cake stand

When your grandmother gives you a new cake stand to match your dishes, there's really only one thing to do with it. You have to spend an afternoon flipping through cookbooks to find a nice cake to try it out with. The Chocolate Snowball is one of my favorite dessert cookbooks, and it has a nice, light carrot cake that I'd never gotten around to making before. Any cake that starts with whipping eggs and sugar for 5 minutes is going to be airy and light, even if you then add in 4 cups of shredded carrots.
While it chilled for the frosting step, I cut out the material for Kate's Halloween costume. She wants to go as an american girl (whichever one is in Williamsburg- Felicity maybe?), so we bought some calico and I'm using the same dress pattern (from a Patrones carneval costume issue) I used last year for her princess dress.

Simplicity has a very cute colonial times girl costume, but I couldn't see buying another pattern when the princess dress still fits her and I have all the pattern pieces cut out already. So if you're looking for one, the Simplicity costume pattern is S3725, with 4 dress variations. Very cute. :-)

Here's the carrot cake with some apricot jam on it, chilling down enough to be frosted:



On the wedding topic, The Martha Stewart Weddings Blog has been wonderful reading all weekend. There are apparently a bunch of wedding fashion shows & some wedding trade show going on in NYC this weekend, and they are posting TONS of beautiful wedding dress photos to their blog. Lots of eye candy!