Baking for Thanksgiving

Each holiday reminds me how nice it is to be close to be family.  For this year's Thanksgiving dinner, I offered to bake desserts and rolls so that my brother-in-law and his wife doesn't have to prepare everything.

 I baked two kinds of rolls: sweet potato rolls (my fave for any fall occasions) and fluffy dinner rolls (pictured below). 

 For desserts, I baked apple-cranberry tartlets with filling I stored in my freezer for about two weeks.  I also wanted to please chocoholics with a rich chocolate cake to die for.  It was not easy to find the chocolate cake recipe I wanted to make, so I made up a recipe like I always do.

 To add extra moisture to the cake, the cake layers were soaked with 1/4 cup Kahlua (yum!).  There's usually some kind of alcohol in my desserts.  A rich chocolate-hazelnut filling/icing and cookies made with leftover short dough from tartlets were used to finish up the cake.

 Arizona-themed cake.  When I have to finish garnishing my cake in someone else's kitchen, I try to make it as simple (but fun) as possible.  I could have done a better job decorating the cake, but, hey, my nieces and nephews liked it.

 Scraps from the cake layers and leftover icing were upcycled into mini-cakes.  The round cookies in the picture below were filled with apple-cranberry filling cooking juice that has been cooked down to a thick paste.  Nothing gets wasted in my kitchen!

Now I can start thinking about desserts for Christmas!