This post marks one of the rites of passage into adulthood in our family. This Fall I put my domestic skills to the test when I cooked a pumpkin (and the seeds of course), pureed it, and used the pureed pumpkin to make a plethera of harvest items.
On Tuesday night I spent a solid 5 hours making two patches of pumpkin cookies and my very first "real" pumpkin pie. The evening was difficult to say the least. On my first patch of pumpkin cookies I totally melted the butter instead of "creaming" it. Now for all of you Betty Crockers out there (such as my sister Elizabeth) you all know that there is a BIG difference in melting and creaming butter... I did not. Apparently, if you melt your butter your cookies will be flat. So the first half of the pumpkin cookies came out as flat as a pancake. At this point I panicked and called Mom, who did not answer, and then the next best thing... Elizabeth. She let me in on this little secret and told me to add flour to my batter. I did that and made little mini muffins (with my fabulous pampered chef muffin pan) for work. And let me tell you they were a HIT!!
So the next patch of pumpkin cookies I "creamed" the butter and take a look at how fabulous they turned out.
However, after I had made my first pan of cookies I realized that I had not put any brown sugar in my batter... For The Love! So I added brown sugar and proceeded with my baking. Here is my Beautiful display of pumpkin cookies. Not bad for a first timer!! (Can you tell which ones don't have brown sugar ?!?!)
Now on to the pumpkin pie. Mom had told me that you had to put "tin foil" (not aluminum foil) around the edge of your pie crust so that it does not burn. However, that is for pecan pies, not pumpkin pies... I am apparently not a good listener. So here is my pumpkin pie in the oven with tin foil on it.
Every thing was looking great until decided to take off the tin foil, which then proceeded to rip part of my crust off!! YIKES!! So needless to say the pie wasn't as aesthetically pleasing as I would have liked for it to be.
But things only got worse on our drive to Vero Beach Wednesday afternoon. We were traveling down Hwy 60 at a reasonable speed when someone came to a dead stop in front of us. This forced us to slam on brakes which caused Rage to become airborne and hit the dash, and forced my beautful plate of pumpkin cookies into the floor on top of my pumpkin pie.
As you can see the top row of cookies lost their tops, but all in all they faired pretty well. The pumpkin pie on the other hand didn't look so hot. But I must admit it was pretty tasty and I think everyone enjoyed it despite the way it looked.
So all in all I think my first pumpkin cookie/pumpkin pie experience wasn't too bad. Hopefully I will get better with age... and time.
5 comments:
I love it! I laughed so hard, you did so good and yes you do get better with age. The only way to learn is to do it and and I'm proud of you! Too bad we only bake them once a year.
I think you did a great job on your cookies and pie. However, the cookies are better when they have candy faces on them. And did you know, you can buy pumpkn in a can instead of baking one. However, I have one that needs to be baked so let me know how to do that. Overall, great job on being domestic!!!
Baking a pumpkin is super easy... cut the top off like you are going to carve it and take all the cuts out. Cut it into four pieces and bake on a cookie sheet (rind side down) at 400 for abot 3 hours. After that you have to scrape out the cuts and puree it.
And you know silly that pumpkin cookies at the Graham house can't have faces... we just do leaves :)
I am laughing so hard right now... I loved your story.
{Don't feel too bad - Geoffrey came in one night to find me in tears with cookie dough and flour all over the kitchen!}
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