Pumpkin Quick Bread

I made a delicious pumpkin bread that I adapted from this recipe: www.allrecipes.com/Recipe/Pumpkin-Bread-2

The changes I made are that I cut down on the amount of sugar (it's still plenty sweet) and replaced the cloves with ginger (didn't have any cloves and don't love them). I also sprinkled cinnamon and sugar on the top of each loaf to create a crispy sugary crust. The bread is very light for a pumpkin bread and not too moist. Next time I'll try to make some substitutions for some of the butter and sugar to make it a little healthier but didn't want to change the recipe too much this time.


Ingredients:

• 1 cup butter (two sticks), softened
• 2 cups sugar
• 3 eggs
• 3 cups flour
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
• 1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon
• 1 1/2 teaspoons nutmeg
• 1 teaspoon ground ginger (use less if using fresh ginger)
• 1 15 oz can pumpkin (not pumpkin pie mix)
• Additional cinnamon and sugar for sprinklin on top (optional but delicious)
• Nuts to sprinkle on top (again, optional but delicious)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Cream butter and sugar in large bowl. Add eggs, mix well. Add the dry ingredients and stir until batter is just moistened (make sure to get all the dry stuff from the bottom incorporated, though). Stir in pumpkin but make sure not to overmix. Pour into two greased loaf pans, sprinkle sugar and cinnamon on top (optional) and cook for about 45 minutes to an hour.

Halloween How-To: Food Edition

We made sure to have plenty of treats for our guests at our Halloween get-together this year. Included were the peanut butter eyeballs pictured above. The filling is PB and confectioner's sugar, rolled into a ball and dipped in vanilla candy coating. The eyeball is black frosting with lines of red gel frosting. Next time I will make the PB filling less sweet since the coating is super sweet and I will make the pupil from chocolate rather than nasty black frosting. Oh well.

Here'a pic of the treat bags we gave out. They are from Martha's Halloween line and appropriately creepy. Inside are wind-up vampire teeth, body organ gummies and chocolate body parts (all from Oriental Trading). You can see some of the candy in the photo below.

I made these creepy "frog eggs" from Tapioca, using the instructions from here:

www.instructables.com/id/Creepy_Bubble_Halloween_Cocktails/

We put out glow sticks for stirrers, which added to the look.

This is a terrible picture but I also made Red Velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting. I made the cake from a mix and the batter was, indeed, blood red. Silver sprinkles completed the look.

Here are some other things that we served that I don't have pictures of:

Bacon-wrapped Squash Bites from here: www.chow.com/recipes/27760

Pesto dip: garbanzo beans, pesto, and parmesan cheese

Chocolate cookies: made from the recipe on a box of Duncan Hines chocolate cake mix. No joke. They are awesome!

Pumpkin Dip: Canned pumpkin mixed with softened cream cheese and cinnamon. Serve with Nilla Wafers or ginger cookies.

Halloween 2008

Here is my jack o'lantern above. I decided to go for something creepy with a lot of teeth, this year! Below is Melanie's cute owl; it looks really cool all lit up!

Here is a picture of the treat bags that Melanie and I made this year. I hope you can tell that they are supposed to be witches' brooms! I got the idea from Martha Stewart and adapted it a little for those of us who aren't quite as skilled as Martha.

Below is Melanie's Halloween cake, complete with skeletons haunting the cemetary.

Pumpkinpalooza Continues...

Here is a picture of the sugar and spice pumpkin seeds I made last night. We had a ton of pumpkin seeds from the five pumpkins we carved at our house. The seeds are good for you and tasty when toasted.

I used this recipe on Allrecipes: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Toasted-Pumpkin-Seeds-with-Sugar-and-Spice/Detail.aspx

The only change I made was to use butter in the skillet (instead of oil) and I didn't exactly measure the ingredients so there might be some variation there. It is a time consuming process but well worth it if you like toasted pumpkin seeds; they come out nice and carmelized.

Pumpkinpalooza Part 2 - Finally

Last weekend I finally found the time to make the Pumpkin Chocolate Covered Raisin Muffins (recipe here: http://www.culinaryconcoctionsbypeabody.com/2007/09/03/a-rant-and-a-muffin/). The change that I made is using a total of 2 teaspoons of pre-mixed pumpkin pie spice instead of the individual spices. I really would have liked to have used ginger but I didn't have any. These are moist and keep for several days (I ate the last one on Thursday and it was pretty much as good as the one I had on Sunday). They don't rise very much so feel free to fill the muffin cups up pretty much to the top.