Good thing baking's my specialty!

K and I spent last weekend in PA visiting his family for Easter. I realized early last week that I wasn't at all excited about heading up there.

I guess it makes sense to not be gungho about driving so long (in one weekend) to spend the holidays with someone else's family, but they're my family too, even if they're not the family I grew up spending holidays with.

K's family definitely has different traditions than mine. Since they're Italian, pasta is pretty much always on the menu for holidays. That and antipasto. Both are delicious. Those are the staples, and all the others vary. Most of them, I haven't heard of.

It's very different from my family. With my family, there's always a ton of meat on the menu -- part of being a butcher's family. And my grandma and great-aunt make sure to keep us full with everything else. There are veggies, salad, iced tea (sweet, of course), and delicious rolls (though those aren't always homemade).

But the part I look forward to most is the dessert. The fruit salad in the red Jell-o (with nuts and other goodies) and the pies and the cookies (and fudge at Christmas!) that my grandma makes from scratch. They're all delicious, but the best one of all? Her peach cobbler. It's to-DIE-for delicious.

The dessert table at my grandma's house last Christmas. Everything here is made from scratch. And it doesn't even show her homemade fudge! (There's more!)

K's family, though, has no dessert table. When I spent Christmas with them last year, I couldn't wait to see what they had for dessert at the end of the meal. (Who doesn't look forward to Christmas dessert?)

Only there was none. There were only two tiny plates of tiny cookies. One looked like chocolate, though, and the other looked like some sort of cookie rolled in powdered sugar (my guess was a pecan cookie or something). I could handle those. Except that when I ate the cookies, the "chocolate" one was a pepper cookie, and the pecan powdered sugar cookie was something that tasted like black licorice (yuck!).

Last week, as I remembered that disappointment, I realized what my purpose was at K's family gatherings: to make dessert!

Obviously, I was going to go straight for the big guns: grandma's recipes. I could try her delicious peach cobbler, or go for her famous Italian cream cake. I let K make the decision, and he chose Italian cream.

I'd only made it once, and that was with Grandma when I went back home after Christmas in 2010 -- over a year ago.

It's one thing to bake with Grandma. It's quite another to try to bake like her ... and without her help.

So I did what I always do in this situation: Start baking, and keep the phone handy. I called my mom a couple times to decipher Grandma's recipe (She doesn't give all the instructions, and the recipe was in a weird order, since she had rattled it off to me off the top of her head.), and I called Grandma for the big stuff (Why can't I get my egg whites to look like meringue? How long do I have to wait to assemble the cake after it's done baking? [Can I wait a couple hours?] Will it be safe to store the cake in the garage when it's 50 degrees outside, since the refrigerator is full?).

In true MLIB style, I managed to make a pretty serious cosmetic error -- I was so worried about properly "folding in" my egg whites (now in proper consistency, thanks to my stand mixer and the super-duper high setting) to the rest of the batter that I forgot to fold in the pecans and coconut along with the egg whites. And I didn't realize it until I had already divided the cake batter evenly among the three cake pans.

My mom had stressed to me how important it is to properly fold the final ingredients. If you do it wrong, it evidently makes a pretty big difference. Do it right, and your cake is fluffy and fabulous.

So I sprinkled the coconut and pecans on top of the batter in each of the pans. I folded them into one of the pans, but I felt like it looked a bit flat. I just left the others and hoped they would somehow fall in as the cake baked.

And for extra measure, I added some pecans and coconut in the icing between the layers.

I was nervous the next day when it came time to cut into the cake and give it a try. K's family knew it was my first attempt at the cake and that I'd made the whole thing from scratch (including the icing).

The verdict?

Delicious. In fact, my FIL couldn't believe I'd never baked a cake (from scratch) before.

From now on, I'll never have to ask what I can bring for the holidays with K's family!