om nom nom straight from the spoon

making honey apple butter

“So what is apple butter anyway,” you ask suspiciously, because frankly that sounds pretty weird. It’s not actually all that weird. It’s really a kind of apple jam. It’s a baked reduction and you can flavour it in a bunch of different ways and I’m getting better at it and it’s getting better as I do. I believe it’s called ‘butter’ because it’s lovely and smooth with maybe just a hint of apple graininess in the texture, not because there’s any actual butter involved. It preserves FOREVER–the stuff stays good,…

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Kitsnacks: Pumpkin Muffins

I made a batch of absolutely gorgeous pumpkin muffins this morning. Light, fluffy, tender, just the right amount of sweetness. The dog ate half of them. #ragemachinemurderbot Baloo’s Favourite Pumpkin Muffins: 1 (15 ounce) can pumpkin puree 4 eggs 1 cup melted butter 2/3 cup water 2 cups white sugar 3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour 2 teaspoons baking soda 1 1/2 teaspoons salt 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger Whisk wet ingredients together in a large bowl. Whisk dry ingredients together in another bowl.…

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holiday prep

Yesterday we went to Dublin to do any shopping that could be done in the real world. I was moderately successful; Ted was not. He was, however, very, very tired after tromping all over hell and breakfast without finding anything. Poor guy. I had some kind of story I was going to tell about the shopping, but I seem to have forgotten it. Unless it was the fact that when I stood to get off the bus, coming home, the bottom fell out of one of the bags I had,…

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worst. cooking. ever.

I have, in a really stunning run, made two bad batches of fudge in a row and followed it up with pie crust worse than what I made at Thanksgiving, which was, up until then, easily the worst I’d ever made. But that’s okay, because the pie I then made was too sweet, too! Srsly. *dies in a pit* I’ve now gotten all the necessary ingredients to make experimental allergy-safe fudge for my friend’s dairy-and-eggs-allergic son, and since I was in the market anyway I also got enough to make…

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a fruit problem

We discovered we have a crabapple tree in the front garden. Chaos immediately ensued, resulting in this: I may have a fruit problem. Today I washed and chopped and boiled and strained all EIGHT POUNDS of those, and by the time I was done I was too tired to make jelly even if all I had to do was pour it all into a pot and boil it with sugar for fifteen minutes. And actually jar it. That was the part that seemed too hard. But the juice is an…

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