Autumn in our Kitchen

Autumn baking is some of my favorite! I know that we've talked about being Team Apple or Team Pumpkin before. My mom and big-little sister are Team Pumpkin. My brother and probably my dad are Team Apple. And my little-little sister is kind of just Team Everything. I'm definitely Team Pumpkin, but we still cook a lot with both ingredients in the fall. We usually do some sort of honey cake around Rosh Hashanah, which traditionally represents the sweetness of the New Year. This year we made an Apple Honey Bundt Cake. The recipe didn't include a specific topping, so we used the glaze from Apple Cake with Honey Glaze instead. Everyone loved this cake. My brother thought that we should add more walnuts. And my sister and I would have liked a little bit more glaze. But it was still very good. One interesting question that we got into is that the recipe uses shredded apples. When we bake with shredded zucchini, recipes usually instruct you to squeeze out the liquid from the zucchini, or occasionally they specify that you don't need to squeeze. But this recipe didn't say anything! Were we supposed to squeeze or not squeeze?! We really didn't know. So we squeezed a little bit but not fully to end up with something in the middle. I still don't know if that's what we were supposed to do, but the cake turned out well so it's what I'd recommend.

I think that this cake looks exactly like what a fall cake should!

Another great autumnal (I just learned that word and I like it!) breakfast was Cinnamon Apple Cake. My big-little sister really liked the glaze on this. And we all liked the strong cinnamon flavors.

This cake looks very pretty too.

If you're looking for something a little bit less sweet though, Spiced Apple Muffin Bread is great. My mom liked this a lot. It has a texture that almost makes it like a pudding cake. And we realized after the fact, that this is actually a very healthy recipe.

Recipes that bake in a cast iron skillet seem especially appropriate for fall.

This picture gives a good sense of the texture.

A recipe that is similar, in terms of having a light texture and being mostly apples, is Very Easy Apple Cake. Rachel sent us a recipe for another easy apple cake recipe, but my mom thought it was this one, so we made this cake by accident! We'll have to try the right Rachel recipe soon!!!!!!

I thought that this looked simple but classy.

I highly recommend serving it with whipped cream!

A less popular apple breakfast was Baked Apples with Oatmeal Filling. My mom really thought that we would like these, but she was wrong! I think part of the problem is that we let them cook too long and so the apples were mushy. We used extra filling as a topping for some apple crisp though and that was much better. So I think we might like this if we just watch the cook time more carefully.

You can see how these apples got very very soft.

Another good apple cinnamon combination was Healthy Cinnamon Sugar Apple Muffins. These use whole wheat flour and not a lot of sugar or oil, but are still very good.

The cinnamon sugar topping is a good way to add some sweetness without using lots of sugar in the muffins themselves.

But despite making all of these recipes, we still had SOOOO many apples from apple picking. The problem is that apple cake and apple muffin recipes only use a few apples each. So my mom found a recipe for Slow Cooker Apple Butter to use up a lot of apples and that was a big success. We actually made it twice and the second time, we used some of the apples from the slow cooker as a topping for Cinnamon Waffles before we pureed them for the butter.

These cinnamon waffles are great and the apples are a perfect topping. We just ran the slow cooker overnight and they were all ready to go in the morning.

This is what our apple butter looked like. It was a great topping for all kinds of baked goods. And we had lots of jars to give out as gifts.

One of our recipes that we used the apple butter on was Butter Swim Biscuits. The name comes from the fact that you put the biscuit batter into a hot pan with melted butter so that the biscuits are "swimming." These are REALLY good! The name makes them sound like they're going to be greasy and they're not. The butter gets absorbed into the batter and just helps make them have a very crunchy crisp outside.

Another recipe that was great with apple butter was Grandma's Honey Muffins. These were drop-dead good (I just made that term up, but I think it's a good one and it applies)! It's hard to explain exactly why these muffins are so great, because they're very simple and the recipe doesn't look particularly special, but they're outstanding.

These muffins were great with apple butter, but would be equally good with other preserves or even just plain. I bet they'd be really good with maple butter or honey butter too.

Our last recipe that we served with the apple butter was Applesauce Cinnamon Bread. This is a convenient recipe because it doesn't even use fresh apples, so all of the ingredients are easy to keep on hand. It makes a very mild bread. It doesn't have strong apple flavor, and so the apple butter really helped it along. My big-little sister loved it. It wasn't my dad's favorite, but my mom thought that it was gird. It's not too sweet and it's very simple. Nobody is going to call it a showstopper, but I thought it was a good fall bread.

The cinnamon brown sugar topping is very good.

This was good with apple butter, but I bet it would also be good with honey butter or cream cheese.

Then switching over to Team Pumpkin, we made Pumpkin Coffee Cake with Brown Sugar-Pecan Streusel. Everybody liked this one too. It's a good basic pumpkin coffee cake. I wouldn't say that it's particularly remarkable, but if you make it, everyone will like it a lot!

This glaze was a good thickness, so it drizzled nicely.

This cake has a layer of streusel in the middle in addition to the top, which is my preference for a coffee cake.

A surprisingly big hit was Healthy Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies. My mom didn't expect us to love these as much as we did, but they were very popular.

We made these and had them after school one day, but these would also be a great breakfast cookie. We love breakfast cookies! My mom usually leaves them for us for breakfast in the morning when she works overnight.

A different kind of coffee cake from what we usually make is Chocolate Chip Cookie Coffee Cake. My big-little sister loved this. She thought that the flavor was amazing and said that it "hit the spot." My mom thought that it was too chocolatey and was more of a tea time cake than a breakfast coffee cake.

This got a nice thin crust on top.

But you can see that there is a lot of chocolate in here! So when you should serve this I guess depends on how you feel about chocolate for breakfast. Personally, I'm a fan of chocolate any time!!

The most surprising thing that we have baked in a very long time (and maybe ever!) was Anna Jones' Amazing Lemon Cannellini Cake. It is a cake that is made with pureed beans, which definitely sounds weird, but it's so good that we made it twice in a few weeks. The recipe suggests a lemon icing that is made with tofu, and we couldn't quite get ourselves there. So we made a Lemon Glaze instead. The cake is amazing. You would never ever know that it is made with beans and everyone loved it, even my dad! Nobody in our family or Rachel or Alec or Grazzy guessed that beans were the secret ingredient until we told them. The cake is made with beans, eggs and ground almonds, so it has a ton of protein in it. And the only sweetener is semi-solidified honey. The lemon glaze that we used had a lot of sugar, but I'm thinking that maybe we should make it again and try the tofu icing. The cake has beans in it and is shockingly good, so maybe an icing made with tofu will be good too!

The beans give this take a very creamy texture. But I liked it much more once it was cold.

A fantastic recipe that I love is my Grandma Linda's Poppyseed Cake. I can send anyone the recipe who wants it! This has a light cinnamon flavor and it's somehow both mild and flavorful at the same time. I realize that doesn't make a ton of sense. But it has a vanilla cinnamon flavor that is delicious, but not overpowering.

My Grandma Linda used to make this cake as gifts for my mom's teachers and it's so pretty that I can see how it would make a great gift!

A very good fall recipe that we tried was Cinnamon Swirl Donut Bread. This is a crowd pleaser recipe. Everybody really liked it and it's hard to imagine how anyone wouldn't.

This cake both looks and tastes like a classic comforting fall recipe.

And not surprisingly, it makes the house smell amazing while it bakes.

Another recipe that smells great is Skillet Cornbread. We made this for breakfast, but it would be great with soup for lunch or dinner too. One of the things that's unusual about this recipe is that it's made for a 12" cast iron skillet. A 12" cast iron skillet is huge! I think that we bought the wrong size by accident and then didn't realize it for a while which is the only reason that we have it, but it's what we have in the summer. But I'm sure you can make this in a smaller sized skillet. You'll just probably have to cook it a little bit longer because your cornbread will be thicker.

I think it looks nice how this cornbread gets served out of the skillet, although I'd probably take off the red rubber pot holder if I were actually going to serve this on the table!

The crispy edges on this are really good.

A very rich but delicious breakfast is Peanut Butter and Jelly French Toast Casserole. This is very filling and would be a great breakfast before skiing. The peanut butter flavor didn't come through as much as the jelly did, but I'm sure that we could change that by adjusting the ratios.

First you make little sandwiches and stack them on their sides before pouring an egg custard on top.

And then we just added a dusting of powdered sugar after it was baked. This definitely doesn't need maple syrup or anything else. The jelly added more than enough sweetness.

A breakfast that really captured the flavors of fall was Baked Apple Cider French Toast. I love baked apples. The French toast and apples remain separate components, and the apples are what really shine in the recipe.

The pecans really add nice texture and flavor here.

A less successful French toast breakfast was French Toast Pancakes. These are perfectly fine pancakes, but they were supposed to have the flavors of French toast, which they definitely do not. And looking back at the recipe, I don't know what we were thinking! There's really nothing that makes the recipe different from any other pancakes recipe, and it hardly has any spices! Maybe if we increased the cinnamon and nutmeg, we'd get closer, but there's nothing special about these as the recipe is written.

It is a fine basic pancake recipe though!

A delicious healthy fruit breakfast that we had was Ultimate Healthy Blueberry Crumble. We used mixed berries, which we prefer to just blueberries. And we liked eating it for breakfast, but it would also be a great after school snack or healthy dessert option.

We've started using silicon pans instead of foil as much as possible because it still allows us to pop bars and baked goods out of them, but is better for the environment. I'd prefer to find a white one because I like neutral dishes way better than colored ones, but we haven't found that yet. If you see any, definitely let me know!

My mom surprised us and added some whipped cream, which we usually don't have on school days, but this would actually also be great with a dollop of greek yogurt on top to add both creaminess and protein!

My mom has been trying to make an alternative to packaged granola bars, which my brother has before swim sometimes. We tried Thick Chewy Granola Bars and of course the only person who didn't love them was my brother!! But the rest of us thought that these were awesome.

The best part about this recipe is that you can use any mix of dried fruit and nuts that you want. We used pecans, cashews, dried cherries, coconut and dates, but I'd like to try them with macadamia nuts and dark chocolate chips.

My Aunt ShayShay sent us a recipe for homemade Nutella, but we decided that a more accurate description of this recipe would be calling it Chocolate Hummus. To make these, all that you have to do is roast chickpeas and then puree them with dates, cocoa powder and hot water.

The texture definitely ends up much more similar to hummus than Nutella.

This is good on toast, but we actually really liked it best stirred into oatmeal.

One of my mom's favorite muffins we have ever made was Any-Berry Muffins with Cornmeal Streusel. I really loved these too. And so did everybody actually! What sets these muffins apart is the cornmeal streusel. It is sweet and very unusual.

The streusel is made like any other streusel, with some sugar and butter and flour, but it uses cornmeal rather than nuts or oats.

This is another recipe where you can just use whatever berry mix you like. We used a combination of blueberries, blackberries and raspberries. We used fresh berries, but I bet that frozen berries (not defrosted) would work fine too.

These muffins also come out looking absolutely perfect - probably the most professional looking muffins we've ever made.

We also made two versions of donut muffins. The first version of Donut Muffins has you bake the muffins and then brush them with butter and roll them in cinnamon sugar. These are very similar to French Breakfast Puffs, which I've blogged about before and remain my all-time favorite recipe from this general category of individual cinnamon sugar breakfast delights! But these donut muffins are very good too. I know this sounds ridiculous, but I don't want to hurt this muffin's feelings by saying that I like the Breakfast Puffs better!!!!!

The recipe says to brush the muffin tops with butter, but I just put two bowls next to each other and did two quick dips, which we thought would be easier and faster.

And then this was the final product. My brother's friend Ollie really liked these.

Then another variant that we tried was Glazed Donut Muffins. Everybody really liked these too. My friend Gloria really likes our Glazed Old Fashioned Donut Cake and so we made these when she was sleeping over and not surprisingly, she really liked these too! The problem with making morning breakfast cakes is that they take longer to bake and then have to cool. Sometimes when we do it, I end up being very hungry and grouchy by the time we eat. Muffins are much more efficient!

These are very simple and look pretty. They'd be a nice addition to a brunch.

A big fall hit was Pumpkin Crumb Cake Muffins. These smell great, taste great and look great. It's hard to ask for much more!

This was actually another muffin that I think looks professional enough that someone would believe that it had come from a professional bakery!

Another very pretty muffin was Brown-Butter Maple Muffins. My only criticism of these is that all of the maple flavor comes from the glaze. There isn't a lot of maple flavor in the muffins themselves. So if I made these again, I'd add some maple extract to the batter. That adds a lot more maple flavor than maple syrup does alone. But regardless, my entire family enjoyed these a lot.

The pecans are optional, but I think adding toasted nuts almost always adds good flavor.

One of my favorite book series of all time is the Little House on the Prairie series. My Grandma Linda read them aloud to my mom and my mom has read them aloud to all of us (well not my little-little sister yet, but I'm sure she will some day!). A very fun recipe that my big-little sister made with my mom recently was called Laura's Little Maple Cakes. My big-little sister found the recipe in a cookbook we have called My Little House Cookbook. They are perfect, not very sweet, little cakes baked in mini muffin tins and then dipped in a maple glaze. Let me know if you want the recipe!

We topped some with pecans and some with walnuts. I generally prefer pecans, but walnuts do go well with maple.

We ended up with a lot of dates because when we bought them for the chocolate hummus, we had to buy a huge container. I LOVE dates. They are known as the "fruit of kings" and I think it should actually be queens, but I completely agree with the spirit of that assessment!! We use Medjool dates, which come from Morocco and are soft and sweet. One of the things that we made was Date Nut Muffins and I absolutely loved these. They're relatively healthy, compared to a lot of other muffins, and taste fantastic.

These are also made with walnuts, which definitely aren't one of my favorite nuts, but are absolutely perfect here.

We also made Healthy Date Carrot Muffins and these were another success. These taste more like carrot cake and have oats in them, which I usually like in a muffin because they add texture and make them less cakey. I'd definitely recommend both of these muffins for more of a regular morning weekday breakfast.

I think it's funny that my mom is holding different muffins on different ways in these two pictures and she is holding them the EXACT same way.

My big-little sister is a HUGE fan of lemon poppy seed muffins and so we made her these Lemon Poppy Seed Scones. She absolutely loved them and said that the glaze complemented the scone and made them very delicious (those were her exact words which really impressed me!).

My big-little sister saw this picture as I was working on this and said "those were the best things on earth!" So I guess that's a pretty good endorsement!

Our friend Christina was visiting and she's a big gingerbread fan and so we made these Gingerbread Scones with Maple Glaze. These were great. They definitely had gingerbread flavors but weren't overpowering. My big-little sister isn't always a huge gingerbread fan, but she loved these.

I thought that we did a particularly good job of drizzling this glaze on artfully!

One of our larger recent failures was Cloud Bread. This was another Instagram recipe and we've learned that those are always a bit risky. We've had some huge successes, which is why we keep trying them occasionally, but we've also had some huge misses. This one unfortunately fell into the second category. You make this with powdered egg whites, whole milk cottage cheese and water. It has a ton of protein in it, which is part of the reason that my mom was willing to give it a try. She and I thought that it was weird, but not bad. My brother and big-little sister just weren't into it. The big problem with it is that it mostly just tasted salty. I think it was because cottage cheese is salty. We actually love cottage cheese, but we get low sodium. We couldn't find whole milk low sodium cottage cheese and so we used regular and that just gave us very salty weird textured fake bread. I liked it better with jam, probably because the sweetness helped to balance all the salt!

It definitely looks like a cloud at least!

Another breakfast experiment wasn't even a recipe, but it is a new way of cooking something basic. We baked eggs in a muffin tin, and it was super simple and turned out great. You just grease the muffin tin and bake the eggs with salt and pepper for about 15 minutes at 350, give or take a minute or two depending on how cooked through you want them. I'm sure you could also had herbs or cheese or other seasonings if you wanted to jazz them up.

This isn't a very pretty picture but I wanted to show you how baking eggs this way is particularly good for putting on English muffins because they come out perfectly round!

A very fun recipe that I didn't make, but I definitely enjoyed was Birthday Cake Cinnamon Rolls. My big-little sister and brother helped my mom make these to surprise me on my birthday. These are like Funfetti cake and they are so rich and so good.

A lot of Funfetti recipes use cake mix to add Funfetti flavor, which my mom doesn't really want to do. But this dough uses instant dry milk instead.

And then they get frosted with a cream cheese frosting. A unique aspect to this recipe is that these cinnamon rolls stay fresh for many days in a Tupperware. We were really surprised by how long they lasted!

I've posted on these Maple Oat Ghostly Scones before. We don't have a recipe link, but I'll send it to anyone who wants it. This is a great scone recipe and it uses a food processor which makes it super easy to make!

We always have these around Halloween, but you could obviously just not cut them out as ghosts and have them any time!

My mom surprised us with special bat donuts on Halloween before she went to work. She made the first ones to show us and then I helped her do the rest. We used a recipe for Baked S'mores Donuts, but decorated them as bats instead of adding the marshmallow and graham crumbs on top. The recipe has you make a ganache to dip the donuts in and it has you mix butter in with the cream and chocolate. We thought that the butter was weird and it turned out to be a huge mistake. It turned our pretty ganache into a separated oily mess. We remade it and skipped the butter and it turned out beautifully, so if you make these, I'd skip the butter in the ganache for sure. This recipe makes mini donuts and that's definitely the right answer because they're very rich. But they aren't terribly sweet. They mostly just have a strong dark chocolate flavor.

We used slivered almonds for teeth and Oreo pieces for ears. It was tricky to get everything to stick in the donut, but they did look really cute!

My very favorite salad in the world is Kale Salad with Dates Parmesan and Almonds. We actually make it a lot, but somehow, surprisingly, I don't think I've ever blogged about it before! I love this salad because it has dates, and the parmesan and almonds and lemony dressing all go together with the kale really well. The recipe doesn't say anything about massaging the kale, but we usually dress it a bit in advance and then massage it a teeny bit to soften it. I don't like massaged kale when it gets super soft and limp, but just a little bit makes it more palatable I think.

We use parmigiana reggiano and shave it over the top with a vegetable peeler.

One of the best things we did this fall was hollow out a giant pumpkin and stick my little-little sister in it. We made holes for her feet and she called it her pumpkin highchair! I'll have my mom send the pictures to anyone who wants to see. It was really cute! But then we used the seeds to make Roasted Cinnamon Sugar Pumpkin Seeds and these were really something special.

The pumpkin was so so huge and we thought that we'd have tons of seeds to roast, but this is all we got. Turns out that extra large pumpkins don't have more seeds than smaller ones, or at least ours didn't!

These seeds were delicious, and they almost taste more savory than sweet. They're great as a snack on their own or on top of salads.

Another favorite thing of mine that we made recently with end of summer tomatoes doesn't even have a recipe, but we roasted them in the oven with olive oil and salt and pepper and fresh thyme and then pulled them out and put a slice of Humboldt Fog on top and spread it all on baguette. Humboldt Fog is a goat's milk cheese made from pasteurized goat's milk with a line of edible ash. It's a great cheese if you haven't tried it and this is a great way to serve it!

The rind is my favorite part!

Another good snack that we did with cheese was make crostini using our apple butter. If you make the apple butter, this is an awesome way to use it in a savory preparation! We just toasted some baguette and topped them with the apple butter, a triple creme cheese and thyme.

The thyme adds a lot to these!

We were on Nantucket for Hurricane Lee and everything was fine, but we had a very rainy day! So mostly we stayed home and played Catan, which is a strategy board game. If you haven't played Catan yet, go buy it right now!! IT IS SO MUCH FUN!!!!!! But for lunch that day we made soup and Basic Homemade Bread to go with it. Any recipe with "basic" in the title doesn't sound that exciting, but this is a very good, easy simple bread. It would be great sandwich bread.

It's nice that the recipe makes two loaves, because you can always freeze one.

The soup that we made to go with the bread is called Carabaccia, which is a Tuscan onion soup. The soup is simple, mostly broth and onions, and then you poach eggs in it right before serving. Adding sherry to the broth gives it some needed flavor, so I highly recommend doing that. My big-little sister thought that this had too many onions, but I liked it.

This is a great warm and homey rainy day soup.

Another soup that I loved was Slow Cooker Mushroom Wild Rice Soup. There is coconut milk in the broth which gives it a great creamy coconut flavor and then the rice and mushrooms add texture and substance. My brother claims that he's not a soup person, but he really liked this one. It's sort of more of a stew.

The pop of color from the carrots is nice and I'd probably add more.

Another recipe that my brother really liked was French Bread Clam Pizza. This is very flavorful. It's like garlic bread, but with clams. This wasn't my dad's favorite, but the rest of us absolutely loved it.

The only issue with this recipe is that it can be a little bit hard to bite and the clams tend to fall off. Increasing the quantity of parmesan might help with that.

Another really good snack that we made recently was Smoked Trout Dip. My dad saw this and thought that it looked good and so he sent the idea to my mom. There wasn't an exact recipe, but she just used smoked trout (they usually sell it near the fish department with the smoked salmon) and mixed it with creme fraiche, lemon zest, chives, dill and lemon juice. The trout itself is very salty, so the lemon juice is very important to add acid to help neutralize the saltiness.

We served the trout dip with crackers and vegetables originally, but later we served it on toasts and that was really good too.

A kind of weird recipe that we tried mostly because we were curious was Mini Pickle Galettes.

First you make a sauce with garlic and butter and flour and milk. It's like a thick béchamel.

For our galette we used a new recipe for Foolproof Pie Dough and just left out the sugar. This recipe uses vodka in addition to water for the liquid! The theory behind using vodka is that the ethanol stops the gluten from binding and makes for a more tender crust. This crust was absolutely awesome and will be our new basic pie dough from now on!

These galettes got mixed reviews. My mom and I really liked them. My brother and big-little sister thought that the cheese and pickles were a little weird. My dad was somewhere in the middle. He thought that they needed some more flavor.

My mom always packs us special holiday lunches, and the Halloween ones are some of our favorites. There are some things that she always puts in (like broomsticks made with pretzel sticks and cheese), but then she likes to try some different things too. This year she made Baked Tortilla Chips and cut them into bat shapes. These were awesome and would be great to make just as normal chips. To make these, you brush tortillas with oil and lime juice and then sprinkle them with cumin, chili powder and salt. My mom used flour tortillas because that's what we had, but we want to try them with corn tortillas too.

Don't these look cute?!

She served us the chips with Black Bean Dip and this dip ended up being a HUGE surprise hit! We all loved it and Rachel did too. My mom was worried that my big-little sister might not like it because it has some heat to it, but my big-little sister thought it was great. And my mom gave it to my little-little sister on pita for lunch and my little-little sister kept screaming for more!

This doesn't look like much, but it's really great. If I were putting it out for guests though, I might sprinkle some cilantro on top to add color and brighten it up.

We also tried a new recipe for regular Roasted Garlic Bread and it ended up being one of my mom's favorite recipes that we've made in a really long time. She was really into this!! To make it, first you roast a few heads of garlic and then you mix the roasted cloves with butter and parmesan and parsley.

Another dish we did with end of summer tomatoes was Tomato-Butter Pasta. This is a very thin tomato sauce. You grate fresh tomatoes on a box grater, which we'd never done before. My mom thought that this was too thin without enough body to the sauce and said that she'd cook it down more to concentrate it next time, but I liked the dish.

We added lobster to it, which I really liked. We served it with the garlic bread and that was my mom's favorite part!

A great warming recipe we made Pasta E Ceci which is Italian pasta and chickpea stew. I love chickpeas and I love that they add protein and bulk to vegetarian dishes. I prefer tomatoes pureed and less chunky, so I might make this with crushed tomatoes rather than whole tomatoes next time.

This is made with ditalini which are very short pasta tubes and I like that shape a lot.

One of my favorite recent pasta dinners was One-Pot Clam Spaghetti. This was really really good and gets a strong recommendation if you're going to cook some of the recipes from this post. It's easy to make, everybody loved it and the spinach in it is awesome.

This is a simple recipe, but the clams and garlic and oil and cheese and pasta and spinach just meld to create a bowl of creamy goodness!

One of our biggest universal hits of the fall was One-Pan Shrimp Scampi with Crispy Gnocchi. This one is a total home run and something that you should definitely make immediately. My dad was skeptical when he saw it but said that he was "shocked" by how good it was. We doubled the recipe and we should have tripled it!

The gnocchi are cooked until they get crispy in a pan and then mixed in with garlic butter and lemon and parsley and sautéed shrimp and it's amazing.

Another really good pasta dish was Pesto Bucatini Pie. We couldn't find bucatini when we made this so we substituted spaghetti, which was fine. We've made another spaghetti pie in the past, which had more cacio e pepe flavors, but this one is similar. We tend to serve these as side dishes, but it could be served as a main with a salad.

I like the crispy top and edges the best.

I was worried that this might just fall apart, but it sliced beautifully. We did let it cool for 30 minutes first though.

One of the very best dinners that we have ever made is Butternut Couscous Bowls with Maple Vinaigrette. I can't say enough about this recipe. It is out of this world good! We used farro instead of couscous because we like it better. But regardless of which you choose, these are grain bowls with kale dressed in a maple vinaigrette topped with roasted butternut squash and chickpeas. The recipe calls for goat cheese, but my sister and I like feta betta (you catch that Alec?!) so we had that. One of the aspects of grain bowls that's great is that you can customize them however you like. We also used our roasted pumpkin seeds and they were awesome with this. Another remarkable feature of this recipe is how good the maple vinaigrette is. It's the first dressing made with vinegar that my brother has ever liked! And it was so good on the kale that my mom just made a double batch of the dressing the next day to keep in the fridge and have on hand!

It's always hard to photograph bowls because you can't see all of the components, but the dressed kale and farro is underneath!

Another huge dinner hit was Grilled Fish with Artichoke Caponata. We used bronzini filets, but the caponata is what provides the flavor, so any fish would work great! The caponata is made with artichokes, olives, capers, wine, tomato sauce, celery, onion and garlic and it is so good that I had it for lunch on toast for two more days!!

The caponata would also be good on chicken or you could even make flatbread pizzas with it!

A dinner that is very different from what we usually have, but that was still good was Crunchy Onion Barbecue Chicken. It uses fried onions instead of a bread crumb breading, which probably isn't very healthy, but it I liked it. Although honestly, the barbecue flavor is what's most prominent, so this would probably good with any crunchy coating. Nuts would actually be good and much healthier.

We served this with baked potatoes and roasted broccoli. I ate it when I got home late from dance, and it was a good comforting meal.

A recipe that was an insane amount of work, but that had good results was The Best Crispy Roast Potatoes Ever. First you boil the potatoes and make a garlic rosemary infused oil, which you strain. Then you roast them in the oven with the oil and lots of shaking and turning and eventually add back in the garlic and rosemary. They're great, but very labor intensive for a side dish!

You can see how they get crunchy crispy edges. It's almost like the soft potato outsides from the boiling become a crust.

A great treat that we made with early fall plums was Plum Cobbler Bars. These are also a fair amount of work because the filling is a plum jam that you make on the stove before making the bars themselves, but these are very very good.

The thick crust layer is delicious and makes these sturdier than a lot of fruit bars.

We seem to be in the labor intensive section of this blog post! Brownie Stuffed Chocolate Chip Cookies are another recipe that has a number of steps, but produces something special. These were a really big hit.

First you make chocolate chip cookie dough and brownie dough and chill them both. We chose to scoop them out before we chilled them to make forming our cookies go faster. Eventually you fold the cookie dough around the brownie dough and then you bake them.

These end up pretty big, but there's no way around that since you're using two doughs. These sort of look like regular chocolate chip cookies, but once you bite into them, you realize that there's a brownie in the middle!

When we make more complicated recipes or have multiple baking projects planned for a weekend, one thing that we do to make things move more quickly is measure out our dry ingredients, and mix-ins, and anything else that we can, to have as much as possible ready to go in advance. It's basically setting up a baking mise en place.

We keep three sizes of deli containers on hand. It's convenient because they stack neatly and all use the same lids! And we label EVERYTHING because even if we think we'll remember what's in each container, it's easy to get confused!!

A very pretty cookie that we made was Salted Caramel Pretzel Chocolate Chip Cookies. My big-little sister really liked these, especially the crunchiness from the pretzels with the chewy cookie. I thought that these were a little bit thin. I prefer thicker cookies, but I did still liked them.

I especially liked the way that the pretzels on top looked. It turned these into a cookie that everyone wanted to eat!

We made Back to School Cookies on the first day of school because they seemed appropriate. These definitely aren't health food, but they do have rolled oats, steel cut oats, ground flax and bran cereal, which actually add some nutrition. These are basically oatmeal cookies and have good flavor, but they were definitely too thin.

The recipe has chocolate chips, but we used peanut m&m's instead.

Another mishmash cookie that we made was called Everybody's After School Cookies, but I feel as if they would be better named Oat Chipperdoodles because they are like a cross between oatmeal cookies, chocolate chip cookies and snickerdoodles. These were some of my favorites. I love snickerdoodles, but they can be sort of plain, so I liked these because the oats added texture and the chocolate chips added a little razzle-dazzle. We gave these to a lot of our teachers to congratulate them for making it through the first week of school and they really loved them!

You can see how they look like chocolate chip oat cookies, but with a snickerdoodle coating.

Another good oat cookie was Whole Wheat Oat Chocolate Cookies. These are made with whole wheat flour and wheat germ, but they don't taste like it at all. If anything, they're just more flavorful. My mom brought these for my brother's flag football team and she was worried they might think they were weird, but everyone loved them. And our pediatrician was a big fan too!

I think that the wheat flours give these a darker color than typical chocolate chip oatmeal cookies.

Another recipe that we made around Rosh Hashanah was Honey Cookies. These look and sound simple, but they are WONDERFUL. Everyone loved them. They have amazing texture and flavor. One thing that I learned this fall from the honey muffins and these cookies is that honey is an ingredient that I should bake with more!

These get rolled in coarse sugar before baking which adds crunch.

Pumpkin Cheesecake Snickerdoodles taste like fall in a cookie. To make these, you roll cookie dough around scoops of cream cheese filling. These were tricky to make. Both the dough and filling get chilled first, but they'd warm up quickly and become hard to work with when we went to form the cookies, so we had to return both the filling and the batter to the fridge to firm up again a few times. My brother doesn't always love pumpkin, but he liked these a lot because of the cream cheese.

These are worth making and are without question worth the effort in the end.

We made two versions of pumpkin cookies with brown butter icing. They were both huge hits. I think that the brown butter frostings would probably make anything taste good! Of the two, Brown Butter Pumpkin Oatmeal Cookies would probably be my second choice. Everyone but me liked them just as much, but I didn't really love the oats in these. I either want my cookie to be all oats like an oatmeal raisin cookie or no oats. But I don't love cookies where oats are just sprinkled in.

But despite my oat issues, everyone else who tried these cookies absolutely loved them.

My preferred cookie in this category was Pumpkin Cookies with Brown Butter Frosting. This is basically a perfect cookie. The frosting is so flavorful and the cookies are thick and soft. This recipe is a big winner.

Another advantage of these cookies is that they make your house smell amazing! If someone turned the smell into a candle, it would sell out immediately!

Peanut Butter Cup Stuffed Peanut Butter Cookies were a very different type of cookie, but they were equally popular. They're like a delicious peanut butter hug. What I really liked about these is that the chocolate isn't too overpowering. It really just enhances the peanut butter flavor. And they're nice to give people because the peanut butter cup in the middle comes as a fun surprise!

I liked how we did the chocolate on top of these as a zigzag drizzle.

One of our friends, German, loves macadamia nuts and so we made these Macadamia Nut Cookies for him. We used a mix of dark chocolate, milk chocolate and white chocolate which added a lot of flavor.

I would call these Triple Chocolate Macadamia Cookies if I were naming them, because they taste more like really good chocolate chip cookies that happen to have macadamia nuts in them.

A less successful macadamia nut recipe was Coconut Macadamia Nut Bars. The problem with these is that the recipe has a small amount of lemon juice in the filling, which was just enough to give them a weird lemon flavor, but not enough for them to be true coconut lemon bars. They tasted more like coconut macadamia bars that had gone sour or had something wrong with them!

These would probably be great if you just eliminated the lemon juice. They're definitely worth trying that way. I think they could be good with some white chocolate added in there as well.

Our last macadamia nut recipe was Hawaiian Brownies. These are very rich dark chocolate brownies. We even made the topping with semisweet instead of bittersweet chocolate, but my mom still thought that they weren't sweet enough. The rest of us liked them though. My big-little sister said that these were "a hit on the butt!" I don't know what that means exactly, but she said it means that she liked them!!!!!!!

These look very pretty and cut nicely. I'd make them with semisweet chocolate though unless you like super dark chocolate.

Another brownie recipe that we tried was called Best Brownies and my brother thought that these really were the best brownies we ever made. They have a brownie base and then a frosting that we really loved. My brother especially liked that the frosting isn't as sweet as buttercream.

These look super dark in the picture, but I think it's maybe just because they're made with cocoa powder. They don't taste as dark as they look.

Rachel recommended that we try Crinkle Top Brownies because they're her favorite and we topped them with the frosting from Chocolate Sheet Cake with Peanut Butter Frosting. My big-little sister and I really loved these and my mom will automatically love anything with peanut butter frosting, which is really just her two favorite foods combined.

Usually we use very high quality chocolate when we bake, but I liked how the candy on top of these adds a different kind of sweetness. My dad is very critical of the quality of chocolate used in candy and says that it's not real chocolate, but my mom and I still love candy anyway!

And not surprisingly, Reese's Fluffernutter Bars were also a huge hit with us. These have a layer of peanut butter dough, and then layers of marshmallow fluff and peanut butter cups and another cookie dough layer. It sounds like I'm making this up, but I have multiple witnesses who will confirm that my big-little sister actually said that "these feel like the warm hug of a peanut butter s'more."My brother thought that these were too peanut buttery, but the rest of us don't even understand what that comment means.

I love everything about these bars, but the only downside of them is that they are very messy.

My mom really dislikes blondies, so we don't make them very often. She feels like they are generally not very flavorful and often greasy. But we tried Brown Butter Blondies and they were reasonably good as blondies go. And our friends really liked them. Maybe there are brownie people and blondie people? I'm definitely Team Brownie, but I'd love to hear your blondie thoughts in the comments! Are a lot of people blondie fans?

The top of these is similar to an ideal brownie top, with a thin layer of crispy, flaky crust.

These definitely cut nicely though, which I think is very important. And they weren't greasy and have good flavor. So if you tend to like blondies at baseline, then this is a good recipe to try.

Another recipe that we tried in our brief blondie foray was Cinnamon Roll Blondies. These were controversial. My brother just didn't like them and thought that they tasted like a bad cinnamon roll. My dad liked them, but said that they tasted like he should be having one with his coffee in the morning. My mom thought that they were kind of weird and that the cinnamon flavor was too strong. I had mixed feelings, but Rachel's colleagues really loved them. So I guess maybe I'd say that these are somewhat risky to make, but if you're really into cinnamon, you might love them.

The frosting on these is very good.

Another bar that we tried was called Peanut Butter Heaven. These are good if you like oats in bars, which aren't my favorite. I like oats in muffins and in oatmeal raisin or breakfast cookies and as a crust in fruit bars (this post seems to involve a lot of my oat-pinions!). But I don't love them in cookie bars. That said, these are still good and were very popular with our friends.

These bars do cut very nicely, which as you know, I really appreciate!

In a completely different direction, we made Lemon Bars. I loved these and so did some of our friends who were visiting. These are extremely lemony. They are custardy and messy and a bit drippy, which I really enjoy. I think that's what makes lemon bars good! But these are difficult to serve and maybe easier to eat with a fork.

The corner pieces are easier to serve and eat because they have more crust to hold. I'm not usually an edge person, but there are special brownie pans shaped like a snake for people who want all of their brownies to be edge pieces. I wonder if using a pan like that would be good for these lemon bars?!

We also tried Cream Cheese Lemon Bars, which had more of a cheese cake consistency. My mom liked these more because of the texture. These were very good and not too drippy.

The creaminess of the filling almost reminded me of key lime pie, which I love!

Our biggest failure of the season was Caramel Apple Cake. My mom absolutely HATED this. Remember our gross strawberry blondies from my last post? Well these had the same problem which is a wet texture. It just turned out wet and soggy and mushy and awful. Weirdly, my dad and brother didn't mind it. But my mom and I were really not fans!!

You can see how it's kind of smushy.

We made a very famous recipe called Tom Cruise Cake for Grazzy's birthday because she loves coconut. I just realized writing this post and talking to my mom that I have thought Tom Cruise was Ted Cruz all this time, and I thought it was weird that we were making his cake recipe! So it turns out that Tom Cruise is an actor in movies (I'm guessing that everybody else already knows that!). I have never seen Tom Cruise in a movie, which is probably part of why I was confused, but now I know that he is the guy in Top Gun. What you might not know is that there is a famous coconut cake from a bakery in LA that he sends as gifts every year around the holidays and people really like it. So my mom had read about it for years and we finally decided to try it. She was actually kind of disappointed with this, but everyone else liked it. She thought that the cake formed a crust that was too thick and hard, and I agreed with her, but it didn't bother me quite as much. I might try checking for doneness sooner if I made it again, because I'm not sure if the outside was so hard because we overcooked it.

This cake looks like a typical coconut cake, but it's a little bit different because it has chunks of white chocolate in the cake and a cream cheese frosting.

We actually used blond chocolate instead of white chocolate, but keep reading for more on what that means later!

A long time ago, Kelsie suggested that we try Ice Cream Bread. It took us forever, but we finally tried it! It's hardly even a recipe, but to make this you melt two cups of ice cream and add self-rising flour and any mix-ins and bake it in a loaf pan. We didn't have self-rising flour, but it's easy to make your own. You just add 1.5 teaspoons of baking powder and 1/4 teaspoon of fine salt to every cup of AP flour. This is surprisingly good and very fast and easy. We used vanilla ice cream and our bread had a mild vanilla flavor, but you could do this with any kind of ice cream that we wanted. My friend Gloria liked this a lot!

We added chocolate chips and sprinkles to ours and I'd leave out the chocolate chips next time because they overpowered all of the other flavors.

A really good recipe that we made twice was Millionaire Candy We went to my Grandma Linda and Papa Richard's 50th anniversary party and made this for their friend Dori, who hosted the party. This candy is similar to turtles; it's nuts in a caramel that then get dipped in chocolate. We tried them with almonds, pecans and cashews. The ones made with cashews were my favorite, but all of the versions were good.

These aren't hard to make, but you do need a candy thermometer, and you should be prepared that it takes a really long time for the candy to reach the desired temperature. It gets close really quickly and then the last 10-15 degrees take FOREVER!

This is what the candy looks like when it's finished. It would be a great holiday gift!

We don't usually make candy, but we also made Sponge Candy recently because we found out that September 21st was National Sponge Candy Day. My mom grew up in Buffalo, and sponge candy is a big deal there, but a lot of people haven't even heard of it. Apparently it's called honeycomb candy in other places. To make this, you just combine brown sugar, corn syrup and vinegar until it's at the hard crack stage and then you take it off the heat and add baking soda and it foams up. Then you transfer it to a pan to cool, touching it as little as possible to keep the air bubbles intact.

This is what it looks like cooled and broken up.

Then you dip the pieces in chocolate.

And this was our finished product. It was great!

A very rich chocolatey dessert that we made was Flourless Chocolate Cake. This is a dense chocolate cake with a glaze. I liked that it is a single layer cake because it's so rich. Anything thicker would be too much.

We topped ours with whipped cream. Our friend Christina had brought us marzipan fruit and so we used that as garnish and it looked great!

In our latest update to Rachel's Wedding Cake, we made them as Funfetti cupcakes, still using the same cake recipe and frosting recipe. We made these for Layssa's birthday because she likes Funfetti too and she really liked them!

We didn't do a great job with these sprinkles. I've learned that placing each sprinkle individually takes a long time, but is the only way to get them really perfect looking in the end!

We also made Confetti Sprinkle Cupcakes, which are basically the same idea. Both versions were great, so you really can't go wrong with these.

But this shows how carefully placing each sprinkle really does make a prettier product in the end.

A complicated recipe that we tried was Real Deal Southern Caramel Cake and we had mixed results. First we made the layers for the cake and they turned out incredible. The cake was light and moist and fluffy. Then we went on to the caramel icing. It is supposed to cook for an hour and a half to two hours and everything was going perfectly, and then all of a sudden it wasn't! I don't know how it happened, but the icing suddenly went from looking beautiful to burnt and grainy. We were so sad because by then we had invested so much time in it!!!!

We even tried to see if straining it could salvage things, but it was definitely not fixable!!

But my dad's family was visiting and we really wanted to serve them caramel cake because we know that they love getting it whenever they go to South Carolina. So we regrouped and used the icing from this Southern Caramel Cake recipe, which came together much quicker.

Fortunately, our second icing turned out great!

Our version combining recipes was awesome, but I still do want to try the first icing again to get it right and compare them. I'll have to report back on that!

An interesting experiment that we tried started with a recipe for Squidgy White Chocolate Flourless Cake, which is also called Kladdkaka. It is a popular Swedish recipe. A while ago, my mom had bought blond chocolate, which is basically caramelized white chocolate. We were looking for something to do with it and decided to replace the white chocolate with our blond chocolate, in part because Rachel was with us and she doesn't love white chocolate. Well it turns out that Kladdkaka made with blond chocolate is REALLY REALLY REALLY great!! Alec and Rachel and Grazzy and our entire family loved this. I cannot recommend this one enough. Just make it.

You need to let this cake cool fully before slicing. We made it in the morning and then served it as dessert after dinner. This would be an outstanding choice for a dinner party!

This has a very fudgy texture, not fudgy chocolatey, but almost like the texture of cookie dough. I love cakes like this that are more fudgy than cake with a crumb.

But of course, after we were all obsessed with our blond Kladdkaka, we wanted to try the original recipe with white chocolate. The white chocolate was actually better than we thought it would be and we all enjoyed it, but the caramelization notes in the blond chocolate gave much better depth of flavor.

The white chocolate version looked very pretty and would be good with berries. Or maybe even cranberry around the holidays! I actually really like that idea and now I want to try it!!

We just served it with whipped cream and it was very good. The fudgy texture is really special.

We made a halloween cupcake variation using Confetti Sprinkle Cupcakes with the Funfetti Cake frosting that we used for Rachel's wedding cake. So these were a combination of our two versions of Funfetti cupcakes above!

We used the tie dye frosting method to make a candy corn swirl effect for these. I thought that they turned out great!

We also made chocolate pretzel spider webs. This doesn't even have a recipe, but they're a great project for kids. My brother actually did these with my mom. You just line up the pretzels and then make circles of chocolate with melted chocolate in a piping bag. Then you drag a toothpick through the melted chocolate to make the web and decorate them with halloween sprinkles.

The big problem with these is that they're very fragile. They're fun to make but they break easily because chocolate is the only thing holding the pretzels together.

Another fun Halloween treat that we made that doesn't even have a recipe was Halloween bark. We made both milk chocolate and semisweet chocolate versions. You just make and spread your base chocolate on silicon cookie sheet liners or parchment. Then you layer on spoonfuls of white chocolate and use a toothpick to create ghost tails. Then you make your eyes and noses with another toothpick dipped in melted chocolate. And decorate with gold starts and candy corn and Halloween m&m's. But you could use other Halloween candies or sprinkles or whatever you want.

This was fun, but I have to say, it's a great example of a project that takes a lot longer than you think. We thought it would be so quick and easy but actually getting all of it done took an INCREDIBLE amount of effort.

A much easier fun Halloween recipe was ghost brownies. My brother was home from school with pneumonia this fall for a really long time and when he was starting to get better, but still didn't have the energy to do very much, he spent time in the kitchen making after school surprises for my big-little sister and me with my mom. To make these, they used Rachel's favorite Crinkle Top Brownies recipe as a base. Then they just topped them with melted white chocolate and sprinkles and marshmallows that my brother put eyes and mouths on with melted chocolate.

Don't these look awesome?! You could also probably do a cute snowman version in the winter.

Another big success was Halloween Cookies. These cookies get their super dark color from black cocoa powder. But they're so good that they would be worth making with different decoration for any time of the year. They'd be great with regular m&m's at any time or you could use red and green m&m's and a white chocolate drizzle around the winter holidays. I also think that a peanut butter m&m version would be good!

You'd probably want to skip the candy eyes if you're not making these for Halloween though!

Our biggest Halloween surprise however was how good these Boo! Chocolate Peanut Butter Bars were! Grazzy found the recipe and sent it to my mom and she just made them with me after work the night before Halloween because the recipe is quick and easy, but these are shockingly SPECTAC-BOO-LAR. They are absolutely delicious, but they're no-bake and come together fast. The only part that takes real time is making the ghosts (again!), so if you just make these without the Halloween decorations, they're be really easy. They're peanut butter cereal bars topped with melted chocolate and they're one of those recipes that turns out to be much more special than it sounds.

These weren't our best ghosts! We were tired and sick of ghost-making by then!!

But they still looked cute sliced. Rachel brought them into work and people really liked them.

We used the Crinkle Top Brownies recipe again as a base to make spider web brownies. To make these you just make whatever brownies you want to and then melt marshmallows and stretch them over the top to form the webs. We started melting our marshmallows on the stove, but they began browning and so we moved them to the microwave and that worked perfectly.

Adding the marshmallows on top was very easy, but definitely turned out to be cute and festive. Doing a brownie platter with a mix of these and the ghost brownies would be awesome for a Halloween party!

Then after Halloween, we had to find a recipe to use up all of our leftover candy. We've tried other versions of this before, but this year we tried Halloween Candy Cookie Bars and we actually liked these more than recipes that we've done in other years. My dad liked how chewy these were and I liked how it's kind of a fun surprise to get different candy textures and flavors in different bites. My brother brought them to his flag football team and they thought it was the best treat we'd made them all year.

We used so many different kinds of candy in these! We had to keep them nut free because my brother was bringing them to school. But they had m&m's, Whoppers, candy corn, Milky Ways, Kit Kats, Twix, 3 Musketeers, Rolos, Hershey's kisses and Hershey's bars, plus probably some other things that I'm forgetting!

That covers pretty much all of our recent cooking and baking. But before I go, I just want to show you something that we didn't make ourselves, but is still so amazing that I'm posting it anyway. I had a little birthday party after we went to see the Taylor Swift Eras Tour movie and my mom surprised me with this unbelievable Eras birthday cake. She designed it and had a hard time finding a bakery to do it for her because it was so involved, but wow did Montilio's Baking Company come through! They made the most beautiful cake I've ever seen and it actually tasted fantastic too!!

The cake was divided into "pieces" that showcased all of Taylor's different albums and eras.

It would take too many pictures to show you all of the amazing aspects of this cake, but I really can't say enough about how beautiful and creative and well-executed it was.

And so now that we're through the Eras movie and Halloween, we're going to have to start thinking about baking for the holidays. I think that I might be hosting a bake sale actually for a project that I'll have to tell you more about, so stay tuned!!!!