Someone Else's Baking

I've been lucky enough the past few days to have someone else do my baking for me! It began with John baking his first cake ever, the Caramel Banana Pecan Ice Cream Cake from Vive Le Vegan. I have loved ice cream cakes since I was a kid, and thought this would be a fun thing to try! Here is John mixing the wet ingredients with the dry for the bottom cake layer...



We opted to use chocolate soy ice cream instead of vanilla, this was a good call I believe. It paired well with the vanilla cake, pecan, and caramel sauce. Here is John scooping the softening ice cream over the layer over bananas and pecans.... looks like the perfect finger licking opportunity.



And here is the finished ice cream cake! I don't think we let it sit quite long enough in the freezer, hence the fast melting ice cream, but we still both devoured our own pieces in record time. Not sure how long this will last in the freezer, but my guess is not long! (I'm sure you're wondering, what happened to cutting out sweets....)


Before enjoying half melted ice cream cake, we went to celebrate my 28th birthday at Ruggles, one of our favorite more upscale Houston restaurants (I even went dinner there before prom back in the day). To start off with I had my favorite green salad, which I have my own version that I love to make at home. ( yes, I know this isn't baked... but cmon, give me a break)


Follow that up with a vegan veggie pizza topped with plenty of basil, spinach, zucchini, artichoke hearts, mushroom, onion, and asparagus.... and you've got yourself a meal!!



And finally, the last baked good that I didn't have to make myself I ordered from Celine of Have Cake Will Travel on etsy (you must know by now that I'm addicted). The cookies arrived right on my birthday and even included a sweet birthday card to go along with the sweet cookies :-) I ordered a combination of coconut chocolate chip and chocolate peanut butter fudge. She even threw in a few chocolate chai snickerdoodles as a little extra! My fave had to be the choco pb cookies, they were HUGE and moist and absolutely chocolatey, peanut buttery good. If you get a chance, go order some yourself!!