Pumpkin and Cinnamon Fun, or Alice's Tea Cup the Sequel

We loved the Alice's Teacup cookbook recipe for my lemon blueberry birthday cake so much that I just new I needed to make a few other recipes.

First up, Pumpkin scones! One of my bosses decided to go back to teaching and for his last usual friday meeting, we surprised him with breakfast. I made these:

They were good, don't get me wrong, but after the awesomeness of that first cake, I was expecting a bit more. They were overly bland for my taste and the caramel glaze that they recommend for the drizzle didn't really pair well with the pumpkin, in my opinion. They were much improved by a quick batch of homemade frosting, which I spread on right over the caramel glaze.

Not the best. And for all the work and special ingredients required, I wouldn't bother with this one.

Instead of a second batch of pumpkin scones, due to this dilemma, I made a nice batch of pumpkin cookies, my favorite cookie recipe by far. And because of the pumpkin, they are almost like eating your vegetables at dessert.

In a classic move of redemption through, Alice's Teacup redeemed themselves with their Cinnascone recipe, which I made because once you have buttermilk and heavy cream in the house from making bland pumpkin scones, you might as well try to make these. They were time consuming to make, but oh so good and fun. You mix all the ingredients and form a dough, which you then roll out. Then, you make the cinnamony center and slather it on the rolled out dough before rolling it up lengthwise (think hotdog rather than hamburger bun) and cutting the result up into the scones and baking them.

What really makes these shine is the almond extract. If there's anything better than a cinnamon pastry, it's a cinnamon pastry that also tastes like an almond cookie. I've since made them a second time and learned a secret trick to make them turn out better (I had some trouble with the cinnamon paste running out of the dough while I was trying to roll the scones up. Slather the paste on the dough and then let it sit a few minutes, preferably with a ceiling fan running overhead, to let the paste solidify a bit better rolling. It worked like a charm.

And nothing does monday right like sitting at my work cubicle desk with a mug of hot chocolate coffee (decaf, no worries) and a nice almondy cinnascone.

It's what's for dessert.

I've been having a lot of fun dessert-related experimentation. I have decided that the world should be aware of the creations I have discovered through my well documented scientific method. Observe subject one.

Subject one is the culmination of several separate fruit trials, brought together for magical results. It all started with some over-brown bananas in the fruit basket. My man, the baker, tossed those babies into a nice batter and baked up some fine banana-nut bread, two loaves. We ate one and because that was all the banana bread we could stomach for a time, we froze the other.

Fast forward to last weekend. I was in Michigan, where the grocery prices are lower, and we bring a cooler for the purpose of cheaper grocery transport back to Cleveland. Kroger had a big sale on all things fresh berry. I partook of two packages of raspberries and one of strawberries. By weekend's end, due to much family quality time and a few meals out, I still had one package of each when I got back to my own kitchen. To use them up quick, I squashed them together in a bowl with a potato masher. Then, I put them in some tupperware in the fridge. 

There was still a slice of defrosted banana bread in the fridge. An idea was born. I took that slice of the bread after dinner the next night and topped it with crushed berries, drizzling both a glaze frosting (powdered sugar mixed with a dab of water) and some chocolate syrup.

It was heaven on a plate.

Subject Two: The Patriotic Parfait

Alas, despite my best efforts, there was still berries left over. I wanted to use them up before they went bad, so I took some lowfat vanilla yogurt and scooped some into a small bowl (read: recycled sinlge-serving greek yogurt container). I topped the yogurt with the remaining berries and drizzled a tiny bit of chocolate syrup. Then, to make things festive, I added a few July 4th star sprinkles.

This scientist's conclusion: Not only is it a healthy dessert alternative, but it's also darn cute.

Subject Three: The Vegan Extra-Chocolatey Oatmeal Cookies

These are from the book "Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar." I have already made their chocolate chip cookies in an earlier blog. Those were a big hit. These babies, these are epic. They are cosmic. They are the Platonic Form of Cookie-ness. These things were delicious. Two different kinds of cocoa powder plus some chocolate chips make Chocolate Fudgy Oatmeal Cookies quite um... chocolate-y. Every bite was infused with cocoa, and because most of the chocolate flavor did come from cocoa powder, rather than baker's chocolate or chips, it was less rich with a hint of bitterness that made these unique. To make your very own Chocolate Fudgy Oatmeal Cookies, go buy the dang book already. Trust me, it's worth the money.

The Batter:

Apparently, these cookies can also be made with dried cherries in them. I didn't have dried cherries when I made this batch, but you can be darn sure that I've already picked up a bag of dried cherries for next time.