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!

Fall

Odd little running man on the street by my apartment

Fall in Salzburg was unusually beautiful this year.  We had 40 straight days of sunshine. Forty.  This meant we spent a lot of time outside, simply enjoying the weather.  I went for hikes, sat along the river, and did my lesson planning at as many outdoor cafes as possible.  In October I went to the Oktoberfest in Mondsee (a town near Salzburg) with a teacher friend, Claudia, and Emily.  Claudia wasn't feeling great, so mostly we sat at one of the many long tables and watched the debauchery happen around us.  The next day we saw a little bit of Mondsee and admired the view of the Schafberg, the mountain that we would hike later in the fall. 

Later, at the end of our stretch of beautiful weather, the Fulbright program organized a trip to the government buildings here in Salzburg, where we met the Landeshauptfrau (essentially the Governer) Gabi Burgstaller and another member of the government whose name I cannot remember for the life of me.  It's interesting that Salzburg, one of the more conservative parts of a conservative Catholic country, has multiple prominent female members of government.  They talked mostly about how good it was that we were doing this program, and shared a few tidbits about the Salzburg government such as the fact that there is a flag on the castle that is raised when Gabi is in town, and lowered when she is away.  I'd bet a lot of Salzburgers don't even know that!

More to come soon.  Really soon, if the forecast for tomorrow (rain, rain, rain) is correct!

My apartment is the yellow one

My apartment from above

With Emily at the Mondsee Oktoberfest

Emily and I ran into Katie, another assistant, at the Mondsee Oktoberfest

The scene.

Fall in full swing

With Claudia in Mondsee.  That's the Schafberg in the background, which we climbed climbed later in the fall

Cupcakes at Cafe Diva

Cafe Diva

Salzburg

The tree in my yard

*Sigh* Salzburg in the fall

Nora pretending to be part of the Austrian government

Gabi, the Landeshauptfrau, and the other lady whose name and title I cannot remember.

Florence Part Two And Back To Salzburg

Pat blow-drying his shoes that got soaked from walking through rivers

Pat and I started our last day in Italy with a true Italian breakfast.  While the Austrians like bread, meat and cheese to start their day, the Italians seem to prefer pastries and coffee.  Pat and I found a cute cafe with very few tourists - a rare find in Florence! - and had our pastries and cappuccinos standing at the counter.

Full of caffeine and sugar, we tackled the leather markets.  The previous day we had assessed everything from prices to quality to how annoying we found the salesmen, and had decided on what to buy for ourselves and others.  At the time I remember thinking how obnoxious and pushy I found the salespeople; now, having been to Turkey, I know that the Florentine leather market is nothing compared to other places.  Regardless, we held our own and even bartered fairly successfully.  It definitely helped that we had checked everything out already.  We bought a few gifts; I came away with a nice pair of shoes and some gloves, and Pat may have gotten a belt.  His real success, though, was a purse for Kelsey.  We looked at everything: brown purses, black purses, purses with handles and with straps, purses with flaps and buckles and buttons.  Finally Pat settled on a brown purse with a top opening.  Later that day, Pat checked his email and found that what Kelsey really wanted was a satchel style bag...so we ended up returning the first purse and getting a second.

That night we followed the advice of a Lonely Planet entry and went to a fancy restaurant.  Still scared of the veggie-ecoli outbreak, we stuck to pasta (again) for our last night in Italy.  We shared some delicious goat cheese mousse, and sampled each others' tortellini and maccheroni with pesto.  The house wine was so good that we even bought some to bring home to Dad.  And, if that weren't enough, we capped the night off with a relaxing drink on the steps of the Duomo while watching the various tourists stroll by.

The following day we boarded a train back to Salzburg, through a very rainy Verona, and then through the scenic but progressively colder mountains of Südtirol and Innsbruck, and finally back to Salzburg.  Our last few days in Salzburg were fairly uneventful.  We ate some vegetables, found that the cactus in my building had bloomed overnight, and had a beer or two in the Belgian bar down the street.  We also spent a pleasant evening eating pulled pork, cooked by Lars, at the castle that he and Nora (an assistant and her husband) now live in.  Finally, feeling sad/excited/exhausted, we boarded a plane back to America and I closed the first chapter of my Fulbright experience.  Whew!  And you're only hearing about it nine months after the fact!

Stand-up breakfast of pastries and coffee

More Masks

Meat in the market

Lemon tarts in the market

Illegal shot of David

Pat smelling the purse he bought.  Isn't it pretty?

Pretending to be David

Duomo by night

Upon arriving back in Salzburg, we discovered that the cactus in my hallway had bloomed into this.

Pat with the Salzburg skyline

Cows in the field near Nora and Lars's castle

Cheers! In the Belgian bar

Biergarten experience in the Sternbräu