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via The Consumerist by Chris Morran on 10/29/10
If a simple slice of pie or cake just isn't complicated enough after you've gourged on the chicken-in-a-duck-in-a-turkey poulty Voltron known as turducken, then here's a dessert for you. Meet Pummple Cake, which combines two kinds of fruit pies (apple and pumpkin) with two kinds of cake (vanilla and chocolate) into one divine mess -- and at only 1,800 calories a slice.
From MSNBC:
The Flying Monkey, located in Philadelphia's famous Reading Terminal Market, bakes this dessert-lover's fantasy from scratch over the course of two days. It starts with the pies, which it par-bakes. The half-cooked pumpkin pie is dipped into chocolate cake batter and baked. The apple pie and vanilla cake get the same treatment and are baked on top of the chocolate cake. Its massive size means that it spends hours in the oven. Homemade buttercream is then -- literally -- the icing on the entire cake.
Flying Monkey sells slices -- intended to feed four -- for $8. A full Pummple Cake requires 72 hours advance notice and will run you $75.
Watch what happens when Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb -- who thinks 1,800 calories is "a day and a half's worth of food" -- come face to face with the creation:
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Cooking with your iPhone is a lot tastier when you have the right recipes and culinary techniques. Here's our list of the best apps for turning your iPhone into a pocket sous chef.
Cook's Illustrated has become a favorite lately, being a free and extremely rich iOS cookbook filled with useful features in an elegant interface. It's exactly the app you're looking for if you're an Apple geek and you like to cook. Finding a recipe is pretty straightforward, in that you can search or browse, but once you find what you're looking for you have lots of great features to make the cooking or baking process a lot easier. Like many cooking apps, you have the requisite shopping list feature. What's also really nice is that Cook's Illustrated has a timer built-in to each recipe so your iPhone can keep you on task. What's really great about Cook's Illustrated, however, is that recipes come with videos to show you how it's all done. Many recipes are provided free of charge, but a subscription is necessary to unlock all the member's only recipes. What you get for free is great, however, so you get a pretty good test run before deciding whether or not you want a subscription.
The free Epicurious app draws from Epicurious' recipe database, given you tons of great options based on whatever you want. The app has a bunch of filters that allow you to find a recipe based on whatever strikes your mood. Randomly, I went for an American-style apple and bacon dish and ended up with ten options, so you're able to be a little unusual and still end up with quite a few choices. If you're looking for something really specific, you can always search for it. Like most cooking apps these days, Epicurious makes it easy to get what you need at the store by providing a shopping list feature, plus if you need to consult any recipe that you like you can always add it to your favorites to find it fast.
I've been using the Allrecipes.com web site for many years and have found lots of great recipes—so long as they were highly rated. Dinner Spinner does a great job because you basically pick out what meal you want (it does a lot more than just dinner), the dominant ingredient, and how long you want to spend making it. Once you've done that you can view any matches it can find—it doesn't always find a recipe, like if you select a 20 minute beef dessert. Once it does it'll start you off with an option and then you can swipe through to see the rest. If this is too basic and you want more options, you can grab the 
Wait, what? Evernote's not a cooking app! It isn't, but if you've ever needed a cross-platform, recipe-syncing solution you need Evernote. It's great for keeping track of recipes you gather from all over, but it's also an excellent shopping list manager. You can add check lists to Evernote, so it's really easy to build a quick grocery list. If you really want to save some time, you can create ingredient checklists to add to your recipes and just copy and paste them into a new note each time you go shopping. Put a few recipes in that note and you've got a grocery list in just a few minutes. Evernote's not really a cooking app, specifically, but it's free and it's versatile enough to warrant a spot on this list.
Although Whole Foods is sometimes known for being pricey, they've got a free app with a lot of great recipes. It's especially helpful if you have—or are cooking for anyone with—special dietary needs. Recipes can be easily sorted for vegans, people with gluten allergies, or for anyone just looking for something that's low fat, high in fiber, or any of the many other options the app provides. One of the neatest features of the app, however, is you can tell it a few ingredients you have on hand and you'll be provided with recipes that use them. Oh, and of course, the Whole Foods app has a shopping list, too. Would it be a cooking app without one?
Based on the kitchen bible 
Dusting kits like those made by Swiffer are nice, but are disposable and end up costing quite a bit of money. Here's how to ditch the store-bought products and make your own pre-treated, reusable dust cloth out of an old t-shirt.
Just cut the t-shirt into pieces and soak it in a glass container filled with half a cup of hot water, two tablespoons of olive oil, and the juice from 2 lemons. Put the cotton pieces of the t-shirt in the solution, cover, and let it sit for 2 hours. After drying, they'll pick up dust like nobody's business, keeping your tables, electronics, and everything else sparkly clean. Hit the link for more detailed instructions, and let us know your favorite anti-dust tricks in the comments.
It's been a long time since you had to ask your kitchen-accomplished relatives to hand down great recipes or spend hours sifting through books looking for gems. Here's a look at five of the best tools for finding great recipes online.
The time you're spending mincing and prepping your ingredients? The money you're spending on pre-sliced vegetables and salad dressing? Food writer and home cooking authority Mark Bittman tells us how to stop inflicting such pain in the kitchen and just get cooking.
Lifehacker: What are some things you've seen home cooks do that are really unnecessary? What kinds of pain do we put on ourselves that's unnecessary?
Lifehacker: What else makes cooking go faster for you, when you don't have all day?
Mark Bittman: I end up using my plastic mandoline slicer a lot.
The immersion blender is my other big tool ... mostly for making vinaigrettes. You plug it in, mix up your ingrdients, and you get a really good emulsion, one that lasts for a week in the fridge and tastes better than the stuff at the store.
Lifehacker: What's your latest food or cooking obsession? Are you working on your next book topic?
