Pumpkin Pie

1st dessert I made this weekend: Pumpkin Pie for Jordan

Growing up I remember my mom actually baking pumpkins left over from Halloween and freezing the 'meat' to make pumpkin pies. I used a short cut by buying canned pumpkin.

Pumpkin Pie
Ingredients:

• 3/4 cup granulated sugar
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
• 2 large eggs
• 1 can (15 oz.) pumpkin
• 1 can (12 fl. oz.) evaporated milk
• 1 unbaked 9-inch (4-cup volume) deep-dish pie shell

Directions:
MIX sugar, cinnamon, salt, ginger and cloves in small bowl. Beat eggs in large bowl. Stir in pumpkin and sugar-spice mixture. Gradually stir in evaporated milk.

POUR into pie shell.

BAKE in preheated 425° F oven for 15 minutes. Reduce temperature to 350° F; bake for 40 to 50 minutes or until knife inserted near center comes out clean. Cool on wire rack for 2 hours. Serve immediately or refrigerate.

Yes, that is a Yosemite Sam candle.

I had left over filling from the mixture, so I sprayed a cupcake tin and poured in the remaining concoction. It baked for about 20-25 minutes. It tasted pretty good, pie with out the crust or a pumpkin custard.

Strawberry Filling

Instead of aiming for a post a week, I'm going to try once a month. School, work and church have me plenty busy but I'm sure I can squeeze in one blog post every 30 days.

A dear friend is moving to Alaska on Saturday so I had her, Jordan, over for dinner with a few other friends to say farewell and do a joint birthday for another friend, Jessie, as Jordan will be gone when her birthday rolls around. I made calzones with ground turkey meat, spinach, mushrooms, garlic, onion, some seasonings and cheese with a little tomato sauce. They turned out awesome! Why didn't I take any pictures? That's right, they were consumed too quickly.

I did get pictures of the desserts. Jordan (some may know her as Erika) requested pumpkin pie while Jessie requested chocolate cake with strawberry. I bought a devil's food cake mix for the actual cake but I made the filling myself. Debating on what frosting to buy, Greg suggested getting vanilla, as to make the cake Neapolitan. If it works for ice cream, it was worth a shot.

Strawberry Filling recipe
Ingredients:

2 1/2 cups coarsely chopped hulled strawberries

1/2 cup sugar

2 1/2 tablespoons cornstarch

Directions:

1. Bring all ingredients to a boil in a heavy small sauce pan, stirring constantly and crushing berries slightly with back of spoon.
2. Boil 2 minutes to thicken, stirring constantly (mixture will be slightly chunky).
3. Pour into bowl and cool completely.

It really was just this simple and very tasty. As it isn't strawberry season, I used frozen and they worked just fine. I just made sure they were defrosted first.

When the cakes were cooled after baking, I flipped them out of the pan and put in the layer of strawberries. This being my first time with any sort of filling besides frosting, I over filled it. As I was frosting the rest of the cake immediately after, the filling started oozing out the side, so the vanilla frosting had a pink hue to it. I should have chilled the cake more in the fridge before frosting but live and learn! It still tasted pretty good.

You can see where my hand accidentally grazed the side when I was putting it in the fridge. Oops!

Layer close-up

Dessert