Fantastic Fall Food

Summer is my favorite season because I get to be home with my family and it's hot and sunny. But fall food is fantastic! Remember how I left you a clue for what we were going to be baking next in my last post? Well if you noticed that we were apple picking and guessed that apples were coming up next, then you were right! When I think of fall, I think of baking with apples and pumpkin. If I had to pick one, I'd definitely be on Team Pumpkin and so would my mom and sister. My brother and dad are on Team Apple. Post in the comments if you vote apple or pumpkin and we'll do a little poll!

The first coffee cake I'm telling you about actually isn't apple or pumpkin. But it definitely tasted like fall and it might be the best coffee cake we have EVER made (and if you read this blog you know that we have baked a LOT of coffee cakes!!!!). It is a maple walnut coffee cake and you should drop everything to go bake this - it's that good. It has maple extract as an optional ingredient, but you should definitely include it if you make this recipe. It adds lots of warm maple flavor.

This cake also smells amazing while it is baking.

I don't always love walnuts, but they were perfect in this cake. Although I bet it would be really good with pecans or cashews too. Nobody really bakes with cashews, but they are my favorite nut, so I think that I should try baking with them!

We also made a cinnabon cinnamon roll cake and if the maple walnut coffee cake wasn't our best coffee cake ever, then this one was!!!!! This recipe is very different from most cake recipes. Usually you cream butter and sugar and then mix in wet ingredients and then add dry ingredients, which have already been mixed together. This recipe just has you dump everything together at once. This cake still came out great, and it's much faster doing it that way!

Once you put the cake batter in the pan, you make a cinnamon nut mixture and swirl that through the cake.

This cake tastes exactly like cinnamon rolls, but is WAY easier to make!!

But of course, we also baked apple coffee cakes too! This apple crumb cake was very good, but we decided that we would add pecans and maybe more apples if we baked it again.

This cakes toasts up to a beautiful golden brown color.

And it is very good, but it doesn't have strong apple flavor.

We also made this apple cinnamon crumb cake. But this would have been a good one for our mistakes and mishaps post. My mom thought that it smelled weird as we were mixing the batter and she realized that she had accidentally added cumin instead of cloves! We were hoping that nobody would notice once the cake was all done, but my dad took one bite and asked why the cake tasted like curry!! And when we told my brother that there was an unusual ingredient in it, he knew that it was cumin immediately. It actually wasn't bad with cumin. Just a little peculiar! My sister really liked it and wants us to make it again, without the cumin this time!

This is me spreading our cumin batter!

And this is the streusel on top.

It looked pretty even if it tasted a little weird.

We made another apple crumble coffee cake, and fortunately managed not to mess up the spices. I loved the streusel for this coffee cake. I don't always love walnuts, but these walnuts were so good.

This cake also had more apple flavor than some of our other apple cakes, which I liked.

A different kind of apple cake that we tried was called an apple sharlotka. A sharlotka is a Russian apple sponge cake. This recipe is interesting because it is mostly all apples, with just a little bit of batter binding them together.

The batter on top crisps up almost like meringue.

This cake is light and delicious. I definitely recommend serving it with whipped cream.

We also made apple cinnamon crumb muffins. We made these Halloween weekend and they were good to have before Halloween because they weren't too sweet. Rachel thought that they were delicious and moist and my sister loved them.

These muffins also freeze very well.

We made a cinnamon apple french toast bake. We've made lots of baked french toast, but this one was assembled differently. For this recipe, you layer the bread and apples upright.

We used binder clips to keep the parchment paper in place. It works really well, you just have to remember to take them off before you put in the oven!

It gets topped with almonds and powdered sugar.

When you serve slices, the apple rings look very pretty.

We also made apple cinnamon waffles. These are good waffles, but most people didn't even realize that they have apples in them. If we made them again, I'd add more apples and spices. But we used them in our lunchboxes for sandwiches with cream cheese and that was amazing!

They just look like regular waffles too.

We went through a SERIOUS salted caramel phase. First we made a salted caramel sauce and then used that for lots of salted caramel apple recipes.

We kept the sauce in jars and actually thought that it might be a nice gift to give people around the holidays.

We made salted caramel apple cinnamon scones. And for these we used a new technique to make the scones and it changed EVERYTHING. We froze the butter and grated it when we were making the dough and this made for a MUCH better texture. We had read about doing that in the past, but never bothered, because it seemed like a pain. And it was a pain, but it was totally worth it!

This recipe made the flakiest scones. And then we drizzled the salted caramel on top.

We also made a caramel apple coffee cake. It was definitely good that we had the sauce made in advance. This cake would be a lot more work, if you had to make the sauce at the same time.

We spread half the batter in the pan and then drizzled the salted caramel sauce in the middle before we added the rest of the batter.

Then after we baked it, we poured the rest of the salted caramel sauce on top. We should have warmed it up more, so that it drizzled better. But we just ended up spreading it around with a knife.

This cake was super sweet but super good. It got better the next day, which I think is a great quality in a cake, because it would be totally okay to make this ahead of time if you had guests!

We had ANOTHER salted caramel breakfast with caramel apple muffins. We made these before my dad and brother went to a Patriots game. I liked the streusel on our last coffee cake, but my mom liked the streusel on these muffins. I thought that there was a little bit too much streusel though.

The salted caramel drizzled on top makes these muffins look unique.

Going over to Team Pumpkin, we made an amazing pumpkin cream cheese bread. This is a loaf cake, with two layers of cream cheese swirl layered between three layers of batter. My brother and I both wished that there was more cream cheese filling.

This cake was delicious. The only downside is that it takes a long time to bake!

My mom also made us pumpkin carrot cake muffins one morning before she went to work. These have raisins and coconut in them and do taste a lot like carrot cake. We all loved them.

The glaze on these was a little bit runny. I'd use less milk to thicken it up next time.

One of my favorite recent breakfasts was a french toast recipe that came from the Norma's cookbook. I've definitely blogged about Norma's before, but I have terrible news! Norma's the restaurant closed during the pandemic!!!!! I'm hoping that it reopens sometime soon, but if not, at least we can make recipes from the cookbook. This recipe is called Crunchy French Toast and you coat the bread in rice krispies. The rice krispies definitely give it a crunchy coating. Just let me know, if you want me to send you the recipe!

This recipe is also served with a caramel sauce (regular, not salted), and it is delicious!

We also made some more scones. Coconut scones with coconut glaze were nice and soft. They had a great texture and excellent coconut flavor.

These scones also have pecans in them, which I loved.

Instacart accidentally delivered way too many leeks one day, so we needed to come up with a bunch of leek recipes. One of them was savory oat, leek and pecorino scones. These were very good and cheesy!

One of the nice things about savory scones is that you can have them for breakfast, but these would also be very good served as part of a lunch or dinner.

Going back to Team Pumpkin, we made baked pumpkin donuts. I didn't love these. The texture of them was too much like cake.

The icing on these thickened quickly so you need to warm it up to keep it loose enough to dip the donuts in.

We've made a few kinds of whoopie pies this fall. My favorite ones were pumpkin whoopie pies (of course!). Whoopie pies are great because they're like a combination of a cookie and a cupcake all in one.

These have an amazing cream cheese filling and were one of my mom's favorite fall recipes!

We also made apple cinnamon spice whoopie pies. Unfortunately we forgot to take a picture, but I bet that you can imagine what they looked like! These were also good, but the pumpkin ones were better. I think we liked the pumpkin ones more because they had stronger flavors.

A new and different kind of cookie that we made was frosted butter rum brickle bites. We needed to buy a new ingredient, rum extract, to make these. I've never had the alcohol rum (obviously!), but I think the extract gives a rum-like flavor minus the alcohol. My friend Gloria really liked the cookie part of these.

These cookies were soft and the frosting was VERY sweet. My mom thought that the frosting was too sweet, and that doesn't happen very often!

Another new kind of cookie that we made was Texas sheet cake cookies. Texas sheet cake is a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting and these cookies are supposed to taste similar. I've never had the cake, so we'll have to make that some time too!

My brother loved these cookies! They are almost like little chocolate tea cakes.

We made some dessert bars too. My brother wanted to try golden m&m bars and my mom didn't expect them to be anything special, but she was totally wrong! These bars actually have a very strong m&m flavor. It's a little bit hard to describe, but most m&m desserts just have a sprinkle of them. This recipe has enough m&ms that their flavor really comes through. We gave them to my brother's flag football coaches and they loved them!

Can you tell that these bars have more m&ms than most recipes do?

Peanut butter chocolate chip nutter butter bars were easy to make and turned out to be a big hit all around. They were soft and gooey, and peanut butter and chocolate is one of my favorite flavor combinations!

These bars have crushed nutter butter cookies on top. I like it when baked goods have toppings that give a hint as to the flavors or ingredients.

Pumpkin and cream cheese is definitely another one of my favorite flavor combinations, especially for fall. This recipe is called The Best Pumpkin Bars I've Ever Had, and I have to agree with the name. I don't know that I would definitely say that they're the best, but they're really good.

One thing that I have noticed about pumpkin bar recipes is that they're really just pumpkin cake cut into squares!

Going back to Team Apple, we made an apple butter spice cake. This was a spice cake made with apple butter that gets topped with a cream cheese frosting, with apple butter swirled through. My brother loved this cake. I thought it was just okay. This cake is very moist, which is good, but it got a little bit wet after the first day. So it's definitely a recipe that is best served right away.

I liked the apple butter swirled through the frosting but my mom said that she'd leave it out next time.

We baked lots of cupcakes this fall to celebrate lots of fall birthdays! The first ones were funfetti cupcakes that we made for our friend Layssa.

I picked that we made the frosting pink, and I think that the color turned out great! But we only use light colors for frosting because if you add too much food coloring, it makes stuff taste weird. My mom always used to say that and I thought it was just me and her, but my Aunt Meggie agrees!

We made coconut cupcakes for Grazzy's birthday because coconut is her favorite! And I had my mom add pink sprinkles because pink makes everything better!! This recipe has coconut extract, and that really helps bring out the coconut flavor.

These cupcakes would look great with green and red sprinkles for Christmas, or just gold or silver for the holidays to include everyone, because the coconut looks like snow!

And then we made lemon cupcakes for Rachel and Chelsea! Except we made these with lemon buttercream frosting, instead of the vanilla frosting that the cupcake recipe has. We wanted these to be extra lemon-y!

And of course - you probably could have guessed it - but we added yellow sprinkles!

Then we made one more kind of cupcake for Kelsie's birthday. These are called party pinata cupcakes because they have a surprise inside, just like a pinata. These were my sister's favorite because she thought they were fun.

First we baked the cupcakes, and then we cut out a piece of the top. We filled the hole with sprinkles and then put the tops back on before we frosted them.

We always pile on lots of frosting! It's too much for my dad, but my mom and I love it!

And this is why they're called pinata party cupcakes!!

We made lots of fun themed food for Halloween. We made this roasted red pepper bread because it had a nice orange color.

This recipe makes two braided loaves. Braiding them was fun!

This is what they looked like all braided up.

They got baked with cheese on top.

We had extra red peppers left over from making the bread and Rachel had a great idea to use them to make a dip! So we made a spicy red pepper and feta dip. It was the perfect dip to serve with the bread.

And I thought it all looked very pretty on a platter served together.

For a fun Halloween treat, we made candy corn rice krispie treats. This recipe uses our favorite rice krispie treat base recipe (it really is the best!) and just makes different colors. These don't taste like candy corn, but they look like it, which is perfect for Halloween.

We put the different colored cereal mixtures into rings, so that it would look like candy corn when we cut it.

These were super cute to give as gifts!

But my favorite Halloween treat this year was brownie cauldrons! I first saw a brownie cauldron recipe in my Harry Potter cookbook and I was dying to make them! But my mom realized that it is a UK cookbook and we couldn't buy a lot of the ingredients in the US. So we found another brownie cauldron recipe and made that.

We baked brownies in a mini muffin tin and then pushed in the middles while they were still warm to make them look like cauldrons.

Then we filled them with green and purple frosting.

Usually the big round sprinkles are super hard and gross, but these ones were just delicious chocolate! It was a pain to pick out just the green and purple sprinkles and my sister made a bit of a mess getting her feet in them (we didn’t use those!), but I think it was worth it because the cauldrons looked so much cuter that way.

Didn't they turn out fabulous?

After trick or treating, my brother and sister and I had a LOT of candy. We each got to pick ten pieces to keep and then we used some to make leftover halloween candy bars and then my mom brought the rest to the hospital for the doctors and nurses. My mom didn't love these that much, but the rest of us liked them.

These had a very soft center, which I liked.

We also did a fun project for Thanksgiving. We made chocolate caramel turkey legs. We had a little bit of trouble with these, but we kept trying and figured it out. And in the end, these turned out great, but this is definitely a recipe where your ingredients matter. We used Bequet salted caramels and Lindt milk chocolate. I don't think these would be as good if you just made them with grocery store caramels and chocolate chips. We didn't take as many pictures as we should have. But first we softened the caramels and shaped them around the ends of pretzels to look like turkey legs. When we first dipped them, the chocolate mostly slid off so that they just looked like weird lollipops! So then we chilled the shaped caramels and pretzels, but then when we went to dip them, we broke the pretzels prying them off the plate! But finally we put new pretzels into the chilled molded caramels and dipped them and they came out perfectly.

My dad and brother loved these! But you need to let them warm up a little bit before eating them. We tried to eat them straight out of the fridge and my mom was worried that we were going to break our teeth!

That pretty much sums up our fall! We've already started our next big baking project. I don't want to spoil the surprise, but it takes 100 hours to make so stay tuned

!!!! Happy Thanksgiving everybody!