Two Thanksgiving desserts

A Covid Thanksgiving

Our usual Thanksgiving tradition involves dinner with friends. Typically three families get together, with occasional additions. Most years we arrive around noon and begin cooking and drinking wine until dinner is ready at 3:00 or 4:00. After our meal we take a walk and then have our dessert - a selection of pies, cakes and other delectables. This year we maintained our tradition with a much scaled-back version. It rained all day on Thursday, so we moved our celebration to Friday when the weather was better and we could eat outside. It was about 60 degrees out - let's hear it for global warming - so it was actually a nice day dining al fresco. Rather than spending the entire day together James showed up at our hosts' home with the turkey in the morning and he and Rob got it started on the grill, then James came back home and prepared the dressing and we went returned at 3:00 with our offerings.  I had planned on making some cranberry sauce but Lisa said they already had three different kinds, so I made two desserts instead. 

Just like the lunch lady used to make

Growing up and attending public school in Baltimore County in the 1970s I usually wasn't thrilled with the hot lunch offered in our cafeteria, and opted instead to bring my lunch. Exceptions to that rule were pizza day and open-faced turkey sandwich day. In the case of the turkey it wasn't so much the main course that I was interested in as the dessert that came with it - "peanut butter confection". 

I've often thought about how much I liked that crumbly, sweet dessert and it seemed this year was a good time to try to find a recipe (and, after all, we were having turkey). On a bag of confectioners sugar I found a recipe for Peanut Butter Fudge that seemed like it might allow me to create reasonable facsimile of what I remembered. It was a simple recipe with only four ingredients (confectioners sugar, milk, marshmallow fluff, and peanut butter) and I did end up with a super sweet '70s treat that was exactly as I remembered.

Is it cake or pie?

My second dessert came from the New York Times cooking page. I told our hosts that I would bring pumpkin pie, but this recipe is called "Pumpkin Skillet Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting" It has no crust, and is made with flour, so it probably is more of a cake than a pie. Nevertheless it was delicious and baked right in our indispensable cast-iron skillet.

This year there were only six of us enjoying our Thanksgiving dinner together. Here's hoping that next year we will be able to return to our usual festivities with everyone in good health.

Thanksgiving Dessert - Pumpkin Layer Cake with Caramel Buttercream

This recipe came from the New York Times Cooking. The online recipe was accompanied this lovely photograph, which looked only a little bit like my finished product. The color of the cake and icing are the same, and I did have three layers. Although mine were rather lopsided, and the caramel cream did not ooze down the sides in quite so perfect a manner. I am sure however, that mine tasted just as divine as this one must have.

With a rather ambitious ingredient list and a whopping 15 steps it was a good thing I left work early on the day before Thanksgiving to get started on this. The first problem I encountered was that I did not own three round cake pans. In fact I had zero. Off to the store went my wonderful husband to bring back the necessary baking items.

Once the appropriate equipment was procured I started mixing the ingredients for the cake. The instructions regularly refer to a stand mixing bowl, and its various attachments. In our house we have only hands, arms, and muscles for mixing. Mostly it wasn't a problem, but I will admit that in making the buttercream frosting it did present a bit of a challenge. Thankfully, my wonderful husband is also a rower and has Popeye-the-Sailor-man-type biceps and forearms (sans anchor tattoo). Ultimately I did have to pick out some biggish chunks of butter from the frosting so that I could more evenly spread the buttercream. Our college child was home for the holiday and suggested using store bought caramel sauce and/or frosting. I explained that was not an option because "on Thanksgiving we go all in". Said child also made a comment along the lines of "what, no pie!" which the New York Times Cooking page actually indicated was a possibility. Fortunately, there is always more than one dessert at Thanksgiving, and a pie was offered by one of the other families with whom we spent the holiday.

In the end the entire family had some hand in preparing this delicious dessert, and it was a hit on Thanksgiving day.

See directions below. This is not a quick one!

    

Pumpkin Blondies

I picked up The Pumpkin Cookbook about a decade ago at a going-out-of-business sale for an independent bookstore - one I had not heard of before getting the flier for said sale. This cookbook is not for those who are wondering what to do with that can of pumpkin you bought as soon as the leaves starting changing color. Everything in this book calls for an actual pumpkin. I imagine that a person might be able to get away with canned pumpkin for any of the recipes that call for pureeing the pumpkin flesh once it's been separated from the shell and cooked, but such was not the case for pumpkin blondies, which calls for whole chunks of pumpkin.