Pin-spiration Monday: Desserts!

So as some of you may or may not know, I'm not much of a baker. It requires precise measuring, which I never bother with, and it just takes too damn long. If I want to make cookies, I want them in like five minutes. Not 40. But our annual Friends Thanksgiving (or Friendsgiving) potluck party was this past weekend, and I felt like being adventurous. So I signed Matt and I both up for desserts, and told him not to worry about making anything because I'm just that awesome. (Ok, so maybe I didn't say it quite like that, but you get the picture.)

Anyway, I scoured Pinterest for about an hour (that is not a joke), looking for recipes and narrowing them down. And this is what I came up with (click the Pins to get the actual recipes):

Source: eatliverun.com via Emma on Pinterest

That sweet deliciousness you see before you is a cinnamon apple braid. It looked kind of complex, but the blogger swore it was super easy, so I thought I'd give it a shot. (I had a little snafu as I was making the dough...apparently, when the blogger over at Eat Live Run said to "mix the dough using an electric mixer on medium high speed," she must have forgotten to finish the sentence with "using a dough hook." Because I'll tell you, using a regular pair of eggbeater attachments did. not. cut it. The dough — which is fairly like bread dough — actually climbed up the mixer attachment and into the machine itself. Which was kind of like watching something out of a horror movie. So after a lot of yelling and Matt having to dump flour all over my hands and the mixer so I could continue, I somehow managed to produce this:


Sweet baby cheebus, that is hands down the most beautiful-looking baked good I've ever made. Usually my stuff tastes ok, but it's not very pretty. Because of the whole "I don't need to measure" thing. But this...this had me so excited, I had to take a picture before I baked it. And it looked even better after I took it out of the oven and glazed it:


My mouth is seriously watering. Luckily, I made two and there were leftovers (a lot of people brought a lot of food...and not many people made it all the way to dessert, haha), so I've been munching on this stuff for breakfast, after lunch and as a before-bed snack. An apple a day, right?

I also attempted to make mini-muffins using this recipe for snickerdoodle muffins:

Source: eatmedelicious.com via Emma on Pinterest

They tasted pretty good, but didn't really look like the photo. I think that maybe because I made small versions, I should have changed the baking temperature and/or length from the original recipe. Ah, well. They're really good bite-sized snacks. In fact, while I was editing these photos, I was pretty much compelled to run to the kitchen and pop one (yay leftoevers!) in my mouth before settling in to do the post part of this post. Yummm.