The Great Pumpkin Part II: The Revenge - Taking Matters Into My Own Hands

Yeah, this is about how I feel about the whole "Pumpkin Spice" concept

Having been fed up with what is being mass marketed as "pumpkin spice" I decided I'd try my own hand at it and see what turned up. Little known fact is I can be quite handy in the kitchen when it comes to cooking and baking from time to time if I do say so myself quite modestly and humbly. This, however would be something entirely different. I've never cooked with pumpkin before.
Thankfully there's boxed mixes for this to help people like me at times like this too lazy to pick and choose from the multitude of recipes from the internet!
First up was the reason I decided to give this whole crazy idea a whirl in the first place:

Never saw this brand or this kind of thing until I saw it on a discount rank at the store and the proverbial Last of the Mohicans and figured like ol' Jack Burton: What the hell. There was a recipe for pumpkin bars on there, add part of a can and voila. So I went home and did just that and they didn't turn out too bad. But it needed to look like the box, so I added a layer of cream cheese icing. Then I decided to get creative: so I made a maple syrup glaze for some pumpkin seeds I that toasted in the oven to top it with. The maple was a nice counterpoint to the creamcheese which went nice with the pumpkin bar overall. Though never satisfied with my own results I tested them out and was met with favorable reviews, so huzzah!

Next up: Good old fashioned Pillsbury Quick Bread, simple enough right? Yeah well, cooking with part pumpkin and part egg makes for strange cooking times and stranger results... let's just leave it at that and chalk it up as a mulligan and a to-be-continued later.
How could I fuck that up you ask? Skill my dear reader, pure skill on my part to ensure that I leave chaos in my wake whether I choose to or not. It's my curse at times.

My other curse at times is to want to try some of the things I see on TV or the internet... sometimes they lead to great things! Other times... like all those years in shopping carts... not so much... this on the other hand looks like a bit of pure genius and I want to try it:



So this is in the works at some point in the very near future having just come back from an excellent day at the pumpkin patch with my pumpkin queen, who was the one who decided we needed to try this idea after having shown her the clip. Let you know how this turns out!