Pumpkin Cake

Last week we had a potluck to celebrate the end of the fiscal year and reward ourselves for working hard and doing a great job (I have a feeling this'll be the last potluck for a while). Because it's fall I decided to make something pumpkin flavored. After a bit of debate over what kind of dessert to make (bars, cookies, cake, cupcakes...) I finally decided on making a cake since I hadn't made one in a while and I wanted to use up the the last of the caramel cream cheese frosting (based on some of the pins on my Pumpkin/Fall board, caramel goes just as good with pumpkin as it does with apple). I finally decided on a Pumpkin Snack Cake from Kitchen Meets Girl.

Apple Pie Macarons with Caramel Cream Cheese Frosting

Between last year and Pinterest, I was able to remember that Chiara is a fall megafan. Since she was recently in Paris I immediately decided to make apple pie macarons and use what I could of the caramel frosting (from July) as the filling. One problem: I couldn't really find a good macaron recipe that had apple pie spice in it (I finally broke down and got a container off Amazon). You'd think it'd be easy; however, most recipes I came across either had another source for the apple flavor in the macarons (like freeze-dried apples - no idea where to find those) or had the apple flavor in the filling instead of the shells. Finally, I found a recipe on The Macaron Queen for apple pie macarons.

Chocolate Chip Blondies

A couple weeks ago we had a dessert potluck at work. Because it was a bit last minute I decided to stick with brownies or bars: quick to bake, usually makes enough for lots of people. Rather than turn to Pinterest or the internet I turned to my cookbooks (with a limited amount of eggs and butter, it would be quicker to skim the recipes for what I had). I grabbed 500 Best Cookies, Bars, & Squares and started looking at the brownies and bars sections, eventually settling on Chocolate Chip Blondies since I had all the ingredients (or so I thought).