How to Get Rid of Extra Pumpkin Without Really Trying

Welcome back friends! Today we solve the problem of me having half a can of pureed pumpkin left in my fridge. I don't have any real need for pumpkin in my life so the solution is more pumpkin cookies! And before you say, "But you just did that!" allow me to rationalize my decision. First off, I wasn't involved in every part of baking the pumpkin cookies last time. So, I denied you opportunities to laugh at my ineptitude. Secondly, this is totally a different recipe! This one is for ICED pumpkin cookies! So that makes it totally different. Obviously. And thirdly, I just felt like it. So there.

As I mentioned, this recipe is for Iced Pumpkin Cookies. This recipe is brought to you by Allrecipes.com and has some sufficiently vague directions for your entertainment. It's also kinda two recipes in one because I had to make the pumpkin cookies and then I had to make the glaze for the "iced" part. Uh oh. Who remembers the last time I had to make a glaze? To remind you, I ended up with an overly thin glaze that ROLLED off my brownie cups. So I think that this is a sufficient enough challenge for a week when I have a probability exam.

The first step was to combine the dry ingredients which I missed the opportunity to do last time. Uh, yeah, that was easy. Not much to report there. Next step was to cream the butter and sugar. Uh oh. I appear to be out of salted butter. Who runs out of butter? And there's no way I'm going out for butter so unsalted butter it is. Technically, the recipe didn't specify salted vs. unsalted but when I made a similar recipe previously, it specified salted. Hope they turn out ok. Next, I mixed in the pumpkin, egg, and vanilla. Other recipes I've followed are specific about the order that things are added in, particularly for wet ingredients, but this just seemed like a free for all of "Toss it all in! It'll be fine!" I'm already suspicious of recipes that aren't coming from cookbooks and this really isn't helping the cause.

Mix in dry ingredients. Check. "Drop on cookie sheet by tablespoonfuls; flatten slightly." Well, I tried. But the dough was pretty sticky so I ended up with slightly flattened, slightly spikey looking cookies that weren't the perfect hemisphere cookies displayed in the picture. No big deal though. Now bake cookies. Between baking batches of cookies, I spent my time trying to memorize probability proofs for my midterm tomorrow. Miserable as that was, at least my kitchen smells like sugar and spice and everything nice.

And now for the glaze. I was really really dreading this after last time. However, I followed the directions precisely, and when I was done I got a way more solid looking glaze than last time. I was told to "add milk as needed to achieve drizzling consistency" and am not entirely sure what that means but I did have to add a tiny bit of milk so that I didn't have gloppy drizzling. I was also told to drizzle the glaze with a fork. This...worked. I'm just as surprised as you are. This recipe was 100% smooth and flawless in execution. Sorry to disappoint all of you who enjoy reading about kitchen disasters but either I'm getting better at baking or this recipe was absurdly easy. I even got advanced with my drizzling technique:

Aren't they pretty? I tossed them in the fridge for a couple minutes to solidify the glaze before bring them to colloquium but other than that, flawless pumpkin cookies. Oh, also, I tasted one but I really don't like pumpkin cookies so I'm no judge of how good they are. I only really tasted it so I could say that I tasted it. I thought they were gross but my officemate just said they're delicious so I'm gonna go with what she said. Success!

Critical Reception:
I don't really have much to add about the baked goods from last time. My mom had some of the cranberry crisp and liked it (though she suggested that if I ever make it again to cut the sugar in half, which I totally agree with) and I brought the Fall shaped pumpkin cookies into my office and people have been slowly chipping away at them so I guess people like them. Or they're starving. I'm going to bring them to colloquium to let them be finished off today so maybe I'll have more to add after today. Sorry for being so boring today, but it has been just an uneventful week for baking. I'll try something really crazy next time, k?

A Disney Moment: Pinocchio

Ever since I was pretty young, I remember really hating Pinocchio. I found the “I Got No Strings” segment annoying and overly catchy and the whole thing was lacking in common sense to me. Then again, I was a good kid who was never once swayed away from going to school by a traveling marionette show. However, viewing the movie as an adult, I must say, it was a lot more appealing than I remember. There were still some pretty obvious problems including that Jiminy was not a terribly effective conscience and that the timeline of the story makes zero sense. I mean, how long was Pinocchio on Pleasure Island? It seems like the whole thing happens in about 24 hours but Geppetto manages to get himself (and his two pets) swallowed by a whale, leaving his cottage for spiders to take over with cobwebs in that time. I just don’t quite get it. On the other hand, the artwork of it is sheer beauty. I really took note of how detailed every little thing was in the film. I also thought that some of the camera angles (so to speak) were really interesting. The angles really jump around and the one that stuck out in my mind was when Pinocchio is skipping away with the two anthropomorphized animals that sell him to Stromboli. It wasn’t a shot from above exactly, nor was it on the plane of where the characters were. It was more like at a 45 degree angle to the action. It’s hard to explain. But it was cool enough for me to take note of it.

Let’s see, what else? Pinocchio’s still an idiot but being a newly made boy I guess that’s forgivable. Oh! How the hell was Jiminy breathing underwater for so long? It was literally aggravating me as I watched. I was ok with Pinocchio underwater because he’s made of wood (and even had the foresight to sink himself down with a rock because wood floats. Kudos for that one, Pinocch.) but poor Jiminy would have drowned several times over during their search for Monstro. Also, I’m pretty sure this is the movie that taught my sister the “but why?” response and I may never forgive Pinocchio for that. The bottom line though for me was that I’ll remember it as one of the most beautifully drawn films I have ever seen. I rank this one about even with Snow White (maybe slightly higher) and is still a classic. Plus, I respect any children’s film that uses the word “jackass” so freely and then uses the power of animation to turn it into a pun. 

Fall Baking with Friends!

Welcome back! So sorry for the excessive delay in posting but don't worry, there has still been baking happening! As a matter of fact, this post will be a double dose of baking! As in there were two projects being baked SIMULTANEOUSLY. Wow. And lest you think that I have that much skill, let me assure you, I had help. Two of my good friends from college came to visit last weekend and on Saturday we had a slight baking and cooking frenzy. So to all those people who think I live a lonely existence with nothing but baked goods to keep me company...nah, I can't make that leap. But I had company this weekend! Yay!

Not knowing if my friends want to be referred to by name, I shall henceforth refer to them as Thing 1 and Thing 2. Those names are more giggle worthy anyway. In a celebration of Fall, we all went apple picking on Saturday morning. We were going to go to the Merrow Corn Maze as well but alas, they're closed this season. Stupid not wanting the soil to erode and ruining my fun. Anyway, in anticipation of the many apples we'd be able to pick we knew we'd obviously have to bake something with apples. Thing 1 had a lovely family recipe for Cranberry Crisp with Autumn Fruit so we decided that would be appropriate for our Fall excursion. After consulting the recipe, we decided to also pick up a couple pears at the apple picking place for the recipe.

After picking some apples we went into the store/stand/whatever place to pay for our apples (and pears) and we browsed around the shop for a bit. Behold! There we found packs of three cookie cutters each. One such pack had a leaf shaped cookie cutter and a pumpkin shaped cookie cutter. After great debate over whether that pack was superior to the pack with a turkey and a maple leaf, Thing 1 decided to get the pumpkin cookie cutter which (obviously) meant we would have to make some pumpkin shaped pumpkin cookies as well. Once we arrived at home, we googled a recipe (because apparently none of my cookbooks like pumpkin cookies) and found one for Pumpkin Spiced Cutout Cookies. Since we already had our hearts set on the Cranberry Crisp, we decided to just make both, in addition to the dinner we were already planning. I'm still surprised we had enough bowls and tools for everything we cooked.

Let the baking/cooking commence!

I'm going to try to post chronologically because everything was kinda getting cooked/baked simultaneously and it was a bit confusing. So to start out, Thing 1 and Thing 2 began with chopping some veggies for our dinner. We decided on grilled cheese with white cheddar cheese, browned (but not quite carmelized) onions, green peppers and tomato. I'm not familiar with cooking any of that stuff, being less diverse with my tastes so I started in on the baking. First order of business was to peel a bunch of apples and the pears that we got. And, wonder of wonders, I had a peeler! Who knew? So with a happy music playlist we were chopping, slicing, and peeling happily in my kitchen. Doesn't that make for a lovely picture? The apple and pear peeling went pretty well for me. I didn't even slice any of my nails with the peeler (a common Thanksgiving potato-peeling hazard) so the next step was to chop 1.5 cups of cranberries. For those of you not familiar with cranberries, they're kinda tiny. So I'm not entirely sure how I was supposed to chop them (Thing 1 suggested not chopping them at all but I will not deviate from the recipe!) but I just sliced them in half and deemed them chopped. This took a pretty significant amount of time. By now, the stuff for the grilled cheeses was just about done cooking so it was almost dinner time. I decided to just finish the first step of the recipe and add the sugar, flour, and cinnamon to the fruit. Now, Thing 1 has made this recipe before so when she asked if I had added the 1 teaspoon of cinnamon, that should have been a good tip off that she was right and I was wrong. Instead I said, "No, the recipe calls for 2 tablespoons!" In my defense, I had just read the recipe and the wording was confusing. The directions say to add 2 tablespoons of the flour and cinnamon. I don't know why I took that to mean 2 tablespoons of cinnamon without checking the ingredient list but there you have it. So, we had extra cinnamon-y cranberry crisp and Thing 1, I apologize for thinking you were wrong. Silly me.

Here we pause to eat a delicious dinner. Yum. Thank you Things 1 and 2 for cooking me dinner in my own home.

Following our incredibly filling meal, we set to work on finishing up the Cranberry Crisp and starting on the pumpkin cookies. While I finished stirring up the fruit and sugar mixture, Thing 2 got to work on the crumb mixture to sprinkle over the fruit mixture. This involved rolled oats, brown sugar, and flour and then cutting butter into that mixture with a pastry fork, I mean, regular fork because I don't have a pastry fork. Oh, and nuts too. I almost forgot about the nuts. I can't really say much on this process because I was in no way involved in it. Which was probably good for me but bad for you, dear readers, because I bet you would've loved reading about me cutting butter into that mixture. While this was going on, Thing 1 was mixing together the dry ingredients for the pumpkin cookies. All of a sudden there were beautiful smells of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, etc. It was happy.

I transferred the fruit to the baking dish (which Thing 1 had graciously greased for me) and while I was waiting for the crumbly topping to go on top, I got to work on the wet ingredients for the cookies. I'm tellin ya, we were a well-oiled machine in the kitchen. Everybody was doing something. So I used my trusty mixer to cream the butter, add some (dark!) brown sugar, some sugar, an egg, vanilla, and of course, pumpkin. Thing 1 had finished her task by then and measured out the pumpkin for me, which included actually opening the can. Given my experiences with can openers, I felt very fortunate to have had help with the challenging tasks. The last step to preparing the dough for these cookies was to combine the spice mixture from earlier. Now you get some interesting directions, folks! I was supposed to swap out the wire whisk for the flat beater. Hahaha. Silly. Oh wait, but it has directions for if you had been using a hand mixer: You might want to mix the ingredients by hand with a wooden spoon. Well sure. Apparently I don't want to overmix at this stage. So fine, I got out a wooden spoon and mixed in the ingredients a third at a time. It wasn't so bad until the last third when the dough got pretty heavy and hard to mix. I eventually got it though. Mission accomplished. Now I just had to split the dough in half and wrap each half in plastic to chill in the fridge for about half an hour. At this point, the Cranberry Crisp was in the oven and we were left with nothing to do for half an hour.

Scrabble time!

After a rousing and challenging game of Scrabble (I should note, I bought Scrabble for $1.00 at a yard sale. Allow me to bask in that triumph for a moment.) we took the crisp out of the oven to cool and got to work rolling out the cookie dough to make delightful Fall shaped cookies. The dough gets really sticky once it starts to get even a little warm, which I learned the first time I rolled out the dough because I a) didn't use quite enough flour and b) didn't roll quite quickly enough. Lesson learned though: Thing 1 rolled the dough out the rest of the time and she's a pro. Sadly, I didn't have any cute Fall colored sprinkles or anything to put on the cookies but we did find sugar "in the raw" in my cabinet which was cute to decorate some of the cookies with. We all pitched in with cutting out the cookies so we had adorable leaf shaped and pumpkin shaped cookies baking in several batches. During this time, I learned of the magic of parchment paper and how it allows you to not make a mess on your baking pan while baking. There was a moment of hesitation and debate with the parchment paper over whether or not it would catch on fire if it was hanging over the edge of the pan but we solved that by just trimming the ends of the parchment paper. Yay! Then we had to actually bake them and put the remaining dough back in the fridge. While they baked, we deviated from Scrabble and played a lovely game of Yahtzee. Halfway through Yahtzee (which, by the way, was invented on a yacht, hence the name), we paused to make another batch of cookies. After the game, we tasted our lovely Cranberry Crisp pictured below:

It was very yummy but very sweet and as I was still full from dinner, I didn't eat a whole lot of it. There won't be a critical reception section on the Cranberry Crisp because it's one of those things that's kinda messy and I really didn't want to bring it anywhere but the counter of my kitchen. Suffice it to say that the Things and I enjoyed it and I sent a good chunk of it back home with them to share with other people who hopefully also enjoyed it.

And now some cookies:

The cookies were also good. We described them as "a hearty cookie" because they are certainly hearty, if not a bit heavy. I'm not crazy about pumpkin cookies myself so I had a small taste and it was good but not something I want to eat an entire cookie of. These cookies will definitely end up being shared with the stat dept though. They're currently sitting in my office so my office now smells of pumpkin, nutmeg, and delicious. Thanks again to the guest stars of this blog post and for bringing me back up after my miserable brownie cups from the previous week.

Critical Reception:
Oh yeah, speaking of those brownie cups... I still maintain that they weren't good. I brought them in to the tutoring center on the day of my midterm to share with people. Ok, fine, it's more like I just dumped them there and went to take my test. I had one person tell me that they were good but it's possible that she was just being nice. However, maybe I just think that because that's what I would say in that situation. Then again, maybe I'm being overly critical of the brownie cups. I mean, they weren't terrific but it was far from the worst thing I've ever tasted in my life. Maybe my bar is just too high. Indecision! So, the jury is still out on the brownie cups because I don't know what anyone else thought...when I got back after my exam, the bag of brownie cups had mysteriously disappeared! I guess I should take that as a good sign?

A Disney Moment: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
And now your Disney moment. The first film in the Disney animated classic canon is, of course, Snow White. A timeless film from 1933 that I have not seen in at least 10 years I'd say. I was first struck by the fact that the animation is just lovely. There's just such charm to it. And the wobbly quality of the old VHS really helps. Aside: this film watching project was delayed for several weeks because somehow my family's copy of Snow White has been lost to time. On the bright side, once I got back to CT I went to the Goodwill store and found an old VHS copy for $1.00. Cheaper than renting from Redbox, folks. I highly recommend getting a VCR for 5 bucks and then frequenting your neighborhood thrift store or Goodwill store or yard sales looking for movies because it's way cheap and there's a lot of selection. Aside over.

Early in watching this movie with my mom and my sister, my mom made the comment that Snow White is a simple girl. She meant that in the non-complimentary sense. However, if you view the movie through that lens, everything makes a lot more sense. Particularly when I was getting so annoyed that every single freakin dwarf warns Snow White against strangers and then she lets the witch in anyway (except Dopey. Because he's mute.) Other thoughts include: how rude Snow White is to just instantly ditch the dwarfs who kept vigil at her coffin for the prince who she's met once before, why is the prince's castle in a cloud?, Snow White's voice is still absurdly high pitched and fake sounding, and this movie is still pretty terrifying. Between the running through the woods scene and the witch brewing the apple and the transformation potion (and the creepy skeleton in her basement, who I half believe is the huntsman who failed to kill Snow White), and finally, the two vultures circling overhead being just enough to imply that the witch is surely dead, it's a pretty scary movie. Overall, still a classic and out of the first 5 Disney films, I rank it about a 2 or a 3.