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.

A coworker’s last day in the office before leaving for her wedding, so I picked out this black-and-white cake: a layer chocolate cake and a layer yellow, with chocolate ganache in between and buttercream over the outside and pink icing flowers on top. Way to step it up, Whole Foods. It was beautiful and yummy. And, since she’s having peach crisp at her wedding this weekend, suitably traditional.

Some mornings you just wake up hungry. You think about what you want - a bagel? Granola? An egg sandwich? No. You’re ravenous. You have a big day ahead of you. Meetings booked straight through from nine in the morning until eight thirty at night. It’s your last day in New York before you fly across the country to San Francisco, in a middle seat. You worked long hours yesterday, no chance to stop for lunch or dinner. You’re pretty damn hungry. Do you want french toast? Banana walnut pancakes? A sticky, gooey cinnamon bun? Maybe none of these things will do. Maybe what you really want is a belgian waffle, piled high with two scoops of ice cream (strawberry and cookies ‘n’ cream), powdered sugar, whipped cream and chocolate chips. Oh, and a side of bacon.

As I mentioned a couple of weeks back, I recently made a rather, um, bulk order from Peanut Butter & Co. Their Crunch Time is my absolute favorite peanut butter, and I wanted to try some of the more unique flavors without shelling out $5.49 each for them at the grocery store. So, in true Jersey fashion, I ended up buying $50 worth of peanut butter (for nine jars! plus two free jars of house-made jam! and free shipping!) because it was such a great deal. Of course, seven of the jars remain unopened, as I went straight to the tried-and-true Crunch Time for lunch sandwiches (their Seriously Strawberry jam is really nice, for the record), but I did taste test the White Chocolate Wonderful, the variety I was most curious about. As it turns out, it’s not only that I prefer chunk peanut butter. It’s that smooth peanut butter sort of icks me out, regardless of the flavor combinations therein - and White Chocolate Wonderful is sort of weird in itself, suitable to my palate neither for sandwiches or for out-of-the-jar spoon-eating.

I had a hunch, though, that the vaguely cloying sweetness would disappear in the context of peanut butter cookies. I was right. This recipe, modified from Smitten Kitchen, was inspired by a peanut butter chocolate chip pretzel chunk cookie I had at the Grub Street Food Festival last October - salty and sweet, crunchy and chewy and very peanut-buttery, made at Sigmund Pretzelshop on Avenue B:

Chocolate chunk peanut butter pretzel cookies:

• 1 + 1/4 cups flour
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1 stick salted butter, softened
• 1 cup peanut butter (your choice, chunky or creamy), at room temperature
• 1/2 cup white granulated sugar + a few tbsp extra for sprinkling
• 1/2 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
• 1 large egg
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1/2 cup hard salted pretzels (I used Utz), broken into small chunks
• 1 3.5 oz chocolate bar, milk or semisweet, broken into small chunks

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Beat together softened butter and peanut butter until smooth (I did this  by hand with a whisk; you can use an electric mixer).
3. Add the sugars and beat well. 
4. In a separate cup, beat together the egg and vanilla, then add to butter-PB-sugar mixture and mix well.
5. Add in dry ingredients and mix thoroughly. 
6. Stir in the pretzel and chocolate chunks.
7. Roll batter into 1-inch spheres and place two inches apart on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Press a clean fork’s tines against the top of each sphere in a criss-cross pattern, flattening the cookies slightly. Sprinkle each cookie with granulated sugar.
8. Bake at 350 for ten minutes and remove from oven. Let cool one minute on baking sheet before moving to plates.