Holiday Cheer

It's pouring rain, cold, and windy as all get out. If it was the weekend, I'd curl up with a cup o' joe and a good book...
...Yeah right, who am I trying to kid? But if I was also sick and unable to move from the sofa or the bed then I would totally do that.
I can hardly believe Thanksgiving is next week. My favorite part of the holidays...okay any day, is dessert. I like eating sweets. I like baking them even more, especially the pretty ones. This is what's on the menu for next Thursday:

I took a trial run at this Cranberry trifle the other day for a fall potluck. I decided to make the Martha Stewart vanilla pound cake rather than buy one at the store. It calls for a load of butter and sugar, but I figured I'd be sharing with a crowd, so it would be okay to splurge.
There I was, making a cranberry compote, whipping up a cream filling, and baking a pound cake. Everything seemed to be going smoothly, but this is ME we're talking about.
When my cake was due to come out of the oven. I poked it here and poked it there with a toothpick, and each time it came out clean so I took it out of the oven and put it on a wire rack to cool. In the mean time, I went back to creaming my cream cheese, ginger, whipping cream, and brown sugar. By the time I had my stiff peaks and returned to my cake, I found a mess waiting for me. The cake had sprung a leak. Evidently the very middle was still a bit soupy. A puddle of batter was continuing to build under the cooling rack, so I did the only logical thing. I scooped the thing back together and returned the whole mess to the oven. Luckily, in a trifle, the cake layers don't have to be pretty. It baked itself more or less back together then I broke it into a dozen pieces in order to layer it in the trifle. This may be the new future for many of my baking projects...
This has been another episode of "Baking with Bobbi."