Samantha's Marble Cake

I've never understood why you would choose chocolate or vanilla when you can have both!

And then I kind of wandered away for two weeks. Sorry about that! Life happened, and I was kind of running on fumes for a while when it came to even thinking about doing anything with my blog. I'll be getting to answering comments shortly.

Anyway, in case you've been under a rock for the last month, some exciting new developments have occurred in the world of American Girl! The historical characters have got a fresh new look that I, for one, am very excited about, and while I'm pretty late to the party, I figured what better way to celebrate than make a cake?

And considering who made a pretty impressive comeback with the relaunch, it seemed only fitting for Samantha to host this post!

Well, that, and I really wanted to make a marble cake.

Julie's Ice Cream Pie

This might have been a bigger hit than the skillet cookie!

My mom's birthday was last Tuesday, and since I like baking and doing nice things for people since they do so much for me, I asked her what she'd want for a birthday treat. She surprised me a little by saying she didn't want cookies, she didn't want pie, she didn't want cake...

She wanted ice cream. And she had a really cool idea about how to make that happen.

What follows is a totally improvised recipe that's both really simple and very customizable. I apologize in advance for introducing it to you, because I've already had several requests to make it again, and the leftovers have been calling my name all week long. Seriously, it's a problem. But I guess that's what happens when you put ice cream, cookies and other delicious things together and stick it in the freezer for a while.

So, why is Julie hosting this post?

It's Our One Year Anniversay!

We've certainly expanded since last year!

One year ago today, I published my first official post on A Peek Into the Pantry, and as promised, we're doing a slightly different kind of post today. I thought about what I wanted to do for our anniversary post. For a while, I wanted to do some kind of recipe, but couldn't settle on a good one. Should it be a Kirsten recipe because she was my first doll? Should it be a family recipe we're all really fond of and dying to figure out a way to incorporate into the blog?

Then I got the idea that it might be fun to do a kind of retrospective. Instead of focusing on one new recipe, I wanted to take a look back and think about what I learned, what people enjoyed, what people really didn't, and where we want to go moving forward. This is what resulted! Instead of just giving you guys my thoughts about the blog, I polled my most frequent taste testers and supporters in the blogging process about their favorite dishes and ones that just didn't fly

So hopefully this will be a fun way to take a step back and look back on the last year, while also looking into the future to see where we wind up this time next year. If not, I guess we'll have to come up with a new idea for next year's anniversary!