A few months ago, Hungry Bear favorited this cinnamon-apple cake on foodgawker and she finally made it for our Lunar New Year celebration this year. It's not Chinese or Vietnamese in any way, but Hungry Bear didn't want to make anything too elaborate and we had two apples to use up. So that's how a cinnamon-apple cake got served at a New Year's party with Chinese hot pot.

I was working that day when Hungry Bear was baking the cake and I wasn't paying much attention. She told me that it was a Cooking Light recipe, but she was making it full-fat because she hates margarine and fat-free cream cheese. I honestly wasn't very excited about the cake. I don't get too excited unless there's chocolate involved.

We've been chocolate blackout cake obsessed since the first time we made it. The cake and pudding are fantastic on their own, but combine the two and you have the best chocolate cake ever!

The last few times we've made this dessert we skipped the icing because it's very temperamental. Instead, we doubled the pudding and used all four layers of cake. Who's not going to like twice as much homemade chocolate pudding?

To prove how good this cake is, all you need to do is take a look at the last picture in the slideshow. That's our friend, Jane, having a piece while in early labor. I'm not kidding! We planned on cooking for Jane and Mark back in September. But, she started having contractions early in the morning so we figured dinner was off. Hungry Bear and I decided to make dinner anyway since we had already gone shopping.

First off, sorry for the lack of posts, but foodgawker has been "eating" up all of our time. We hope to get back on a more frequent schedule soon. Second, we had our one year blogiversary at the beginning of the month, but sadly we didn't get chance to post about it. Hungry Bear did make this incredible chocolate blackout cake to celebrate the milestone.

She used a blackout cake recipe from Sweet Stuff: Karen Barker's American Desserts, but substituted bittersweet Valrhona chocolate for the semisweet. The cake is absolutely delicious, but it's time consuming to make because of the many steps... coffee brewing, pudding creating, cake baking, cookie crumbling and icing making. We loved the pudding and the cake part. There was an extra layer of unused cake and it was fantastic by itself.

The icing tasted good, but we didn't like the hardened texture and it was difficult to work with. If we had to make it again, we would use Gale Gand's fudgy chocolate frosting instead. Or we would skip the icing, double the pudding quantity, use all four cake layers and top it with pudding.

Still, it was one of the best chocolate cakes we've made and definitely worth the effort!

Carrot cake again? I know, I know, how much carrot cake can someone eat? Well, I've eaten entirely too much of it in the last two weeks. After Hungry Bear made her fantastic carrot cake, I wanted to make a light version while her normal, full-fat version was still fresh on our minds.

The light carrot cake recipe was adapted from Cook's Illustrated (CI). I used all the CI fat reducing steps...

• Reduced the amount of oil from 1 1/2 cups to 1/2 cup
• Reduced the number of eggs from 4 to 3
• Used Philadelphia Neufchatel reduced-fat cream cheese
• Lowered the sugar quantity in the frosting

Then, I kept the majority of the normal cake's other ingredients to keep the flavors similar, which means pineapples and coconut flakes were included.

Cook's Illustrated's light cream cheese frosting recipe uses 12 oz of reduced fat cream cheese and no butter. I didn't like the idea of buying two 8 oz boxes of low fat cream cheese and not use 4 oz. So, I modified the recipe to use 8 oz of cheese and added a little butter.

I love carrot cake. Of all the non-chocolate cakes, it's probably my favorite one. When Hungry Bear gave me the choice between carrot cake and chocolate turtle cake, I still chose the carrot cake. I wanted to keep it uncomplicated this past Sunday night, and what's better than a simple carrot cake with cream cheese frosting?

Hungry Bear used a recipe from an old roommate, Roz. You know, the kind of recipe that's written on an index card and handed down. The cake contains pineapples and coconut flakes, which we both enjoy in our carrot cake. Hungry Bear mentioned Cook's Illustrated (CI) pooh poohed the use of canned crushed pineapples, toasted coconut and wheat germ in The New Best Recipes. In fact, they were "unanimously voted out", but CI approved raisins and nuts as options... um, no thanks. I love Cook's Illustrated, but sometimes their decisions seem completely arbitrary. With all due respect to CI, Hungry Bear and I unanimously voted pineapples and coconut flakes back in!