I made dessert

The night before, I made pumpkin pie, my "specialty", and a pumpkin-orange cake from Cooking Light that Dad had requested. This was the very first multi-layer cake I had ever made, and also my first attempt at frosting (it was cream cheese) from scratch.

The cake definitely turned out well, but was an altogether too complicated recipe with overly exotic ingredients, as I find most things from Cooking Light to be -- they wanted you to use egg substitute instead of egg; the topping was also supposed to include the seeds of two pomegranates, which I don't even know how to cut open; and then it called for cake flour, and we couldn't find cake flour ANYwhere, not even at professional-chef-haven Whole Foods. Instead of all these, I used a real egg, no pomegranate, and whole-wheat pastry flour (better for you anyway) -- and it still turned out great. We had a good laugh about how this cake, which required a whole stick of butter, was in Cooking Light. Dad noted that, in order to be "light", this cake was supposed to serve 14 people. He thought they should have added at the end, "Serve with a Diet Coke."