I {HEART} Fall

There are so many wonderful things about Fall...crisp weather, colorful foliage, Halloween, apples and PUMPKINS! Love everything squash or pumpkin related - from roasted butternut risotto to THESE beauties - Pumpkin Cupcakes!

So easy to make from scratch and very tasty! Here's how:

Pumpkin Cupcakes:

1 1/2 cups all purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon ground cloves

1/4 teaspoon ground ginger

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup unsalted butter, room temperature

1 cup white sugar

2 large eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

3/4 cup solid packed, canned pumpkin puree

Cream Cheese Frosting

4 oz. cream cheese, room temperature

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 1/2 cup powdered sugar

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line muffin tins with paper liners or spray cups.

In a large bowl sift together flour, baking soda, spices and salt.

With your mixer cream butter and sugar together until fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time, mixing well after each one. Beat in the vanilla extract. Scrape sides of bowl. With the mixer on low, alternately add the flour mixture and the pumpkin puree in 3 additions, beginning and ending with the flour mixture.

Fill the muffin cups roughly 2/3 full using 2 spoons or an ice cream scoop. Bake for 18-20 minutes or until firm and a toothpick in the center comes out clean. Cool.

In your mixer beat the cream cheese until smooth. Add the butter until incorporated and smooth. Add the vanilla extract and the powdered sugar. Beat until fluffy (2-3 minutes). Pipe or spread frosting onto cooled cupcakes and garnish with toasted nuts

(as I did: Spread walnuts onto baking pan lined with foil and bake for 8-10 minutes until brown and fragrant) or with toffee bits.

These are quick and so delicious. I put walnuts on some but not all, as I have some finicky eaters but they're just as yummy with frosting alone.

Welcome Fall and thanks for bringing with you that beautiful pumpkin. {wink}

Plums!

Another one of Summer's gifts - plums! My mom brought over a basket of fresh plums, right off her tree. While I'm not a big stone fruit fan, there are some wonderful desserts that make the most of these little guys.

While they can be really messy of you are the tree owner, they cook up beautifully in a dish like this one: Plum Clafoutis

SUPER quick, simple and delicious. Best served still warm out of the oven! Try it out. Start to in the oven was about 10-15 minutes, including preparing the fruit!

Plum Clafoutis

6 tablespoons white sugar

14 plums, pitted and halved

3 eggs

1 1/3 cups milk (I used 1 cup milk & 1/3 cup cream)

2/3 cup all purpose flour

1 1/2 teaspoons grated lemon zest

2 teaspoons vanilla

1 pinch of salt (precise, I know- I'm kinda like that)

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

2 tablespoons powdered sugar

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Butter a 10 inch pie plate and sprinkle 1 tablespoon of the sugar on the bottom.

Arrange the plum halves, cut side down, to cover the entire bottom of the pie plate. Sprinkle 2 tablespoons of the sugar over the plums.

In a blender, combine the remaining 3 tablespoons of sugar, eggs, milk, flour, lemon zest, vanilla, cinnamon and salt. Process until smooth, about 2 minutes.

Pour over plums in the pan.

Bake for 50-60 minutes in a preheated oven or until firm and lightly browned. Let stand 5 minutes before slicing. Dust with powdered sugar before serving. Try to serve fairly soon after cooking as it has a tendency to fall and become more dense (less "fluffy") upon cooling.

This is an impressive dish for guests that is WAY easier than it appears when finished! Which is TOTALLY right up my alley!!

Apple Gallette

I have a confession. I Love Costco. I mean, really. LOVE it! It's so awesome to be able to get all the usual things I buy, but LOTS of it. A household of 5 plus a large dog = lots of laundry. And there's nothing worse than being 2 loads from complete (starting with oh, about 20 loads to do) and run out of Tide! Or even worse, running out of Downy! Or how about Charmin?? Lots of butts around here, so....you can figure the rest. Have you tried their granola?!? It's THE absolute best I've ever tasted. Literally, I eat it for breakfast EVERY.SINGLE.DAY. Never get burned out. I could go on, but it's just so nice to have plenty of the essential things we need (or love) and not having to worry about running out.

Anyway, I digress. So, needless to say I buy lots of stuff at Costco. While I try not to go there on an empty stomach, sometimes I can't help myself. This time it was apples. The kids LOVE apples. So why not buy LOTS?!? We can't eat them fast enough and I was feeling a bit bad about buying SO many. Being that it is the season for apples, inspiration wasn't tough to find, as far as something to do with them. (Have I mentioned how much I LOVE Google Reader?)

Thought about these apple dumplings by The Pioneer Woman - Ree Drummond (She ROCKS!) but didn't have any Mountain Dew on hand. So I went for a "rustic" aka lazy version of an apple pie - the Gallette! By definition the gallette is a general term used to describe various forms of flat, round or freeform crusty cakes.

I started with a pre-made pie crust. Yes, I could've made one but I had these on hand and it saved TONS of time.

The recipe:

4 large apples - your favorite variety ( I used Pink Lady) - peeled & cored

1 tbsp flour

juice of a lemon - approx 2 tbsp

1/3 cup brown sugar

1 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp nutmeg

1/4 tsp clove

1/4 tsp ginger

2 tbsp butter

2 tbsp cinnamon sugar

Put your peeled, cored & sliced apples in a bowl and toss with lemon juice. In a separate bowl combine flour, sugar & spices. Toss with apples.

Take your pie crust (store bought or otherwise) and lay it onto a greased pizza pan or rectangular cookie sheet. Lay the apple mixture either in a circular pattern or in rows into the middle of the cold pie crust.

Fold up edges of the pie crust around the apple filling

and dot with butter
Lastly, sprinkle with cinnamon sugar - I keep a shaker of cinnamon sugar handy since we LOVE it on buttered toast!

Bake at 425 degrees for about 50 minutes or until golden brown. For maximum impact, serve with vanilla ice cream OR cinnamon whipped cream!

Trust me. It won't disappoint.

Lasagne Roll Ups

After making my homemade tomato sauce, I was inspired to make Lasagna Roll Ups! Italian food is a major favorite around here. The only drawback (for me, anyway) is that it's usually fairly time consuming to prepare....such as lasagna. This is my cheater and quick version that always goes over BIG!

First, brown your ground meat of choice, I used beef but turkey works great too. You can add onion but since I have one picky eater than can detect the smallest molecule of onion, I refrain.
Then add your tomato/marinara sauce to the meat and allow to simmer on low while you cook the lasagna noodles.
Only cook for about half the suggested time as you want them to be VERY al dente. Otherwise, if overcooked they will fall apart. Once they're cooking, prepare your filling.
For the filling I used one container of ricotta cheese, one egg, a handful (precise, I know) of cheese - anything works however I prefer a blend of Asiago, Romano and Parmesan, basil, parsley, salt & pepper. Mix well.

Drain your noodles and rinse in cold water. Drain again. Then you will take a small amount of the sauce/meat mixture and coat the bottom of a 9 x 13 pan prior to adding your roll ups.
Once cooled take you lasagna noodles and put a spoonful of the cheese mixture onto each on and spread it from end to end on the noodle. Roll it up and layer into the pan.
Repeat until all noodles are complete.
Take the remainder of the sauce on spoon it over the pan of roll ups.
Cover the top with cheese of your choosing, here I've used shredded mozzarella. Fresh mozzarella slices are an especially extravagant touch as well.

Bake for 35-40 minutes at 350 degrees or until heated through and nicely browned on top.

Yum! It's a crowd pleaser for sure. This is also one of those dishes that tastes even better the next day!

If you're lucky enough to have that happen {wink}

You say Tomato, I say Tomahto

Summer's bounty - such a beautiful thing. Last years garden gave tomatoes, broccoli, butternut squash - yummy! This year's garden...zip. Nada. Zero. Didn't have one :( Bummer! Luckily for me, my mom is on the ball. She's kept me stocked with one of my favorite summer treats - tomatoes! Caprese salad (sliced tomatoes with slices of FRESH mozzarella cheese, drizzled with olive oil and balsamic vinegar and sprinkled with chopped basil) is one of my most favorite things to eat!

Now that they are almost past their prime, the last of the tomatoes are ripening on the vines. There's many more than my mom & dad can use so I decided to try my hand at homemade tomato sauce.

This is quite a conundrum because everyone does it different. You can freeze it or can it. Cook it or puree it. Seeds or no seeds. The right approach for me? The EASY way. Now, I've made authentic "Brooklyn Gravy" before, where it HAS to be a Roma tomato and you blanche, peel, strain, cook, condense, etc. SO delicious but SO much work. Not today. It doesn't get any simpler than tomato sauce so why should it be difficult? Here's what I did:

Take your fresh, delicious tomatoes (roughly 6-8 tomatoes produce 1 cup of sauce)

and remove the core. Cut into rough 1" pieces.

Put them into your food processor or blender (I chose the latter) and puree, skins seeds & all.

Pour everything into a stock pot and simmer on low. You want your puree to condense down to about half of the original amount OR until it's the desired thickness. Mine took about 2.5 to 3 hours. You can leave it as just tomato sauce, to maximize the number of uses, OR you can season while you are cooking as I did, with any number of the usual spices; garlic, basil, oregano, etc. Since I use the same sauce for pizza, pasta, meatball sandwiches or whatever, I went ahead and seasoned mine. Also, you can use a rubber spatula to stir and scrape down the sides as it cooks, about every half hour works great.

This simple recipe is so versatile. If you don't want the seeds you can strain before or after freezing. To freeze, fill your containers and leave on the counter for about an hour to cool then put in the freezer. It should keep fine for 6-9 months, but if you're like me, it won't last that long!

Today I froze half and used the other half. But that's another post - stay tuned!

Lauren's party details

So keeping this SURPRISE Sweet 16 is pretty tough. Trying to come up with cute ideas...even tougher. Trying to come up with cute, creative ideas and get them made on the sly...the toughest of all!

Here's some inspiration and my version in progress:

Painted bottles for vases by Chicy Creations via Oops I Craft My Pants found here

Dollar store serving trays by Joys Hope found here

Paper lollies by Rhonna Farrer found hereSO much to do and so little time! Gotta keep it up - only a few days left :)

Terrarium add-ins

When I posted here about making terrariums, I really had another use in mind. Aside from them being just plain cute, I wanted to use then for Lauren's birthday party table decor.

Using the same technique with the Crayola Model Magic, I molded a Mad Hatter's hat and a Cheshire Cat face. Again using Making Memories acrylic paint to finish it, these were super easy.

And I think they loo pretty cute in the terrariums, too!