I'm B-a-a-a-a-ck

...and now that I have an over-equipped kitchen at my disposal, I can't keep myself from cooking. (It also helps that I no longer have five classes with behemoth reading lists to occupy my time, at least for the next month.)

To herald my return to the deluxe world of KitchenAids and convection ovens, my parents decided to host a Christmas cocktail party and put me in charge of appetizers, cocktails, and desserts (much as I would have liked to round out the alphabet with breads, I wasn't even the one to buy baguette, much less bake any). So last week, in between writing twenty-five pages of term papers and parsing forty sentences of an obscure Central American language, I came up with a fancy title for myself ("First Notes and Finishing Touches, Plus Booze") and plotted my menu: adorably portioned miniature desserts. And the morning after I came back, at two a.m., I rolled out of bed and into an apron and got started, with six hours of sleep in three days, and made these:

Chocolate Soufflé Cupcakes with White Chocolate Mint Mousse

My mother, blessed woman that she is, even bought me a one-pound bar of bittersweet chocolate for the job. With almonds. Which meant that I spent ten minutes in front of a pan of melted chocolate fishing out nuts. (Never fear, those almonds found a second home on squares of French chocolate cake.) But they turned out beautifully, no? The secret, it turns out, to getting your parents' neighbors to beg you to open up a pastry shop is to whip half a pound of white chocolate with heavy cream and sliver dark chocolate on top.

The second item on the menu was a plate of individual pavlovas with berry sauce.

Pavlova is basically a fancy name for a huge meringue, all dolled up in pretty whipped cream and a dressing of fresh fruit. Australia and New Zealand have nearly come to blows over which country invented the dessert, which was named after Anna Pavlova - though how a Russian ballerina is related to a big puff of sugar and fat I'm not sure.

My real labor of love was this cake, though - three layers of decadent pistachio, marzipan (homemade!), and chocolate ganache. I sliced open my index finger leveling this thing, but it was all worth it because I got to taste the scraps of cake. Somehow I managed to decorate it one-handed; the pink marzipan rose on top was not colored with blood, thank you very much.

Leftovers, what leftovers? I had one cupcake and one teeny, tiny sliver of cake left for the next day, testament to the glorious success of the party. The bottle of homemade Irish liqueur I made surely didn't hurt. I still have half a bottle of it left, though,which I'll have to dispose of somehow.... maybe tomorrow I will post the recipe.