Fall baking

I was on call yesterday for work, so couldn't venture too far from the house. It was a perfect fall day - crisp breeze, mid-50s, and sunny. What a great day to bake! I made three new recipes - yep, spent the whole afternoon in the kitchen - this is really the only time of year that I seem to break out my baking skills, so might as well pack it in while I can....once spring hits, it's over!

So I made Zucchini cupcakes with cream cheese frosting, bananas foster bread, and homemade twix bars....I didn't take a ton of pictures while baking, but grabbed a few here and there....

#1: Zucchini cupcakes - from MarthaStewart.com, I wasn't sure about making cupcake with zucchini and Mr. LazyDog definitely wasn't convinced but figured they were worth a try since I had one lonely zucchini left from my garden....These ended up great! I added a 1/4C ground flax seed and used pecans. Here are the before and after pictures:

Once they were frosted, Mr. LazyDog was sold! I have a feeling these will be headed to his office for his co-workers enjoyment, since I don't work until Wednesday (and hopefully I won't eat them all by the time he gets home!)

#2: Bananas Foster Bread - this ended up being fantastic! It's from the October 2010 issue of Cooking Light. I used dark rum instead of cognac - yummy, super moist - delicious!! This may become a staple in my house - I love bananas foster - even almost set my friend Lori's kitchen on fire making it once (let's just say a little 151 goes a long way!!!) Luckily, they still let me in the house and even back in the kitchen after that!

#3 Homemade Twix Bars - found these on one of the blogs I follow through Google Reader (I'm sorry, I can't remember which one - the recipe is from King Arthur Flour - Thousand Dollar Bars). These were much easier to make than I expected. I used square caramels found in the Halloween candy section for the caramel layer and I used half and half instead of heavy cream, since that was already in the fridge. I used light chocolate candy melts from Wilton for the chocolate layer. I decided to leave them in the pan and cut them into squares once set, instead of cutting into Twix sized bars and dipping individually - less work for me!