I have been cooking since I was maybe 10 or 11. Like most kids (I think), I started with mac and cheese out of the box, and moved on to cookies and tacos and hamburger helper. Since then, I have developed a love for Italian food, so pasta has played a big part in my cooking life more recently, along with the delicious panini. I loved to try to help my mom and grandma at holidays. I still do. My speciality is dessert. I make desserts for everyone's birthdays and the holidays all year. I love to make cheesecake for my boyfriend. Experimenting with different candies or toppings. I also love to experiment with sauces for pasta. Rachael Ray has some great recipes in her cookbooks. My mom made lots of different casseroles (hotdish in the midwest) when I was growing up. With four hungry, growing kids, you learn how to make the food budget strech. I am now trying to relive some of those days, by making some of my favorits for my bf. Something we still eat during the holiday season is lefse. Its like a crepe but made with potatoes. Its good with butter and sugar, or just plain, too. De-lish! Alfredo sauce. Its a triumph and a tragedy actually. I am terrible at thickening things, with cornstarch or flour, so I generally have issues with my alfredo sauce. I am horribly afraid of scorching my cream. Once though, maybe the 3rd time I made it, I added too much cornstarch, and my sauce started to get chunky and thick. After stirring to get the cornstarch moved through, everything turned out perfectly. It was fabulous! I tried to make a Princess cake for my 17th birthday. Its a traditional cake for a girl's 16th birthday in Denmark, but it was too late for 16 for me, so 17 would have to do. (BTW my family has danish roots.) Its a layered cake made from scratch, which I had never done before, with marzipan for the outside. I am a procrastinator by nature, and this cake had many different elements. It had the cake, one normal layer and one cut in half, a soaking solution, cream filling, jelly, and marzipan. My cake was dry, despite the soaking solution, and my marzipan was a disaster. Dry and crumbly, it made the cake look terrible. I was very disappointed.