Lemon-Cranberry Cupcakes

These cupcakes are another recipe from Julie Hasson's 125 Best Cupcake Recipes. Pretty good, although I would be tempted to bump up the lemon flavor a bit with some extract or lemon oil. They are topped with a ginger-cream cheese frosting.

Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day means baking. This year, I made two special things for Valentine's Day. First, there was a batch of Sprinkle Cookies from Mom's Big Book of Baking by Lauren Chattman. This is a pretty simple sugar cookie, with the dough rolled in a ball, then dipped in sprinkles before it's baked.

Then I made a batch of chocolate cupcakes. Having enjoyed Jill O'Connor's banana rum cake so much, I decided to try the Chocolate-Mayonnaise Cupcakes from her book Sticky, Chewy, Messy, Gooey. These cupcakes are awesome. The batter baked beautifully without oozing onto the top of the cupcake pan. I made a batch of plain buttercream tinted pink to frost them, then added some holiday sprinkles for the top.

Peanut Blossoms

I love Mom's Big Book of Baking. It's a Lauren Chattman book, and I don't think I've made anything questionable from it. Claire and I decided to make a batch of Peanut Butter Thumbprints from the book; instead of filling them with jelly, we used chocolate stars and kisses.

The dough is extra peanutty: It uses natural peanut butter, for one thing, and also contains a cup of finely chopped salted peanuts. I especially liked the ones we made with dark-chocolate stars.

Birthday Cake

Now the truth can be told. I once again had a mishap with my wife's birthday cake.

Despite the many good birthday cakes I've made for Karen, the ones that are remembered are the disasters, perhaps most famously the chocolate cake with a marshmallowy seven-minute icing. While stored in the fridge overnight, the icing (which perhaps hadn't set up properly during its seven minutes of whipping) melted. Holding the final result, the cake dome was like a bakery aquarium, with chocolate cake layers wallowing amid a sea of white goo.

I decided this year to rely on tried-and-true Best Birthday Cake from Lora Brody's Chocolate American Style. I've been making this cake as a three-layer event, but this time followed the recipe and made two deep layers that would be split to make four layers of cake.

Although I've made this cake a number of times, the bad birthday mojo struck. When I took the cake layers out of the oven, one collapsed entirely, and the other crumbled a bit coming out of the pan. Not happy.

What to do? Frosting corrects a multitude of sins, and this cake has a great white chocolate-cream cheese frosting. I patched it up, put some sprinkles on the outside and on top, and all was fine.

From now on, this is a three-layer cake.

Banana Rum Cake

I'd picked up a copy of Jill O'Connor's Sticky, Chewy, Messy, Gooey last year, but hadn't made anything from it. While facing an ongoing overripe banana issue, I grabbed the book and saw a recipe that I realized I needed to make: Bahama Mama Banana Rum Cake. The cake came together just fine, and while it was baking, I made the Dark Rum Glaze to accompany it. The glaze, rich with butter, sugar, and rum, is poured over the warm cake and absorbed into it.

When the cake came out of the oven, I was a little apprehensive. There was a lot of glaze -- almost 2 cups' worth. I brushed a little bit on the cake, then some more. When fretting more about the quantity of glaze, I remembered the name of the book and thought that I might just as well get all the glaze on and in the cake. So I did.

Any misgivings I might have had disappeared the moment I tasted the cake. Surprisingly, despite the quantity of rum in the glaze, the cake isn't boozy at all. And clearly, it is super moist. I especially like the use of chopped pecans coating the bottom of the cake pan, then becoming the top of the cake.

Banana Cupcakes

Faced yet again with a bunch of overripe bananas, I made a batch of Banana Cupcakes using a recipe in Julie Hasson's 125 Best Cupcake Recipes. These cupcakes are finished off with a topping of Chocolate Fudge Frosting from the same cookbook. Pretty straightforward stuff, and a good banana cupcake recipe.

Mardi Gras

My daughter Claire is in her first year of taking French. She announced last week that her class would be having a Mardi Gras party and that there would be lots of fun foods and snacks to eat during the party. After five minutes of her rhapsodizing, I asked, "Is this your way of letting me know I need to make something?" It's hard to put one like this past me.

Initially, she wanted to bring that old French favorite chocolate-chip cookies, but by the time the sign-up sheet got to her, someone else had already grabbed that one. So Claire signed up to bring snickerdoodles, another classic from the French pastry collection.

I knew I had a reliable recipe from Tish Boyle's The Good Cookie, although Tish calls her cookies Cinnamon Sugar Crinkles. My Cookie Day pal Ryan always makes a batch (or two) of snickerdoodles every holiday season, and Tish Boyle's is his go-to recipe.

So Claire and I made a batch of snickerdoodles, and by all accounts, the French class enjoyed them -- enough so that not a single cookie came home, at any rate.