Halloween Cookies and Pumpkin Carving

Panta and Nora rolling out the dough

Since caramel apples took so long, we had to put off our pumpkin carving until the following week.  To this event we added cookie baking, mostly because I have a ridiculous amount of Halloween themed cookie cutters, but also because, seriously, who doesn't like cookies? Also, baking is much more fun if you have an industrial-style dishwasher at your disposal (like Nora and Lars do in their castle).  The cookies are the same recipe I always use, the one so lovingly written out by my grandmother on an old, yellowed, flour-covered note card, and copied by my mother onto a slightly less yellow and flower-covered note card.  These cookies are special.  It's just not Halloween without some pumpkin cookies somewhere.  I even made them last year for our Thanksgiving feast.  This year we had slightly less vibrant food coloring, and slightly more warped looking America cookies, but we had fun.  And this time we actually got around to carving the pumpkins.

Here is the tried-and-true sugar cookie recipe, for those who are interested.

Sugar Cookies:
2 3/4 c flour
2 3/4 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
2 eggs
1/2 c shortening
1 c sugar
1 tsp vanilla
Cream sugar and shortening.  Add eggs. Add vanilla. Sift and add dry ingredients. Chill 10 minutes. Roll and cut. Bake at 400(F) 10-12 minutes.

Frosting:
2 tbsp butter
1 1/2 c confectioners sugar
Cream above. Add:
2 tbsp milk
1/4 tsp vanilla
Beat until fluffy

Panta, Nora and Lars

Mary and Me

Note the upside down vampire bat

Frankenstein cookies

Cookies that were supposed to be shaped like America, but ended up looking more like fish so we decorated them accordingly

Fish/America cookie

Panta (Kansas) loves Canada

Bat/bowtie

Pumpkins!

Guts

Panta = 5 year old when it comes to pumpkin guts

Nora, taking out some aggression on that pumpkin!

Mary

Finished products

Caramel Apples (x2)

The apples, skewered and ready to go

In October we decided to have an evening of pumpkin carving and caramel apple making.  After all, what is Halloween without jack-o-lanterns and caramel apples?  Nora kindly volunteered her castle on a hill as our home base for this event.  The problem with that?  Getting some fairly large pumpkins up a mountain.  I loaded myself down with two Ikea bags full of pumpkins, apples, and other equipment.  I got some fairly funny looks on my way up, but that's to be expected, and made it up the mountain without any problems.

We did, however, have a few problems with the caramel apples.  Most caramel apple recipes call for corn syrup; corn syrup does not exist in Austria.  Or if it does, I could not find it.  I even tried the English shop, where they sell Betty Crocker cake mixes, but the owner laughed at me and reminded me that it was an English shop and corn syrup is a distinctly American product.  So we worked around it.  After all, caramel apples have certainly existed for longer than corn syrup has, right?

Eventually I found a recipe on www.101cookbooks.com/ that called for a honey-caramel glaze.  The recipe has simple ingredients, all easily located in Salzburg.  Hurrah!

Yet somehow we managed to screw it up.  The honey-caramel would not stay on the apples.  It melted down the sides, slowly, so that we would think for a while that we had succeeded in keeping the caramel on the apple, only to find that it had oozed down and created a puddle of caramel-goo on the tray.

Eventually we were tired and hungry and ate the apples as quickly as possible, in the hopes that we would be faster at eating than the caramel was at dripping off the apples.

In all of the chaos of the apple making, we never actually got around to carving pumpkins.  We scheduled that for a week later.

Panta: caramel apple model.  Note the lame excuse for a caramel glaze on the apple.

Caramel fail

Maybe the nuts will hold the caramel on the apples...? Nope.

Success (for now)

Nora laughing at how hard the apples were to actually eat

Mary

Clean plate club

In the meantime, I tried again.  I was not satisfied by our first experience - I like caramel apples too much to go without them for the entire Halloween season.  Besides, I wanted to prove to myself that I could make caramel apples that were as good as what I buy at home.  So I tried again, this time using a more traditional caramel recipe (the honey-caramel was too sweet for me).  Recipe number two went well, and I ate caramel and caramel apples for a week, which was enough to satisfy both my stubbornness and my craving for the season.

My second attempt

Great success!

An Assortment

I have long been contemplating the addition of food and recipes to my blog.  Often as I explore the inner workings of the internet, hopping from webpage to webpage, my attention lingers on blogs such as Smitten Kitchen or 101 Cookbooks.  Thus, I have decided to include a recipe here and there.

I know, I know, the world has enough food blogs.  But how many of those have 'oops, I'm a foreigner living in a strange place' mistakes included in them?  Not many, I'd bet.  These mistakes, along with the (hopefully more abundant) positives, will be included - for better or worse.  And plus, sometimes I make delicious things that I'd like to share with the world.

To kick everything off, I've got a summer strawberry cake that i made last May when strawberries were in season.  Maija was actually the one who prompted me to make this, and as strawberries are my favorite food and cake is almost always a good idea, I happily obliged.  Alas, my attempts at documenting the baking process were thwarted by the baking itself.  Or rather, by the eating.  But really, can you blame me??

The original recipe can be found on Smitten Kitchen.

Strawberries that went into the cake. I may have eaten a few as I was baking and taking pictures...

Recipe:

6 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature, plus extra for pie plate
1 1/2 cups (188 grams) all-purpose flour (can swap 3/4 cup or 94 grams all-purpose flour with 3/4 cup or 75 grams of barley flour, see Note)
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon table salt
1 cup (200 grams) plus 2 tablespoons (25 grams) granulated sugar
1 large egg
1/2 cup (118 ml) milk
1 teaspoon (5 ml) vanilla extract
1 pound (450 grams) strawberries, hulled and halved

Preheat the oven to 350°F.  Butter the pan.

Whisk flour or flours, baking powder and salt together in a small bowl. In a larger bowl, beat butter and 1 cup sugar until pale and fluffy with an electric mixer, about 3 minutes. Mix in egg, milk and vanilla until just combined. Add dry mixture gradually, mixing until just smooth.

Pour into prepared pie plate. Arrange strawberries, cut side down, on top of batter, as closely as possible in a single layer.  Sprinkle remaining 2 tablespoons sugar over berries.

Bake cake for 10 minutes then reduce oven temperature to 325°F and bake cake until golden brown and a tester comes out free of wet batter, about 50 minutes to 60 minutes.

The unfinished cake looked like this.  The finished cake didn't look that different, except I ate some before I remembered that I wanted to take pictures of it. I have no regrets.

May provided many memorable moments besides cake-baking.  Each of these is captured and captioned below.

One day, I walked into one of my classes of 14 year old boys and this is what I found.  When Claudia (their teacher) asked them why they'd covered their chair in women's' sanitary pads, they responded, "Because they're soft and smell nice."

Poppies on my way to work

Outside of Salzburg there is a lake in the forest surrounded by wooden decks.  It's stunning, but I felt too awkward to take any really good photos of it because I was surrounded by half-naked men and women.  Austrians (of a certain age at least) seem to wear one bathing suit for swimming in and a different bathing suit for lying around.  And if they're women, they'll often leave their tops of to get a perfect tan.  Not very American, but not that awkward...until you take into account that there's a zipline that runs over the lake, where teenage boys can gawk at naked ladies and get a thrill for a small fee. 

At one point during the last few months I managed to see Andy McKee in concert.  He is one of my favorite guitarists and I urge everyone to check out his music.

Schockomuffin from Kaffe Alchemie.  Heaven.

With Maija (and the other assistants) at Die Weisse - a brewery - for one of our last TA get-togethers.

Maija, me and Annie

Dave and Maria, still at Die Weisse

Delicious Weissbier on a balmy summer night

Seafood and Sunsets (Rockport, part five)

The cousins left the next day to head down to Myrtle Beach, but my fam stayed around in Rockport for a little longer. For some reason we ended up at Back Beach in Rockport rather than one of our regular beaches, though I can't remember why. And once we got there, we were stuck because Mom locked her keys in her car. Oops. Dad - whose least favorite place is the beach anyway - volunteered to wait by the car for AAA or the police or someone to break us in, while the rest of us enjoyed our beach time.

Papa with his binoculars on the beach

Chris, faceplanted.

That evening, once we got back into the car, we made it down to the lobster shack that's on the water. We've always called it the Lobster in the Rough, but actually it appears to be called the Lobster Pool. Regardless, we went there to enjoy our lobster dinners. Even Dad ordered one, which is unusual. You place your food order inside and then, weather permitting, you eat outside and enjoy the fabulous sunsets. Which is exactly what we did.

Pat out in the rocks

Still Pat, still out on the rocks.

Dinner's ready!

Mom's in heaven.

But Dad was frustrated about the difficulty of opening lobsters.

Family. Taken by Papa.

Dad was proud that he'd purchased a bottle opener

Chris jumped in front of my pictures

Me, taking pictures

Pat

Me

Mom was being cold and worried about Pat out on the rocks.

Chris, undoubtedly making fun of Dad for the fact that he tried to use self tanner on his pale legs, but it only turned them orange and streaky. Ha.

Nice hat.

Back in Rockport, Donna's jewelry on display in the Prince and the Pauper.