Thanksgiving Baking

I know it's December, and almost Christmas. House is decorated, cards have been sent, gifts are piling up to be wrapped and I've been gingerbreading.

But all that stuff has taken time and I baked some cool stuff for Thanksgiving that deserves a blog post! I short changed a lot of my fall baking treats that were pretty cool so I'm trying not to do that again!

So here's the last of the fall baking, keeping it short and sweet. :o)

1) Pumpkin brownie bites


I baked and pureed my own pumpkins this year (and I still have a freezer full of pumpkin puree). So I meant to bake these to bring to Dave's family that was our second stop on Thanksgiving but my bottom pan burned and I had to pry them out of the pan. :o( The top pan, however, was delicious.

It's a fabulous chocolate brownie "swirled" with a pumpkin cheesecake. My recommendation if you're going to make them is to make the pumpkin portion first then the chocolate portion. My chocolate portion thickened as it cooled and made swirling difficult.

2) Pumpkin cookies withe maple icing


Seeing as I couldn't bring only 8 or so good pumpkin brownie bites for Thanksgiving, I got up early that morning and in addition to baking an apple pie, I baked these pumpkin maple cookies!

I did have maple extract on hand as the recipe calls for and I have to say this icing was orgasmic. If I ever make it again I'll try it with real maple syrup (we bring back a high grade from Maine every year), but the extract gives it some serious flavor. I had a ton left over though and couldn't bring myself to just get rid of it, so I put it in some tupperware and brought it to my mom's to set out at dessert for Thanksgiving. It has the potential to be to all foods what bacon has become to desserts. My uncle tried it on pie and I think my cousin put it over her ice cream.

Anyway, these cookies have a nice pumpkin flavor and also stayed nice and cakey. Love em.

3) Apple Cake


Once back from Maine I had some apples left over from my epic apple pie baking. So I baked up an apple cake from my Totally Tea Time cook book! I really love tea, and going to tea rooms, the whole tea experience. In fact I'd love to own a tea room, I think I'd be great at it, anyway... I got this book as a gift awhile back and thought I'd make some apple scones but this used up far more apples. ;o)

Came out pretty good, I thought I'd frost it with some swiss meringue apple butter frosting I had in the freezer but I don't think that's the point of apple cake and it was good without it anyway. :o)

That's it! That's all my fall baking blogged. On to the next adventure!

The Apple Pie Post

The holidays are busy, cut me some slack... See the flickr page for Christmas photos until the blog catches up with the holiday baking and crafting! There are new photos of my epic gingerbread adventure and crafty holiday cards!

But this post is about apple pie! I made two apple pies this Thanksgiving. One for my fam and one we traveled to Maine with for Thanksgiving with Dave's fam. Here's the one that came to Thanksgiving at my mom's house with us.


I made my first unsupervised apple pie this year (featured in this post of fall baking) and it turned out so well, my mom asked me to handle the apple pie for Thanksgiving. I really was very pleased with it. I got the recipe from a book my mom photo copied for me, Aunt Jenny's Pies Husbands Like.

It's all about how to hook a man with pie, I think it was published in the 50s? So it has to be good. ;o) And the pie did go over well with everyone who tried it! It makes a big deal about the "water whip" method for pie crust that involves pouring boiling water over something called Spry...the same thing as shortening...and then adding the flour etc. I used butter flavored crisco and it did turn out lovely.

I also used my William Sonoma fall pie crust cutters!


Cute! I colored the dough with different color food coloring and cut the leaves out of that. I'm such a nerd. Here's pie 2 that went all the way to Maine. I came home after Thanksgiving and made this that night (hence the bad lighting) since we were leaving the next morning, so glad I had something to bring though, and again everyone seemed to enjoy it. :o)


My crust got a little burnt although I covered it with foil towards the end. I hear there are pie crust protectors that take care of this, but I have yet to see one.

I had some extra pie crust (I had to double Aunt Jenny's recipe for my giant pie dish) so I made some cinnamon and sugar pie crust swirl cookies. My mom and grandma always made these when I was younger with left over pie dough. We snacked on them in the car on the way up to Maine. :o)