Happy Halloween!

I carved two pumpkins again this year; Eric made "gourmet" pumpkin seeds. On with the photos! (All photos link back to my Flickr account, where you can find more pumpkin photos in this set)



I knew from the beginning of the season that I wanted to make an NY Giants pumpkin for Eric's fam. I checked out all of the different logos they use but in the end thought a simply one would be best and most easily readable from their porch. Apparently the last time they had a NY pumpkin the Giants won the superbowl. If that happens again... well... I see a lot of Giants pumpkins in my future.



Eric took the seeds from that pumpkin, did some magic and came up with fancy pumpkin seeds. They definitely have cinnamon on them, probably oil, maybe a bit of sugar, and I'm not sure what else. They smelled delicious.

His pumpkin only took an afternoon to clean out and carve, even with scraping an outline in addition to the carving. I wanted something more complicated, something challenging, but also something nerdy and preferably kind of creepy or scary for mine. I'm not quite up to carving a Jack Sparrow or Starry Nights pumpkin yet (those are my goals), but still wanted to push my limits and get more in the Halloween spirit.

Then I saw it. My preciousss.



I'm not a huge Lord of the Rings fan--it took me forever to get through the books and even after reading them I had some trouble following the movies--but I still think it's an amazing literary piece and movie and have a lot of respect for them (Tolkien created how many languages for those books??). Gollum, a corrupted and decrepit hobbit, was exactly what I was looking for. It's a free pattern I found it on The Pumpkin Wizard site and took hours to carve. At one point, I had a spent a lot of time on this without seeing results and was ready to give up. Boy am I glad I stuck with it.



Happy Halloween, indeed.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Love

A few weeks ago I discovered a bag of Reese's Peanut Butter Chips at my boyfriend's house. They look just like chocolate chips except they're made with peanut butter. It was love at first bite; they're amazing! As much as I love regular peanut butter from a jar, you can only have so much before your mouth is glued shut. These babies have all the flavor of peanut butter without that inconvenience.

I was eating them by the handful when I saw a picture and recipe on the bag for chocolate peanut butter chip cookies. That's right: chocolate and peanut butter together in a portable cookie. I finally convinced my BF to make them with me this weekend and we were pretty satisfied with the results:


The only downside is that they're a bit too sweet to indulge more than a couple at a time (or maybe that's a good thing?).

It would be more than worth making them again, though, just for the batter:


Ok so it doesn't look like much in the photo, but trust me it tastes fabulous.

If you want to make the batter yourself (or, you know, the finished product too), the recipe is online: REESE'S Chewy Chocolate Cookies