I have resentful memories of late October weather as a kid, investing hours conceiving a perfect Halloween costume only to have it ruined by the parental enforcement of an unmatching puffy winter coat. My birthday is the 29th, and this year I spent hours trawling thrift shops on the evening of the 28th to find a perfect white trenchcoat to match my Holly Golightly costume in anticipation of the unseasonal snowstorm that hit New York last weekend. Waking up on Saturday morning at 6 a.m. to construct a beehive and shellac it with enough hairspray to resist the elements, I roused the rest of the household by practically jumping on the bed until the remaining inhabitants were enlisted on an 8 am trip to Alice’s Teacup for breakfast tea. When I say “the rest of the household”, I mean that we brought stuffed animal friends and ordered scones for them. I take my birthday seriously.

By the time we’d returned from breakfast, heavy, thick flakes had started to fall, coating the view outside my window in a slushy sheen of white. So I did the only logical thing: cued up some Christmas music on Spotify and got to baking.

I’d initially planned to bake pumpkin cookies, by request for a Halloween party later than night, but in an effort to make something a little more festive looking than misshapen orange blobs, I turned them into miniature pumpkin whoopie pies, with pumpkin buttercream filling and the edges rolled in gold sugar sprinkles.

I began with this recipe for the cookies, doubling all the spices (as I always do in pumpkin desserts), adding nutmeg and ground clove, and omitting the vanilla and ginger since I was out and not planning to head to Trader Joe’s mid-blizzard. Instead of cream cheese filling, I beat together butter with confectioners’ sugar and a touch of Trader Joe’s pumpkin butter to make buttercream frosting. Each whoopie pie got a daub of pumpkin butter, then a healthy spoonful of frosting before another cookie was sandwiched on top and the edges were rolled in sprinkles. Tiny, adorable, festive and surprisingly portable.

Pumpkin blondies notwithstanding, this was the first pumpkin cake of the season, made on a whim after a healthy vegetarian tofu dinner and for no occasion in particular, although we did end up taking the remaining third of it (after putting away 2/3 ourselves in 24 hours. yep. that’s right.) to my boyfriend’s parents’ house for pre-Yom Kippur dinner last night. I have two go-to pumpkin cake recipes as holdovers from last fall: this one and the one inscribed on the back of the Trader’s Joe’s Pumpkin Bread and Muffin Mix box, doctored with extra spices and TJ’s pumpkin butter. This pumpkin cake started with the Trader Joe’s box, but instead of two eggs, oil and water, I added a whole can of pumpkin, about a cup of milk, and tons of cinnamon, nutmeg and clove. Then I made streusel topping, enough for a very generous layer on top of the batter, with crumbled graham crackers, butter, brown sugar and more cinnamon.

I still had some leftover butterscotch chips from the blondies, and had been thinking about mixing them into the batter when my boyfriend, whose cooking advice generally comes from what-seems-like-it-might-work rather than experience, suggested making butterscotch sauce to go with the cake. “Put some butter in it, too!” he directed, “and scotch!” So I’m pouring a half-shot of Johnnie Walker Black Label into the mixture of melted butterscotch chips and milk I’m stirring in a saucepan on the stove when it occurs to me to ask. “Hey, is there actually scotch in butterscotch?”

“No idea,” he says. (turns out butterscotch is traditionally the alchemy of butter and brown sugar. According to Wikipedia, “Food historians have several theories regarding the name and origin of this confectionery, but none are conclusive. One explanation is the meaning “to cut or score” for the word “scotch”, as the confection must be cut into pieces, or “scotched”, before hardening^. It is also possible that the “scotch” part of its name was derived from the word “scorch”.)

Here’s my super professional chef pro tip: it is definitely a really good idea to assume flavors go together if you think an ingredient is part of the name for another ingredient. Definitely always do this. Or maybe just with anything and scotch, because this butterscotch sauce was out of this world and I literally was drinking it by the spoonful.

I don’t understand the conception that French toast is difficult to make. As someone who struggles to achieve perfect pancakes and doesn’t own a wafflemaker, French toast is my standard special-occasion breakfast to impress. Even - or perhaps especially - on occasions when a slightly hungover me is the only one that needs impressing.

Also, HAPPY OCTOBER! Did you know that it’s my favorite month?! And it’s my birthday month, so this was basically a pre-pre-birthday breakfast. I had it with a tall glass of milk rather than with the namesake beverage, but I’m sure if your threshold for pumpkin is as high as mine it’d be delish that way too.

Pumpkin spice French toast:

• 3 slices challah, a day or two old
• 1 large egg
• 1 apple
• 1/2 cup milk
• honey, cinnamon, and nutmeg
• 1 tbsp + 1 tsp butter
• optional toppings: ice cream, whipped cream, more honey, and/or maple syrup

1. Dice the apple finely and add it to a saucepan with a teaspoon of butter, a squirt of honey, and cinnamon & nutmeg to taste. Cover pan with a lid and cook, stirring every so often, for 5-10 minutes, until apples are softened to your liking.
2. In the meantime, beat together the egg, milk, more honey, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Dredge challah slices in the mixture for about a minute.
3. Heat 1 tbsp butter in a frying pan. Place french toast slices in the pan and cook until browned on the outside, about 2-3 minutes per side. Some people put their French toast in the oven for a few minutes after this part. I don’t because A) My oven is broken, B) I’m not ultra-paranoid about raw eggs because I buy good-quality organic ones and have a very strong stomach and C) I love love love when French toast is all moist and custardy on the inside. It’s your call.
4. Plate French toast, add cooked apples, and top with whipped cream or ice cream - I used Trader Joe’s pumpkin ice cream, which we (okay, pretty much just I) have gone through a quart of this week.

In further pursuit of my goal to try a large percentage of the pumpkin beers on the market this season, yesterday we split a Shipyard Smashed Pumpkin (Pugsley’s Signature Series.) In contrast to the sweet, almost syrupy pumpkin pie-ishness of Southern Tier’s Pumking, this one hovered in the savory pumpkin category - sort of like eating a spoonful of plain, organic pumpkin out of the can when you’re baking with it. The earthy autumn heartiness was still very present, but this was a beer I could imagine drinking with beef stew or short ribs or sharp cheese, not just along with or instead of dessert.

And, like all my favorite beers, the alcohol content is over 9%. What? A girl’s got to stay warm in October somehow! 

I first made this cake on New Year’s Eve of this year, so I think of it sort of as my good luck charm of two thousand eleven, symbolic of how far I’ve come in my relationship with food this year. It is to 2011 what pumpkin cake was to my 2010 (see top of page 2 in the link): representative of what kind of cook I am, and what I want to feed people when I cook for them. Despite my haphazard history with baking, it’s somehow impossible for me to screw up, and people like it, they really do. It’s the Sally Field of my recipe repertoire. Also, when you cut it into squares, it makes the best possible brownies you can imagine. The quality, obviously, depends on the quality of the chocolate you use. I made them for our housewarming party on Friday, along with chocolate-chip-Kit-Kat cookies and pumpkin blondies with butterscotch chips and white chocolate chips, which were not particularly good-looking but tasted fantastic. Homemade garlic hummus, peppers in red wine, a cheese plate with Zabar’s rye and 7-grain bread, dry aged monterey, goat brie, camembert and New York cheddar, vodka-orange sparkling punch, and Magnolia Bakery cupcakes rounded out the menu. Apartment officially warmed, just in time for the chilly weather.