T Stands for Sweet Treats

 Hi everyone. It is T day again, and I hope everyone's had a lovely week since last time we met with our drinks and chatter. Last week was busy for me, and add to that we had some gorgeous late summer weather. It was so nice I took a few long leisurely walks and did a lot of outside pre-winter clean up. But no raking, as most of the leaves haven't come down yet.

A few weeks back I took a road trip out to King Arthur flour to get my fall and winter baking specialty supplies. For those of you who aren't familiar with King Arthur, they are one of the oldest flour manufacturers in the US. (Maybe even the oldest.) Their main offices are  in Norwich, Vermont, which is just  over the border from western New Hampshire. There they offer baking classes and have a really nice baking specialty store. I was out of the "seed crunchies" that I add to my pizza dough. and I also wanted a couple of bags of specialty flour that I can't regularly  in the grocery store. Plus, it's fun to see what kind of baking supplies and equipment they have on the shelves. I will say their prices have gone up since last November when I last visited, but then where haven't prices gone up?

And yes I could have mail ordered my supplies, but sometimes it is just more fun to go shopping.😀

I usually leave fairly early in the morning as it is a bit of a road trip, and this time I had some pretty foliage to enjoy as well as listening to my book. When it was time to drive home it was time for lunch, so I hit the cafe they have. You can buy salads and sandwiches, and they also have (of course) a bakery. Everything is made on site, so it's fun to see what they have out to drool over. 

I decided to skip the salad or sandwich and instead bought a big brownie. The other treats looked yummy, but the brownie looked less messy to eat while I drove. (I had some other stops to make on the way home and wanted to start driving back.)  Plus this brownie was made with rye flour, and I wanted to see how it tasted. (By the way it was delicious. I've made rye flour chocolate chip cookies and now I need to figure out the ratios of rye to white flour for brownies.)

I also got myself a large chai latte tea to go, and that's my ticket to T day this week over at Bleubeard's and Elizabeth's blog.

This past Sunday was my husband's birthday, and I made him a birthday cake.

Awhile back  I picked up this 2 pack of a King Arthur flour cake mix at the store. It still had one mix left in the box. It's a bit less work than making a homemade cake, but I wanted to use it before the package ended forgotten in the cabinet and out of date. I do think this mix tastes much more like a homemade cake than some of the other big brand name cake mixes you can buy. 

My husband's favorite cake is a Boston Cream Pie, which if you're not familiar with this dessert, is really not a pie. It's a vanilla cake (often a sponge), filled with creme patisserie and covered in a chocolate glaze.

I did make my own creme patisserie and chocolate glaze. The filling wasn't oozing out until my husband cut the cake (because I made the recipe for an  8 inch cake and mine was only 6 so there was a lot of cream-but why not enjoy it?), and yes my chocolate glaze, although nice and shiny, wasn't smooth. I'll use the excuse that since it was a dark day my lighting wasn't good  enough in the kitchen to see the waves in the glaze-smile. Oh well. It tasted yummy and that's what really matters.

I hope I didn't make anyone drool as much as I am looking at all the photos of the sweets in this post. 

Have a happy T day and week ahead.