Treats for appetites of every size
As promised, it’s time for pumpkin. And when I decide it’s pumpkin season, I don’t mess around. This morning for breakfast, I had what I like to call the Gunther Tooties Pumpkin Trifecta: a pumpkin bagel with pumpkin cream cheese and a pumpkin spice coffee. I’m not sure you can get much more committed than that.
I’m a plan-everything-far-in-advance kind of person. Like, if I know I won’t have time to bake, I’ll make two recipes the week before. But sometimes, a whole weekend can work out perfectly with very little planning at all.
I’m always surprised by how much of ice cream making is done over a stovetop. It’s a frozen dessert – I feel like at most I should be mixing the batter at room temperature, and then freezing it. But no, it’s like 20 minutes of stirring over low or medium heat and then using an ice bath after the fact to cool it down. Seems counterintuitive.
Friday night was a baking marathon. After a week of birthdays and J-term festivities, I really needed a night where I didn’t have to leave my apartment. Lucky for me, I have friends that felt the same, and were willing to trek to my apartment for a quieter night in.
This was both an amazing and absolutely terrible idea. I’ve had Serious Eats The Best Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe saved on my Pinterest for literally about 3 years. In that recipe, Kenji, who runs the food lab (a science person’s dream baking blog) painstakingly adjusts every ingredient in chocolate chip cookies until he arrives at his ideal. And I finally gave it a try.
Spring break was supposed to start Friday. It was supposed to be a half day, and then I would have all of this coming week off. However, apparently when you have seven snow days, those week-long-break perks of being a teacher can disappear. So instead, I have two more days between me and an extended long weekend with my parents. Rather than wallow in these extra two days, I used my last weekend before Lent is over to bake for one more person at my school, that happens to be a celiac (can’t eat gluten).