Thai Sweet Potato & Carrot Soup with Gluten-Free Orange & Almond Cake

Every three to four weeks I get the lovely privilege to host for our small Bible Study group where I get to treat my friends to supper and a dessert. We eat, we pray, we fellowship with each other, we grow closer to God. It is a wonderful time and I really enjoy making food for others. Last week I hosted this meal, but sadly only one friend could make it. We ate like Kings that night. Starting again this week, knowing that everyone but one friend was going to make it, I madly searched online for a new recipe to try. I have a problem, I always want to try out new recipes when I have guests over. The good side is that I know I have real judges - they will let me know if something is horrible. The bad side - I don't know the recipe - what if it fails and I am stuck with nothing to serve to my friends? It is a risk I am willing to make, and the recipe I want to share with you was a beautiful, delicious risk. So delicious in fact, and I was so tired after slaving away in the kitchen, that I forgot to take an abundance of photographs. I managed a few and I hope that it will still make you drool. 

The Thai Sweet Potato & Carrot Soup recipe is here. It was a very tasty soup. I doubled the recipe without doubling the spice (as I wasn't sure how spicy everyone's pallets were) and I forgot to roast the peanuts for garnish. I served this soup with a homemade make-yourself (where you can add whatever ingredients you want to the salad - some people don't like certain items so I always like prepping veggies and other items and have guest build their own salads) salad and a cheese biscuit. I am a huge fan of cilantro and I loved adding it to the soup, my husband was a huge fan of the lime and thought that it added to the soup! If you love eating soup in the winter as much as I do, then I highly recommend this recipe!

For the dessert, I made a Gluten-Free Orange & Almond Cake with Mascarpone Cheese.  I didn't get any pictures of the finished product aside from a half eaten piece my husband had. Oops. One of my friends is gluten-free and I wanted to make a dessert that everyone could enjoy. This cake was a lot of fun to make as I have never boiled a whole orange before. The cake was extremely moist and I enjoyed the amount of orange flavour it had. I had mascarpone cheese on the side so that the cake could be dipped into it if so desired, and on top of the cake I crumbled almond slices to make it look prettier. I really wish I had gotten a better picture, I am sorry, but it was delicious. Trust Me. I am a huge fan of orange flavoured cake and a huge fan that this was gluten free and it didn't taste like a gluten free dessert. At least, not in my opinion.

The photography was definitely lacking on this dinner, but maybe that is a good testimony to the dish? I was so excited to eat and enjoy the food that I forgot to take pictures ... yes, I will go with that excuse. ha. I hope you all drooled a little during this post. If there are any recipes that I post on my blog that you try out, I would love to hear what you think about them! AND if you have a recipe that you think my Bible Study group would like, I would love for you to leave me a link to the recipe down below! Any help I can get for recipe ideas would be much appreciated.