Fall Baking (Cider Donuts and Pumpkin Pie)

Greetings, everyone!

It being the holidays, we've noticed a "rise" in our sadness to not be with family, but we tried to make up for it by doing some fall festivities. :)

One of the fall things we did was hang out with two members of Rodney's saxophone studio at our apartment, making cider donuts. :) Around here, cider donuts are a BIG fall tradition, one that I'd never known about living in Boise. We decided to buy some donut mix and hold a cider donut-making party. Since it was a Sunday night and we informed people a little too late about it, only two showed up. :) But it was still very fun, and they actually turned out much better than expected!

Here's some of the dough we started with: (notice the Blue Moon glass sitting on the cutting board-- that would be our roller, because we don't have one). :)

We also didn't have donut cutters, so you notice from the above picture that we used a biscuit cutter, and then to cut the middle hole out we just used a knife. Much easier said than done. :)

And THEN we had our first ever frying experience! :) Rodney and I have never fried anything before, so heating the oil and everything was a bit... scary, to say the least. Rodney was afraid of explosion. We were amazed at how hot the oil got! Needless to say, we put the donuts in. Here they are frying:

We burned the first batch, because the oil was much hotter than was necessary. We had trouble controlling hot oil temperature. :) But we eventually figured it out. Here's some of us trying to figure it all out: (note the device we are using... yes folks, that is a plastic spatula).

Of course, us being as excited as we were to try out this frying technique, we didn't realize how the extremely hot oil might have affected the spatula. Well, it did.

So the guys had this "brilliant?" plan to make cider donut pancakes. They call this their "million dollar idea." So, we thought it was absolutely hilarious when they whipped out the pancake batter to figure out the measurements / differences between the two batters (the paper on the fridge is the cider donut dough ingredients).

Although the pancakes didn't turn out perfectly, they still tasted pretty good. :)

CIDER DONUTS! :) (You can see up my nose!)

For Halloween, we spent the day watching scary movies, passing out Halloween candy to trick-or-treaters, and making pumpkin pie-- completely from scratch. Using an actual pumpkin, and homemade crust. :) It was fun! Waiting for trick-or-treaters was fun too, the neighborhood was really in a lot of festivities for Halloween. Even Ruby was excited! :)

We had only planned on very few trick-or-treaters, so only bought two bags of M&M's. We found out about 5 minutes into trick-or-treating, when we only had about three individually wrapped M&M bags left, that we would need to get more. We were thrilled to discover this.

Unfortunately when I got to Walmart to buy more candy, I realized that in my hurry to get out the door, I had only grabbed my keys and left my purse sitting at home. Of course it wasn't until after I had driven the car to the store when I realized this. So, I turned around and came back home. When I walked in, Rodney reported that he had to shut off the outdoor light because kids kept coming for treats and we didn't have any. :( So, I grabbed my purse and headed out again. Of course, because this kind of thing only happens to me, I realized I forgot my wallet in my purse, and of course I didn't realize it until I got to Walmart AGAIN. So, I had to turn around again to go home. By this time, I was so frustrated, and knew it was getting later and later and more kids were coming by our apartment, so I walked in the door and asked Rodney to run out because I couldn't handle any more bad luck! haha So he ran out to get candy, six bags in fact, and of course by the time he got home, we only had about 10 more trick-or-treaters all night. Perfect. :) So, we're going to pass out candy to our schools tomorrow and remember this for next year.

After all of this, we had dinner and started making our pumpkin pie. We, of course, recorded this for PROOF to everyone that we actually made it from scratch! :)

The pumpkin was insane to cut into. We desperately need a new set of cutlery anyway, and the fact that the outer shell of a pumpkin is crazy hard to cut into didn't help. I was the worried wife, standing by watching her husband try to saw through the pumpkin, afraid he'd slip and cut off a finger:

Our serrated knife did nothing, so although the bigger straight knife was more "slippery," it worked better.

Yay!! We finally got it cut in half. :)

We then had to scrape all of the stuff out of the pumpkin.

We wanted to roast pumpkin seeds later, so we separated the "gunk" from them.

We microwaved the pumpkin for 15 minutes and pulled the skin off the inside...

...and blended it. :)

Me rolling out the dough for the pie crust...

Pouring the pumpkin filling in (notice the incredibly awesome design on the border of the crust... totally my idea). :)

The disaster zone afterward...

Finished product!!! :)

We were very proud. :)

After we finished making the pumpkin pie and had set the finished product out to cool, we sat down to watch our second scary movie, Quarantine. Good movie, but unfortunately, it was in "Blair Witch Project" style in its shaking and constant swirling. It made both of us so motion sick that by the end of the movie, the pumpkin pie did not at all sound appealing. haha! So, we agreed we'd eat the pumpkin pie the next day so we could fully enjoy our success. :)

Great night! I hope everyone else had a wonderful Halloween too. :)