Pumpkins and Pinterest-10/27/11

 Ever since I began this blogging thing I've wanted to post my own recipe on "Cooking Mag Mommy".  I struggle with one big question though.  What makes a recipe mine?  When am I no longer copying the ideas of others and coming up with something "original" to me?  I mean...bake at 350.  Not exactly a novel idea!   Tonight I made a pumpkin pull-apart bread adapted from a recipe I found through pinterest.com on the blog, "Sunny Side Up in San Diego". recipe link here  Earlier this week, I had made a Garlic Parmesan Pull-Apart Bread I found on the blog "The Pastry Affair" using tastespotting.com, another awesome site I've been using to find great recipes on blogs. recipe link here  The recipe I came up with used measurements and cooking techniques from both recipes but the finished product really was its own recipe.   And it was really good!  Richard and I ate over 1/2 of it while watching the World Series tonight.
Here's my recipe!   I'm so proud...

Cinnamon Sugar Pull-Apart Pumpkin Bread with Rum-Soaked Raisins

6 Tablespoons unsalted butter, divided
1/2 cup milk
2 1/4 teaspoons active dry yeast
11/4 cups sugar, divided
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups pumpkin puree
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/4 cup rum (optional)
1/3 cup raisins (optional)

Melt 2 tablespoons of butter in a saucepan over medium-high heat.  Pour melted butter into large bowl then heat milk to warm in same saucepan.  Add milk to the melted butter.  Cool milk/butter mixture to warm (between 100 and 110 degrees) then add the yeast and 1/4 cup of sugar.  Let this yeast mixture sit until foamy, up to 10 minutes.  Add the the pumpkin, salt, and 2 cups of flour. Stir by hand or mix in stand mixer with dough attachment until combined.   Add the rest of the flour 1/2 cup at a time and knead by hand or machine for 6 minutes, until the dough is smooth and elastic.  Put dough in a large, lightly oiled bowl and cover with plastic wrap or towel. Allow to rise in warm draft free area until doubled in size (an hour to an hour and a half).  While dough is rising, soak raisins in rum in a small bowl if desired.

Melt the remaining 4 tablespoons of butter. Mix the the sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg in another small bowl.  (If you choose to add rum soaked raisins, add them to the cinnamon sugar mixture.)  Spray the bottom of a bundt pan with nonstick cooking spray.

Punch down dough and pull off small spoonful size pieces.  Roll each piece of dough into a ball and dip in melted butter.  Then roll each ball in cinnamon sugar mixture and put in bundt pan, covering the bottom with the small balls of dough.  When all the dough has been rolled in cinnamon sugar and placed snugly in the pan, cover the pan with a clean towel and let rise for 30-45 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Bake the bread for 30-35 minutes.  Let cool for 5 minutes in pan then turn carefully onto wire rack or plate, then flip onto other plate or rack so bread holds its shape.  Enjoy warm or at room temperature.

This yummy bread recipe was not the only pumpkin inspiration I've had of late.  The very top picture is Rylynn looking all ready for Halloween with a cute shirt from her grandma and an adorable pumpkin hat.  I whipped up that hat last week and have made two more since for several friends who have kids Rylynn's age.   It's so cute and easy.  I found the directions through pinterest.com, on a blog titled "My Bountiful Life".   I linked her free pattern here. pumpkin hat pattern link here 

I couldn't post about all my fun pumpkin themed projects without putting in a picture of my two favorite pumpkins all dressed up in their Halloween costumes.  There is some debate between Richard and I about how exactly we came up with the idea to do slightly irreverent matching costumes for the girls.  I'm sure you can tell from the picture but we convinced Eyrleigh to be a scuba diver (anything but a princess!).  I found some great ideas...on pinterest...that involved her own black clothes, soda bottles, and duck tape.  She looks great, though I seriously doubt she'll wear the goggles over her eyes at all!  We found a infant shark costume at Old Navy for Rylynn and for my favorite part of the whole thing, I made Ry a little sign that says "Give my sister candy or I bite".  I posted this same picture on Facebook and everyone loved it!

Great Halloween Read-Alouds-10/25/11

There will not be a single mention of food or cooking in this entire post...wait, that was a mention!  Oh well...
With Halloween right around the corner, I wanted to put in my votes for great Halloween read-alouds for preschoolers.  These are my current favorites to read to Eyrleigh and Rylynn and I'm planning on bringing them along to E's preschool class party on Monday.  Room on the Broom by Julia Donaldson has all the qualities of a great preschool read-aloud.  It has a wonderful rhyming cadence and a repetative story that is easy for young children to follow.  There is even a "group participation" posibility if you want the kids to pipe up as the broom "whoosh"es away. 

Last year I bought The Spooky Wheels on the Bus by J. Elizabeth Mills from the Scholastic Book Fair.  Sung to the tune of the more traditional "Wheels on the Bus", this story is a great one for preschoolers and a reader who can sing.  Using the numbers one through ten and Halloween themed bus "parts" and riders, the whole class can sing and act out this story together.   This one is great for a party where sitting and listening just isn't in the cards.  The kids can sing, wiggle, and make all the silly noises they want and still be a part of the activity.

The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything by Linda Williams is not a novel pick by any means.  Almost every list I found of Halloween read-alouds included this classic.  Don't worry though, kids could hear this one 100 times and still have fun.  The repeating actions of the scary pumpkin man are great to keep kids engaged and acting out as the story goes along.  Wiggling, shaking, nodding, and clapping is sure to keep little listeners engaged in the story and though the pumpkin man is a little scary for the really little ones, the ending is cute and not at all frightening.

10 Trick-or-Treaters:  A Halloween Counting Book by Janet Schulman was a new one to me this year but I'm  adding it to the repetoire.  The rhyming verses and the counting back from 10 to 1 are great for a preschool class.  The kids are just beginning to recognize numbers and this book has big contrasting numbers on each page that kids can see.  Using their rhyming skills and the visual numbers, most 3 and 4-year-olds should be able to shout out the appropriate number as the story goes along.  It's a  great way to reinforce number recognition in a really fun story.
These are just 4 great read-alouds and I hope to find a few more in time for the preschool party next year!   Reading other reviewers, I think I need to find In The Haunted House by Eve Bunting  and Pumpkin Eye by Denise Fleming.  Have a great week reading to your kids!

Christmas In October-10/25/11

I've blogged since 2008 but in the last few months, I've finally started following other blogs.  I've discovered something about myself.  I am hopelessly into themes.  Maybe it's the teacher in me but everything is more fun in themes...themed parties, themed food, themed lessons.  I know there is a large and vocal group of people that find themes cheesy but I  (and may I add, Martha Stewart) am not one of them.   I love things all tied together around one central idea. That's why I've had so much fun with Eyrleigh's parties and what I've become really addicted to looking at on blogs that show parties all centered around everything from apples to zebras.

My last blog post was a seriously tardy review of our Halloween party and this post will continue that.  Here is a quick summary of our Christmas party LAST year complete with allergy friendly food ideas, a game, a craft, and some fun Christmas stories.
The photo above is our table setup.  Now that I've spent hours looking at all these classy party purveyors, I see we are pretty amateur but this is for  two-year-old preschool class and not wealthy paying clients.  I actually left my camera in the car for this party so I had to get my pictures from Lori. 

Here are some of the cool things we did to make the food more fun.  The fruit for the party was threaded on kabobs and stuck in a whole pineapple.  If you look closely you can see the star fruit at the ends to give a Christmas look to our fruit tree.  We also made little ham sandwiches.  Jacob, Lori's son, has outgrown his wheat allergy and can have certain breads if they are made without milk products.  We cut these little sandwiches in tree shapes with a cookie cutter.  Like at the Halloween party, we made Jello Christmas bells in red and green and even cut out candy cane shapes from corn tortillas and fried them for chips.  

Lori took some good closeups of our most creative additions to the food.  We made little popcorn snowmen for the kids to take home.  Basically, we made these much like Rice Krispie treats.  We melted marshmallows,  mixed it with popcorn, and rolled the popcorn into two balls.  We used raisins for eyes, fruit leather cut into strips for a scarf, pretzel rods for arms, and Skittles for buttons.  They were really cute and fun to eat.  Lori also made some adorable Christmas mice.  She used Enjoy Life chocolate cookies and dipped one half in melted baking chocolate (also from Enjoy Life Foods).  The ears are sunflower seeds and the tails are red licorice rope.  She even made a snowy bed of coconut.  So cute!

Our craft went perfectly.  The little Christmas mouse you see Jacob holding was was easy for the kids to assemble.  The mom who made them cut out a red mouse shape from felt (basically a teardrop shape) and put two slits near the pointed end.  She then cut out green ears (basically a dumbbell shape) that could be slipped through the slits in the red.  The children were given two eyes and a small white pompom for a nose to glue on themselves.  The candy cane attached by sliding into the loop created by the ears on the underside.  The kids thought these were great and they didn't take a lot of parental assistance.

Our game was actually a repeat of one we played with the kids at Halloween...and I completely forgot to explain in that post.  We choose a fast beat Christmas song, I think "Rocking Around the Christmas Tree".  (At Halloween, we did the Monster Mash and Ghostbusters.)   We placed two different Christmas themed shapes on the floor with enough of each one for each child.  (Here you see we did gingerbread men and trains, at Halloween I did pumpkins and ghosts)  We played the song and got the kids dancing then quickly stopped the music and shouted one of the two shapes.  The kids had to run and stomp on the shape we called....kind of like musical chairs with no losers.  The kids got to dance around and work on shape recognition and following directions.  It was fun!

We read a few holiday stories too.  The Night Before Christmas is always a great one and I have a beautiful pop-up one by by Clement C. Moore and Niroot Puttapipat.   Snowmen at Christmas by Caralyn and Mark  Buehner has cute rhyming and is easy for little kids to follow. 

This final picture is just for laughs.  Eyrleigh and Jacob are usually at school while Lori and I make the party food but because of timing, they played while we worked the day before the party.  This adorable picture is the two of them playing in the Jello scraps after we cut out the bells.  They ate some, they smashed some, and basically had a blast.  Gotta love them!