About a month ago I bought Baking From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan (amazing book!) because of the Tuesdays with Dorie posts that constantly fill the blogosphere every week. It wasn’t until recently (mostly because they won’t be accepting anymore members after this month) that I actually decided to join TwD for myself!
For this week, Kelly of Sounding My Barbaric Gulp chose to make pumpkin muffins (you can find the recipe here), which was definitely a great choice for the fall! I’ve been dying to make something pumpkin ever since the leaves started changing colors and because of this recipe I’ve probably made more than enough pumpkin foods to last me for a while.
You see, Saturday night I remembered that we didn’t have any pumpkin puree because I had forgotten to put it on the list after I used the last one, so I needed to go buy some that night or else I probably wouldn’t have made these at all! Being in college and all, I cannot bake during the week so I either had to make them Sunday or never. Unluckily for me, it seemed like everyone and their mother was making pumpkin something this week because I had to go to THREE different grocery stores to find some puree. Everyone was out! What’s even worse was that when I did find some they only had a HUGE 29 oz can. (That’s over 3-1/2 cups of pumpkin puree and this recipe only called for 3/4 cup).
I wasn’t about to make fifty million pumpkin muffins so I went on a quest to find many more enticing pumpkin recipes. Cookies, breads, cakes, waffles, sauces, pies! There were so many things to choose from! For the time being I settled on two breakfast recipes (who doesn’t love pumpkin early in the day?), pumpkin pancakes and pumpkin scones.
I had always wanted to give scones a try and when I came across a Pumpkin Spice Scone recipe on Pinch My Salt, I immediately knew that it was something I had to make. Why not, right? I had to use up all the puree someway! These scones were fantastic by themselves and even better with the maple ginger and cinnamon icing (my favorite of the two) that the author suggested you should use.
My dad had requested pumpkin waffles, but being more of a pancake lover I made pancakes instead. He had complaints either way considering I was offering to make breakfast. I found a great recipe for these pancakes at Allrecipes.com and would suggest that all other pumpkin loving people give it a try! They are light, fluffy, and are accompanied by just enough pumpkin flavor to be delicious. No wonder they were the highest rated pumpkin pancake recipe on the site! (Although I’d like to note that it says it serves six, which I found out doesn’t mean six pancakes. It makes A LOT of pancake batter so keep that in mind!)
Of course, I ended up using all of the ginger making breakfast so in the end I had to go to the grocery store on Sunday anyways. It was fine though! The billions of grocery store trips were completely worth it! Also, I wasn’t too fond of using raisins, nuts, and sunflowers seeds in my muffins. I guess I’m just not adventurous enough for that so instead I went old fashion and mixed in some chocolate chunks and sprinkled the batter with some cinnamon sugar (1 teaspoon cinnamon with 2 tablespoons sugar) before baking. Being a cupcake fanatic and not much of a muffin eater, it should really be no surprise that I instinctively thought to add more sugar to these, causing them to be more like cupcakes than muffins. As cupcakes or muffins, these things are still pretty darn good.
After these three recipes, and basically indulging on only pumpkin flavored foods all morning, I had had enough pumpkin to last me for a while. Sad, too, because I still have quite a lot of pumpkin puree left. Oh well! At least I tried to use it all, right?
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