got attacked – all the kudos for the presentation go to my sis-in-law (cuz she’s just awesome like that).