Romy's Baking and Cake Decorating

A very pretty caketop. This past Spring we finally had a tree company come prune our apple tree.  It's very tall and sprawling and the low branches were making it impossible to mow underneath.  We love this tree that sits just outside our sunroom and provides really nice shade on hot afternoons.  It usually yields a handful of apples that the squirrels take.  But after the nice haircut it got, our apple tree went crazy this year!  There were so many apples, enough for the squirrels to pilfer a few and for us to pick a lot. It's a shame we couldn't get to the high branches but even in spite of that we had quite a bounty.  And as if that weren't enough, we came home with a bag of apples from the trees that grow near the entrance to our condo in Vermont.  We don't usually take any of those, but this is the last year we have the condo, and it brought back memories of picking apples there with my mom when Bubby was a toddler.  So those were some specia...

Pineapple Upside Down Cake. On a recent nice summer evening my French conversation group met at our house for a Summer potluck.  This Summer has flown by, and we've hardly had a chance to host people on our patio. I tried to organize something with this group a couple of weeks ago, but had to cancel due to the weather. I rescheduled and had amazing luck with beautiful weather on the new day! I considered making eclairs, because with 12 people coming it would have been an opportunity to make a large-batch dessert and they would have enjoyed it. But ultimately, I realized I wasn't going to have time. So looking at old recipes I hadn't made in a while, I decided to try Pineapple Upside Down Cake . It's very good, summery, and an old-fashioned recipe you don't see often. I used Sally's Bake Blog  recipe . I'd used it before, and when I checked her blog it had been updated.  I went with the new version, using cake flour and egg whites only to make a less-dense ca...