[fairly empty] thoughts about dessert

I've been accidentally collecting unfrosted cake recipes lately, like this double vanilla butter cake, ooey gooey double baked chocolate cake ("ooey gooey"? ugh, come on, Food52), and this grapefruit curd in grapefruit cake.

I actually made the double vanilla butter cake tonight and in case you were wondering, can I forget to mix the sugar with the eggs at the beginning and not realize it until I've already added all of the other ingredients and still get a decent cake? Yes, you can! I tested out that scenario just for you! Your cake will be about half the height of the cake in the picture and therefore twice as dense, but it will still taste okay!

This will sound like a stupid idea coming off of that failure, but I also decided I want to tackle a Milk Bar cake sometime soon. Probably the birthday cake. I'm debating whether it's worth forking over a bunch of money on Amazon for 1) glucose 2) acetate strips 3) quarter sheet pan 4) 6" cake rings 5) more sprinkles. I was already going to buy myself sprinkles for my birthday, but glucose? When am I ever going to use glucose again unless I bake more Milk Bar cakes?

Not cake, but these salted peanut butter cookies look amazing. However, any recipe with significant amounts of peanut butter, maple syrup, honey, or Nutella makes me hesitate because that stuff is not cheap. And if we're buying peanut butter it's because Aaron eats a peanut butter sandwich almost every day for lunch (he's a champion of food monotony), not for a batch of cookies we'll devour in a couple days. This is when I'll know we've made it: when I can nonchalantly pick up an extra thing of peanut butter at the grocery store for cookies I'm making on a whim with no purpose or event in mind.

Speaking of cookies, I got a cookie scoop for Christmas, and it is a life changer. I want to make drop cookies all the time now because cookies obviously, but also because using that scoop is so fun. It magically makes my cookies turn out much better to boot. I've been biased against cookie scoops in the past because I've always thought of them as ice cream scoops, and they suck at scooping ice cream. But, it turns out when you use them for their actual purpose, they work great! Who would've thought?

You'd think that after such a long gap between posts I'd return with something meaningful or interesting to say buuuuut nope! CAKES AND COOKIES. The important things in life.