Sugar & Spice.

It's that time of year again where everything just tastes better with a spoonful of sugar and a sprinkle of cinnamon :) I love it! I've been making all kinds of yummy things. I've made banana bread and cream cheese spritz cookies and chocolate chip cookies and I've been drinking loads of tea. My tea drinking habit has actually gotten a bit out of hand. In addition to my normal tea drinking (black tea with milk, peppermint tea, lemon tea with honey, green and white tea blend, Rooibos, coconut chai etc.) I've now started steeping tea in hot juice on a somewhat regular basis. Spiced hot cranberry juice is amazing (I suggest using chai) and earl grey works really well with hot apple juice. Speaking of earl grey, it's never been a favorite of mine but Whitney had tea at her house from Trader Joe's called Duchess Grey. It is similar to earl grey but very delicate and citrusy and much yummier than normal earl grey.

Grammi and I made pumpkin cookies over Halloween weekend. They don't have pumpkin in them, they're sugar cookies decorated to look like pumpkins. She makes them every year. I've never helped before but she wasn't going to make them this year so I had to help if I wanted to make sure I was going to get my pumpkin cookies. I need a bit more practice at it. I accidentally put the icing on too thick so then when Grammi put the faces on some of the chocolate chips were sliding off. These pumpkins had some pretty interesting facial expressions. They were certainly yummy though. I brought my Halloween cat cookie cutter and we made of few of those too. I used green icing on one of the cats and brought it home especially for Tara.

Isn't this apple perfect? I love it. Lena brought it home from Yakima. In fact, she brought loads and loads of them home from Yakima. So when we got together last week we spent a good 45 minutes looking up apple recipes online. We settled on an apple coffee cake and apple butter.

Pretty cute little cooking area for such a tiny kitchen :)

The apple butter experience was a really fun one. It was super easy to make and really quite tasty. I think it would be fun to make for gifts over the holidays. I just have to do a little research about how long it will keep and things like that. Here's the Apple Butter recipe: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/gale-gand/allspiced-apple-butter-recipe/index.html and here's the coffee cake recipe we used. It's pretty darn good but skip the glaze -- it's just not necessary. http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/emeril-lagasse/apple-coffee-cake-with-crumble-topping-and-brown-sugar-glaze-recipe/index.html.

I'm looking forward to lots more baking in the chilly months to come. This year I want to try out some cold weather drinks too. I plan to make homemade apple cider and figure out what the hot buttered rum thing is all about. AND I found a recipe for homemade Irish cream that I'm pretty excited about. Mmmm... sounds like fun.