The Pumpkin Trials

12/8/2016

If you follow my food instagram, snapchat or are friends with me on facebook, you may have seen that I went a little pumpkin crazy this fall. I'm not really a pumpkin spice latte crazed kind of person. I've never actually even had one, but this fall I realized I was missing an important chance that only comes once a year. Making pumpkin desserts. Therefore, the next time I went to the store after this realization I bought out most of the gorccery store's canned puree pumpkin. Next, I began to bake a series of different pumpkin desserts. The purpose of this? One, because I love to bake, and two, to find the best pumpkin dessert for the fall. Here are the results according to my sister (Zia M. Cooper), and my father (David W. Cooper).
I will be sharing a few recipes at some point, so stay tuned.

According to my Dad

1. Pumpkin Cupcakes
These cupcakes are absotutely delectable. They're fluffy and moist (sorry if you don't like the word, but that is the correct one to describe food). They contain the perfect mixture of pumpkin and spice, and taste splendid with cinnamon cream cheese frosting.
Side note: My field hockey team also loved these.

2. Pumpkin Spice Chocolate Chip Cookies
These cookies are really good. I tried a bit of one after I baked them. They're a lot like spice cookies because they have (obviously) a lot of spice in them. My sister wasn't really a big fan of the chocolate chips in them (she said they "ruined the cookies") so, if you're like Zia, feel free to leave the chocolate chips out.

3. Pumpkin Cinnamon Rolls
This was one of the pumpkin recipes I had in my mind since the beginning of fall and was dying to try and make. If you aren't following my food instagram (anjimcooper), my snapchat (anjicooper) or are not friends with me on facebook, you may not know that I love love love to bake cinnamon rolls. So adding a fall twist? Sounds spectacular.
And these rolls were spectacular. The bread/dough part contains actual pumpkin (as do all the recipes on this list) and the filling not only contains brown sugar and cinnamon but also has all the other spices that make up the famous "pumpkin spice." They're warm and delectable, I will definitely be posting this recipe because I love it so much.
Another Side Note: brought this to my team pre- play offs and they all loved them. (We also won playoffs, go ANC field hockey)

4. Pumpkin Bread
See Zia's list for details.

5. Pumpkin Chocolate Cups
These are one of the more unique recipes that I created with pumpkin this fall. Pumpkin chocolate cups. Easiest way to explain them is like reeses, but instead of being filled with peanut butter, they're filled with a creamy, delicious pumpkin cream cheese mixture. These may not be very high on my dad's list, but they are extremely high on Zia's-- she actually got a little obsessed with them.

6. Pumpkin Spice Latte Cake Pops
Here's a little secret, these were actually made with the pumpkin bread, I just made them into Cake pops but breaking up the bread and using cinnamon cream cheese icing to bind the crumbs together. Well, still they're lower on the list because (I would assume) my dad didn't like the extra sweetness quite as much. Still, I reallt wanted to make these because I thought they'd turn out adorable-- and they did.

7. Pumpkin Spice Cake Donuts
Unsurprisingly, holding the last place on both lists are the pumpkin spice cake donuts. These are for one, cake donuts which are never really that good (in my opinion). Sure, they're dipped in chocolate ganache, but I wasn't really a big fan of these either.

According to Zia

1, Pumpkin Bread
Zia's favorite dessert of the punpkin variety was the bread. It really is quite good-- similar to the structure and sweetness of banana bread, but using pumpkin instead. It has the warm flavoring of pumpkin spice and is really quite easy to make. This pumpkin bread is great when toasted and is spectacular when paired with cinnamon cream cheese frosting (another recipe I plan to share soon.)