Impossibly Easy Pumpkin Pie

I'm continuing to (slowly) slosh my way through a backlog of posts, and this is one that I have been meaning to get up on the blog for months.

Now, I love me some pumpkin, but oddly enough, I've never posted my go-to classic pumpkin pie recipe. And today is still not that day, unfortunately. But instead, I have another variation of pumpkin pie to post -- the "Impossibly Easy" kind.

Why? I'm glad you asked. Necessity. I needed a quick pumpkin pie recipe using the ingredients I already had on hand in my pantry, which did not include pie crust, or butter or shortening, which precluded me from making a from-scratch crust (also working against me was the time factor). But, what I did have on hand was Bisquick.

Applesauce Spice Cake

My LO was supposed to be a Thanksgiving baby, due to arrive on November 21st. But he had very different plans. I actually went into labor on Halloween, the day after Sandy passed through when we still had no power, and I didn't end up delivering until 2 days later courtesy of an emergency c-section.  Toss in coming home to 4 downed trees on our property after a week in the hospital, and it has been a very busy month!

Cinnamon Apple Quick Bread

I am waaaaaaay behind on the posts I had hoped to make. I still have an entire summer's worth of farm-share related blogs to get to, but I'm going to not even think about those until after this holiday season is done.

Although I love yeast breads, the joy and simplicity of a simple quick bread never ceases to amaze me. After I went on my annual apple-picking excursion, I wanted to try some new things with my apples. The first recipe I settled on was an apple quick bread, which is a variation of Paula Deen's zucchini bread, which I became well-acquainted with this summer during my farm share, when I had zucchinis coming out of my ears. At the time, I thought the base would be good for other fruit or veggie mix-ins, and I was right. With a little tweaking, I made this recipe work beautifully for apples.

But first, a little interlude (or skip down for more baking!):

Halloween is my absolute favorite holiday, hand's down. Not only do I love Halloween-themed treats, but I love Halloween tradition as well.  Last year, around this time, I paired my Halloween and Fall-themed posts with little blurbs on the background of some common Halloween tradition and/or lore, including the history of Halloween and trick-or-treating, vampires, zombies, jack-o-lanterns, and bobbing for apples. This year, even though I am starting a little late, I am continuing that tradition with this latest topic:

"So useful to have him swooping around like an overgrown bat."

Pumpkin Pecan Cheesecake Pie

I. Love. Pumpkin. Pie. In fact, let’s be honest: I love pumpkin anything. But pumpkin pie is the very pinnacle of all pumpkin desserts as far as I’m concerned. I used to make a traditional pumpkin pie every year, but last year I went in a different direction, rolling out a brand-new type of pie, and haven’t looked back since. This new pie, the Pumpkin Pecan Cheesecake Pie, is my definitive holiday pie. It is like three desserts wrapped into one, and although it might sound busy, this pie has the most wonderful blending of flavors that results in my favorite Thanksgiving dessert.

Cranberry Upside Down Cake

This year, I decided to add some desserts to my Thanksgiving repertoire, and after spying this eye-appealing recipe on the Williams-Sonoma site, I decided to try my hand at a cranberry upside down cake. So with a few ideas taken from a similar recipe from Martha, I concocted my own version of this recipe that combined what I felt were the best elements of both, plus some additional mods from moi.

But before we get to that, let’s talk cranberries!

Honey Cornbread Muffins

I love multiple iterations of a holiday. You know, when you celebrate the same holiday several times in a given season? Take Thanksgiving, for example. I just celebrated it (with friends) last week, and I’ll be celebrating it again (with family) next week. In my family, because of everyone’s schedules and obligations, it isn’t unusual to celebrate Christmas, and then “Second Christmas” and occasionally “Third Christmas.” As an avid baker and budding chef, I relish the multiple opportunities to not only make the staples that people expect year after year, but also to change things up a bit or try out new recipes. Multiple holiday celebrations are like gigantic experiments where I can field test different creations.

Zombie Brain Cupcakes (Easy Halloween Cupcake #2)

Zombies. Rotten reanimated corpses stumbling hither and thither in search of brains and other various human body parts on which to feed. I love them for it. Zombie movies, zombie games, zombie merchandise, I devour them all with a ravenous hunger that rivals any denizen of the undead. Unlike the other usual suspects of Halloween, such as vampires, witches and mummies, who can simultaneously be bad while exuding both sex appeal and style (don’t think a mummy can be sexy? Then you haven’t seen Arnold Vosloo), zombies seem to exist for no other reason than to kill. They are remorseless, they are ruthlessly terrifying, they are…not at all appetizing. And, at least for those zombies of George A. Romero’s fertile imagination, they are actually quite gross. I don’t want to see that on a cupcake, although there are some who might. But, there are ways to create a zombie-themed confection without resorting to decomposition.

Vampire and Slayer Cupcakes (Easy Halloween Cupcake #1)

Like my previous Halloween post on Quick Creepy Treats, this post and the few following it are not actual recipes, but ideas and directions for assembly of some quick Halloween-themed treats, in this case, cupcakes. But not just any cupcakes…vampire cupcakes…and slayer cupcakes!

In other words, 

Welcome to the Hellmouth. Or my kitchen. Either way. Now, vampirism is a cumbersome and complex topic, full of history and pop culture references. For just a bite (get it?) of vampire lore concerning that most famous of all vamps, keep reading, or scroll down to the pics to get back to the Buffy baking!

Apple Cider Doughnuts (Oct '10 Daring Bakers Challenge)

This month's Daring Bakers Challenge (my first participation in a while) was extremely exciting for me: doughnuts! I've always wanted to try my hand at doughnut making, and I even have one of those baked doughnut pans although I've yet to use it. For this challenge, I decided to give it a try, and I decided to fry them, despite having never deep-fried anything in my entire life. This process was a definite learning experience, but a lot of fun, and the doughnuts were super-tasty.

Pecan Pie Muffins

Mid-October begins the official pecan harvesting season, and they are ubiquitous in baking and cooking throughout Autumn. I adore pecan pie, it is one of my Fall baking staples, so I jumped at the chance to try Pecan Pie Muffins -- all the goodness of pecan pie in a muffin form. 


Pecans, or Carya illinoinensis, are native to North America. They're called after the Algonquin name for the nut, "pekkan" which literally means a nut that has to be cracked by a stone. These nuts were very popular in America from the colonial period onward, and had some notable fans early on. Thomas Jefferson used to grow them in his nut orchard at Monticello, and he made a gift of pecan trees to George Washington, who henceforth began to grow them at Mount Vernon. Although they were grown on a small scale sporadically in America, mass commercial cultivation had to wait nearly a century for a slave named Antoine of the Oak Alley plantation in Louisiana to develop a method for grafting and propagating pecan trees in 1846-1847. This cultivar was dubbed "The Centennial", and was the first commercial variety of pecans in the world. Two of the original pecan trees grafted by Antoine still stand today at the Oak Alley plantation, which is less remarkable when you realize that pecan trees can live to be over 300 years old!

Pumpkin Blondies

Hands down, my favorite flavor of the Fall is pumpkin -- pies, bars, cakes, soups, you name it, I love it. My Autumn baking season, roughly from September until Thanksgiving, is positively dominated by pumpkin in all its many permutations, and this post is no exception. Last year, I modified a pumpkin cookie recipe with great  success, so this year I decided to try my hand at some pumpkin bars, which are more like blondies due to their moist, dense texture. I modified a basic recipe from Martha Stewart, changing around the proportion of pumpkin, as well as the amounts and kinds of sugar, spices, and some of the mix-ins. Like my cookies, I added butterscotch chips to these in lieu of the chocolate chips that the original recipe calls for, because the combination of pumpkin and butterscotch is just too darn good to pass up!

Quick and Dirty Creepy Treats: Easy Halloween Food Ideas

Now that October is here, I'll still be posting Autumn-themed stuff, obviously, but I also wanted to get started on some Halloween-themed posts. So, for the next 4 weeks, my posts will be Halloween-centric with some smatterings of Halloween history and lore thrown into each post.

For this post, I am dusting off some really old ideas and pics (I was notoriously bad about documenting my creations before I became a blogger) of quick and easy Halloween treats that come together in a snap but are super fun to do. These treats are collected from ones that I and my friend Lauren made years ago when our lab hosted our Department's Halloween Social. Everyone in my lab pitched in and made Fall and/or Halloween-themed desserts, and this post is dedicated to just a few of them, the "quick and dirty" treats, to borrow a phrase we use often in lab. They are not very sophisticated, but they are cute and easy, and would make a great starting point for brainstorming new Halloween treats. These are all great ideas especially if you want something to do with little kids, because they are all decorating-oriented and not oven-oriented. For this post, we have quick Witch Hats, Critters, Ghosts, and Dirt. Unfortunately, I made these a while ago, so I don't have pictures of intermediate steps, but the directions are straightforward so this shouldn't be a problem. To be honest, they are so simple that, in most cases, you can just figure out how to assemble them from the pictures!

The Cookie Buffet: Pumpkin Bread Bites

I've never attempted a pumpkin cookie before, even though autumn is my favorite season, and nothing screams "Fall" more loudly than pumpkin-flavored goodies. Most of the time, I content myself with pumpkin pie, but I knew from the beginning that I'd definitely want to include pumpkin cookies in the cookie buffet at the shower.  I found a Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies recipe on the FoodNetwork online courtesy of George Duran. I tweaked the recipe a significant amount, changing the amount of sugar, spice, and pumpkin.

The Cookie Buffet: Triple Chocolate Chip Cookies

Chocolate chip cookies. Where would a cookie buffet be without them? Believe it or not, this was a new recipe. I normally make the good ol' standby Tollhouse recipe, which is yummy to be sure. But I didn't want to make the same old thing for the shower. I've been wanting to branch out and experiment with chocolate chip cookies that use both butter and shortening for a while now, and this was the perfect opportunity. A little gumshoe detective work turned up this recipe from the lady herself, Paula Deen. It uses both butter and shortening, and three kinds of chocolate.

That's right. And nuts. Well, at least it did by the time I was done tweaking the recipe.

The Cookie Buffet: Gluten-Free Chocolate Chip Cookies

I decided to include a gluten-free selection in my shower’s cookie buffet, for one of my best friends and bridesmaids, Rachel, whose dietary needs necessitate gluten-free living. Now, I wasn’t sure how to go about making gluten-free cookies, but luckily my main man, Alton Brown, came to the rescue with this gluten-free chocolate chip cookie recipe. I can not say enough good things about Alton Brown in general, or this recipe in particular. Believe it or not, these cookies taste pretty much like any other chocolate chip cookie, no mean feat considering that there is not a smidgen of wheat anywhere in sight.

Alton’s secret, so I am told, is through his choice of alternate flours and their proportions. His recipe calls for a combination of brown rice four, tapioca flour, corn starch, and xanthan gum, which comes as close to recapitulating the taste and texture of wheat flour as you can get…without actually using wheat flour.

The Cookie Buffet: Spice Cake Balls

Cake balls. Have you heard about these things? Up until a year ago, I hadn't. And then I spied this post on (where else?) Bakerella's site. And folks, these things are easy. Ridiculously easy. And they taste good. Ridiculously good. So good that people have trouble believing that they are so easy, in fact. But I promise, they are. 

Aren't these pretty in their fall colors?

The Cookie Buffet: Pierniczki

Because I had included Greek cookies in my cookie buffet, I figured it was only fair to include some Polish ones too -- the only problem was that I didn't know of any! A little research online, and I found what seemed to be the perfect cookie choice: pierniczki, a Polish ginger-honey cookie. These are traditional Christmas cookies. They are also traditionally rolled out and cut into shapes with a cookie cutter, but I decided to bypass that and convert the recipe into a drop cookie dough. In order to do that, I adapted the flour to fat ratio of one of Paula Deen's ginger cookie recipes, and tweaked it into a pierniczki dough that could be dropped by a cookie scoop.

The Cookie Buffet: The Greek Cookies

When I finally decided to do the cookie buffet for my bridal shower, I knew that I had to include some Greek cookies to honor my heritage. My favorite Greek cookie of all time, finikia, is a honey-dipped spice cookie perfect for autumn, but believe it or not, I've never gotten around to making them before. I usually just make the rounds of local Greek festivals to get my fill. So, because I didn't feel like debuting yet another new recipe (I already had 2 other new cookie recipes planned), I decided to stick with what I know.

In my house, we make two kinds of Greek cookies, mostly around the holidays: koulourakia and kourambiedes. I forgot to take pictures while baking, so I included a later pic of koulourakia as an example of the traditional shape. The pictures of the cookies in the basket below are the ones from my shower.

The Cookie Buffet: Details

I knew fairly early on that I wanted a sweets buffet as part of my bridal shower. Well-coordinated candy buffets have such a stunning effect, that I fell in love with the idea of a Halloween or autumn themed candy buffet, something gorgeous like this or these. But, budgets are always an issue, so I downgraded to the idea of a Halloween candy buffet, for the reason that there would be plenty of Halloween candy around in the middle of October, so it would be easier and more economical. I was right on this point, it would have been cheap (relatively) and easy, but something about the concept of a Halloween candy buffet 2 weeks before Halloween still wasn't sitting right with me. And then I hit upon a great idea, and I have no clue why I didn't think of it earlier: a cookie buffet filled with homemade cookies!


This had all the elements I wanted: homey, rustic, baked, etc etc. And although I love baking anything and everything, cookies make me especially happy. So I chose my cookie types and got to baking, starting about 3 weeks before my shower. And I had to figure out a way to turn this: into the cookie buffet of my dreams!

Bridal Shower Preparations: Little Details

As a scientist, I am very detail-oriented. I love details. Big details, little details, any minute way to tie together a theme: I'm there. The great thing about fall is that there are so many little ways to incorporate an autumn-theme into what you are doing. But be careful, not to overdo it, or it might end up looking like this:
This was my house prior to leaving to go set up for my shower. Yes, all those boxes on the floor were just to set up for the shower. It was a lot of work to put together, but I wouldn't change it, I loved how it turned out!
The flowers below I bought the year before, on sale. I bought up all of the flowers that I thought would make nice centerpieces, and then my mom and I arranged them into awesome copper pails I found at A.C. Moore for $1 each (just as awesome for the price as for the look)! In the below pic, they are in the boxes already in their pails, so you can get a feel for how the arrangements were put together. I have a picture of a table a little further down, so you can see the pail too.