some things I baked

Lorne and I don't really celebrate Valentine's Day with big gifts or fancy dinners or anything. This year he had an abstract for a conference due the next day, so we ended up celebrating (in our minimal way) on the 15th. Lorne made gigantic T-bone steaks encrusted with blue cheese and port wine sauce, mashed potatoes, and asparagus. Encrusted meats are delicious.

I made dessert.



This is a cheesecake with toffee bits (still in the springform pan). I found the recipe at Culinary Concoctions by Peabody. I haven't made a cheesecake since I was 16 because I've never had a springform pan before (I made the one when I was 16 in a pan borrowed from my friend's family, then gave them the cheesecake). We got this for our wedding and I figured it was high time to break it in.



I was quite pleased with how easily the cheesecake came out of the pan.



Here are the apples that went on top. They were the most delicious part of the cheesecake. Apples + butter + sugar = yum.



And here's the caramel I made for the top. I cooked it a little longer than I should have - the sugar mixture went from clear to caramel colored pretty quickly. It tasted a wee bit burnt, but not so much that we couldn't eat it. I failed to take a picture of everything all put together, so just imagine that the beautiful picture on Peabody's blog is what ours looked like.

I was pretty happy with how it turned out, especially seeing as how I completely messed up Lorne's lemon meringue birthday pie the previous week.



It looks normal here, doesn't it? But then Lorne cut it open, and this was what was hiding under the pretty meringue:



Lemon meringue soup. I missed the step in the recipe that said to pre-bake the crust, so the crust was all mushy and the lemon goo got all goopy and gross. Blagh. In my defense, I've only made two pies before in my entire life, and both of those were many years ago. I'm more of a cake person.