Pumpkin Orange Cinnamon Rolls

These cinnamon rolls were moist, warm and flavorful. There's pumpkin and orange zest in the dough and orange juice in the cream cheese icing.
When I made these, I mixed up the batch of dough, placed it in a bowl, covered it with plastic wrap and then set it in a slightly warm oven to rise. After an hour I looked in on it and it had risen so much that it was hanging down the side of the bowl and resting on the baking rack. The dough was so puffy that when I tried to put it into the cake pan, I had to squish it in to fit. Then it rose some more and lost a lot of its cool cinnamon swirl shape. Next time I will let it rise in a huge bowl and bake it up in a 9" pan instead of an 8".

Coconut Macadamia Brownies

I brought some unsalted macadamia nuts back with me from our trip to Hawaii. I wanted to use the flavors of coconut and macadamia nuts in a dessert and I love Mounds candy bars. This was made from an almond joy brownies recipe but I used macadamia nuts in place of the almonds.

The brownie layer was super moist and fudgy. The coconut layer was rich and chewy. The milk chocolate layer was smooth and sweet. The chopped macadamia nuts on the top added crunch. I would make these brownies again. They are more time consuming than brownies from a box but they are complex in flavor and highly addictive.

Mint Chocolate Cookies

Our friend Israa came over to visit. We whipped up some cookies from whatever we could find in the cupboards. The recipe had no eggs in it which was good because we were able to eat the cookie dough too. We only had a little bit of mint chocolate chips so we added dark chocolate chunks. The cookies were very soft in the oven but firmed up when we cooled them on the rack. They taste great with a glass of ice cold milk.

Giant Halloween Oreos

Tablespoon sized balls of cookie dough spread out to become 4 inch cookies. They were super puffy in the oven but when I took them out, they deflated and became chewy. There is a vanilla icing sandwiched in the middle with orange and black sprinkles.

Pumpkin Muffins

The little pastry chefs helped to make pumpkin muffins for breakfast. They turned out light and fluffy.

Lemon Bundt Cake and Mini Bundts

I was so excited to try out my new mini bundt pans. These worked perfectly with my 6 inch bundt pan to make a full recipe. This recipe used lemon zest, lemon extract and lemon juice along with a little bit of rum. It also has a lemon icing. The cakes were sweet, moist and zingy, a ray of sunshine in the gray windy days of fall.

Lemon Madeleines

It was fun to use my madeleine pan again. The last time I made orange blossom ones and this time I chose lemon. These little cakes turned out light and full of sunny citrus flavor. I combined lemon juice, lemon zest and lemon extract. When I mixed in the butter, it was not room temperature and the batter had a slightly curdled look. But when I baked them, they turned out fine. I had a hard time figuring out what to do with the tops of them. I considered glazing them with lemon icing, dipping them in white chocolate, and dusting with powdered sugar. In the end, I just went with the classic powdered sugar which still showed off the shell shape and was not sticky or hard to stack.