pumpkin pie bars

This one is an oldie but a goodie for me. I clipped the recipe many years ago from Kraft's Food and Family magazine and have made it many times.

Pumpkin Pie Bars
(from Kraft Foods)

1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cup sugar, divided
1/2 cup packed light brown sugar
3/4 cup cold butter
1 cup old-fashioned oatmeal, uncooked
1/2 cup chopped pecans or walnuts (I used walnuts because that's what I had)
8 oz. cream cheese, softened
3 eggs
15 oz. pumpkin puree (not pumpkin pie filling)
1 T pumpkin pie spice*

Heat oven to 350 degrees F. Line a 13 x 9-inch pan with foil, with the ends of foil extending over the sides; grease foil using pan spray.

Mix flour, 1/4 cup sugar and all the brown sugar in a medium sugar; cut in the cold butter using a pastry blender or 2 knives until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Stir in the oats and nuts.

Reserve 1 cup of the oat mixture; press the remaining mixture into the bottom of the prepared pan. Bake 15 minutes.

Bottom crust before baking...

... and after.

Beat cream cheese, remaining sugar, eggs, pumpkin and spice with mixer until well blended.

*If you don't have pumpkin pie spice, feel free to substitute a mixture of equal amounts of  cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and allspice (or use whatever proportions and whichever of those spices you prefer).

Pour the mixture over crust...

... then sprinkle top with reserved crumb mixture.

Bake for 25 minutes, then cool for 10 minutes.

Use the foil overhang to lift the dessert out of the pan and place on a wire rack to cool completely before cutting. Cut into 24 bars to serve.

I love making these in the fall -- the creamy pumpkin custard marries well with the chewy sweetness of the oat/nut streusel and the buttery bottom crust. It's terrific for a little pumpkin pie fix!

it's apple season!

I made these cute cupcakes a few weeks ago, in celebration of the boys' return to school. The cake itself was from a mix (Wilton-approved Duncan Hines Dark Chocolate Fudge) that I happened to have on hand. The icing was the Chocolate Frosting recipe from The America's Test Kitchen Family Baking Book. I don't know what the problem was with my icing recipes this summer -- maybe it was just the increased warmth -- but they typically did not turn out well at all. I remember it being a fairly cool day, inside and out, and still the icing turned out soupy, about the consistency of warm pudding, even after refrigerating the icing for several hours before piping. It was such a disappointment. You can see that the icing in the photo doesn't look very sharp; I took this picture after chilling the iced cupcakes overnight. After about 15 minutes out of the fridge, the piped icing lost much of its definition.

For the toppers, I tinted some fondant with Americolor soft gel pastes -- Super Red for the apples, and Leaf Green for the leaves. I really love this product -- the colors turn out bright without using a ton of gel paste; I much prefer them to Wilton icing gel colors. I also painted on a little straight gel paste for some highlighting on the apples so they wouldn't look quite so flat. I love how they turned out!

gourmet's pumpkin muffins (by way of smitten kitchen)

The boys' high school is holding a mini college fair today and the parent board sent out a call for baked yummies for the visiting college reps, so I searched for a seasonally appropriate (and easy) muffin recipe.  The obvious choice was pumpkin. I didn't feel like rolling the dice and risking the scorn of the dried fruit or nut averse, so this recipe totally fit the bill. Just pumpkin puree and spices in the batter and topped with cinnamon sugar... what's not to love?

Pumpkin Muffins

(adapted from Smitten Kitchen)

Batter:

8.5 oz. all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 cup canned solid-pack pumpkin (not pumpkin pie filling)

1/3 cup canola oil

2 large eggs

8.75 oz. sugar

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon ginger

1/8 teaspoon cloves

1/8 teaspoon nutmeg

Cinnamon sugar:

1 tablespoon sugar

1 teaspoon cinnamon

Place oven rack in the center position and preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Line a muffin tin with paper liners.

Combine flour and baking powder in a medium bowl and whisk together. In a large bowl, whisk together pumpkin, oil, eggs, 8.75 oz. sugar, salt, baking soda and spice until smooth, then whisk in flour mixture until just combined. Stir together ingredients for the cinnamon-sugar in a small bowl. Divide muffin batter evenly into the muffin liners, then sprinkle tops with the cinnamon sugar.

Ready to go in the oven! I used a scoop to divvy up the batter, but had to make two passes to use up all the batter.  In a perfect world, I'd have more scoops, in varying sizes.

Bake until golden brown and a wooden skewer inserted into the center of the muffin comes out clean, 25 to 30 minutes.  Cool in pan on a rack for 5 minutes, then transfer the muffins to the rack and cool until warm or room temperature. Makes 12 muffins.

summer birthday cake #3: america's test kitchen's devil's food cake with cream cheese frosting

 

C. requested a chocolate cake with cream cheese icing for his birthday. I selected the Devil's Food Layer Cake and Cream Cheese Frosting from The America's Test Kitchen Family Baking Book. I have to say I no longer hang on to ATK's every word when it comes to baking, as I've had a few of their recipes not turn out well (including one which caused Team Awesome to blow our grade on the Baking For Health and Wellness practical).  No issues with the Devil's Food Cake but the Cream Cheese Frosting was really disappointing. It was too soft to work with in spite of being well-chilled. I know it's a cardinal sin in the cake business to even attempt using cream cheese icing in the summer, so I was already asking for trouble, but I believe this recipe was a bit wonky to begin with.  This morning I conducted a postmortem and compared the ratios with the cream cheese frosting recipe I ordinarily use (from the Philadelphia Cream Cheese folks). ATK's uses a quarter of the amount of confectioner's sugar that Philly's does, slightly more butter and includes a small amount of sour cream (which the Philadelphia Cream Cheese recipe does not have).  I really should've compared the recipes before making the icing and recognized that there might be a problem with the ATK recipe.  Baking is a science, so call this a failed experiment.

Icing failure or not, it was an adorable cake.  I enlisted the birthday boy, AKA fondant modeler extraordinaire, to create the figures for his cake.  My original idea was to model little schnauzers but he has more experience than I do with making dogs so I asked him if he might like to give it a go.  He suggested making something else entirely.  Recently he's been on a Pikmin kick so he created different figures from the game. He mixed the colors and modeled everything himself. Clearly he's the real artistic talent in our family. (Happy 14th birthday, C!)

The Wollywog squashing a blue Pikmin.

Different pellets, and a purple Pikmin carrying a marble.

Dwarf Red Bulborb

stracciatella ice cream

This is the first batch of ice cream we've made this summer.  When the warmer weather rolls around, I always intend to make lots and lots of ice cream, but I somehow put off pulling out the ice cream maker. It's really not such a big deal -- retrieve box from the cellar, put the bowl in the freezer overnight, mix up the ice cream base and chill, then spin in the machine.  But as with many things, I manage to procrastinate... I'm not sure we made any ice cream last year.  Anyway, C. suggested we make some chocolate chip ice cream, so when we got home from our annual Cape vacation, I set the above process in motion.

The recipe is from David Lebovitz's The Perfect Scoop. The base is a French-style (i.e. using an cooked egg custard mixture) vanilla ice cream (see the recipe on David's site here). Instead of using actual chocolate chips, which would have turned into hard little tooth-breaking rocks in the freezer, I made stracciatella or Italian-style chocolate chips by drizzling melted bittersweet chocolate over the ice cream at the end of the spinning process (scroll way down on this page to read how to make stracciatella) and then breaking up the chocolate bits as it cools and hardens. The tricky part is incorporating the hot melted chocolate into the just-spun and still very soft ice cream without rendering it all into a soupy mess. I found this really challenging (sometimes I really wish I had a couple more hands) and although there was a bit of melting, it refroze just fine.

I think this is the first time I've made a French-style ice cream outside of pastry school.  Before JWU, the idea of tempering a heated liquid into egg yolks would've petrified me, but now I've done it with such frequency that it doesn't require much thought. The egg custard base produces a much smoother, creamier ice cream than the easier Philadelphia-style ice cream (which uses an uncooked base and doesn't contain eggs). It is easily the best ice cream I've made at home thus far.