Fall Desserts

My neighbor and I agreed today, 'Tis the Season to be a jolly size. After all, it's autumn and some of us feel like hibernating soon. This is the time of year that I really enjoy making desserts. Of course I always feel like eating dessert, but sometimes I'm just not in the mood to create yummy food and then have the hassle of cleaning the kitchen afterward. However, as the weather turns, it puts me in a festive mood and suddenly turning on the oven doesn't seem like such an irresponsible thing to do.

I wanted to remember the things I've been making so here's a picture of this weeks' dessert fare.

From left: Cinammon rolls with maple frosting, apple crisp, and pumpkin swirl cheesecakeI need to give credit to Mark for peeling and cutting all the apples for the apple crisp. He's right, it's the hardest part of this dessert.

My notes... These were some of my better rolls. I didn't give in to the temptation to keep adding flour, so they were not dense like they usually are. The maple frosting was a last-minute improvisation because I didn't have any more cream cheese, having used it up in the day before's cheesecake. We were all surprised that just a few drops of maple flavoring into butter/pwd. sugar frosting would make it that good.

The cheesecake was nice, but a lot of work. (Part of it was that Katrina was helping.) Tasted kind of like a blend of pumpkin pie and cheesecake. Not too light and not too heavy. I had to substitute since it called for 1/2 cup brandy and we did not have that. Not knowing what to substitute, I put in 1/4 cup brown sugar and some almond flavoring. It was probably totally off.

The apple crisp was okay. We make this one all the time, because it's brainless and doesn't even require a recipe anymore. So it should be perfected, but the oven got turned off somewhere in the middle, so we had no clue how done it was and played the oven roulette game. Consequently, the "crisp" had mushy apples. Also not enough apples. Mark likes a lot of crisp though so he was satisfied.