Third Annual Pumpkin Week in Spring Day Five: Black and White Pumpkin Cookies

It ain’t a good meal if there isn’t dessert at some point. Seriously. I HAVE to have dessert every day. Just like I have to have a bedtime snack. I need a bedtime snack. I’ve practically broken up with a guy because he never had food at home. Sometimes I like my bedtime snack to be followed by it’s own special dessert. Considered breaking up with someone over that too.

Get yer mind out of the gutter Cliffy!

I am en route soon to do my second show with my improv group, Commonwealth at the Neon Venus Theatre, so I best be getting out of the gutter and into the game.

Then when the night is over I shall have rum, and maybe, just maybe, a cookie.

Incidentally, these cookies are not really black and white. They are black and beige (from the cinnamon) and orange. The world ain’t just black and white and has much more than just variants on the color grey.

Crud, I was headed back into the gutter there.

Black and White Pumpkin Cookies adapted oh so slightly from the Joy the Baker Cookbook by Joy Wilson
Cookies:
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1 1/2 cups flour
1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. cinnamon
2 eggs
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup applesauce
1 15 oz. can of pumpkin
1 tsp. vanilla
White Frosting:
2 cups powdered sugar
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1 Tbsp. light corn syrup
1 tsp. vanilla extract
Up to 1 tsp. water
Chocolate Frosting:
2 oz. (about 6 Tbsp.) oz. bittersweet chocolate chips (I used Ghiradelli)
1 heaping Tbsp. butter
Pinch salt
1 Tbsp. light corn syrup
FOR COOKIES:
Heat the oven to 325 F, line a baking sheet or two with nonstick foil.
Sift flours, baking soda, baking powder, salt and cinnamon. In another bowl whisk your eggs and sugar. Put some muscle into it, you want it to get jut slightly lighter in hue. Then whisk in pumpkin, applesauce and vanilla. Fold in the flour mixture until totally incorporated. Dollop by heating tablespoons onto the sheet and spread to a 2-inch circle. Bake, start checking around ten minutes doing the clean toothpick test. When you stick it in the middle and it comes out clean, take them out if the oven and put pan on a wire rack for ten minutes, then grab a spatula and move cookies to the wire rack to cool.
FOR GLAZES:
Whisk powdered sugar, corn syrup, vanilla and cinnamon, adding water drop by drop if necessary until it is spreadable.
Melt the chocolate and butter. I put my chocolate in the microwave for 2 minutes at 50 percent power, then add butter and stir. Continue to zap at 50% for shorter periods of time, stirring when you stop, until it is melted. Add the salt and corn syrup.
Turn the cookies over so you are putting the frosting on the flat side. Spread on, half and half, then give them some time for the frosting to get firm. Teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony. Then eat.

Piedenfroid

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. And it’s tomorrow! I will be hosting a whopping 9 people. I’ve never hosted before. Yikes!
I do promise a vegetarian T-day recap, but in the meantime, if you are reading this you either have your menu in check, or are digesting a tasty meal. What I am getting to is, who really has time for ANOTHER Thanksgiving recipe? So thank you to Eleanor for suggesting that I feed not your bellies, but your brains.
This week I give you a word. You can use it to spice up your holiday table talk if you are dining with foody wordy nerds like me.
The English language lacks enough words to cover emotions felt in specific instances. We have no equivalent to “schadenfreude”, used to describe delight felt in another’s misfortune. Well, I have taken it upon myself to create a word to descibe a common and unfortunate feeling-one I hope does not describe your Thanksgiving experience. Allow me to introduce you to this soon-to-be linguistic sensation:
PIEDENFROID
You know how sometimes a dessert looks amazing, sounds amazing, perhaps even smells good, and totally tastes lame? Not bad, just…lackluster? So you eat it, but it is not special. You feel tricked, and are filled with remorse, disillusion, dispair, perhaps even denial as you make excuses for the failed dessert(well, the whipped cream seemed real, at least!). You regret that dessert. You are left saddened and still wanting, yet you’ve filled your belly with this useless dessert.
This is piedenfroid. It has it’s word origings in “pie”, the dessert most easily guilty of piedenfroid. So easy for a pie to fail if not in a tasteless cardboard crust, then in a overly dried or too gooey filling.
This word also denotes just a tinge of anger, both at yourself and at the dessert, and the dessert’s source(hopefully not yourself-then you’ve wasted time cooking and ingredients). It does not, however, denote rage. The dessert has to be truly awful for rage. I am working on the word for that.
May your Thanksgiving be plentiful and piedenfroid-free.