semi-homemade

One night last week, the temperature took a sudden down-turn, and Dustin couldn't take it any longer. He made one of these:

Yes, a real, wood-burning fire. It's one of our apartment's saving graces.

Since we jumped the gun a little, we had to snuggle on the other side of the room while trying not to complain of the heat. And then we turned back on the air conditioning.

In the spirit of Fall and tight schedules [and because I wanted to contribute to the fam's snack food this weekend], I whipped up a semi-homemade pumpkin double doozy.

I baked some of those cookies with the pictures in them. You know, they really aren't that good. But there is something about them that makes me feel that I need to buy at least one pack for each season. Here's the trick: seven minutes. The package says eight to ten, but don't let them back a second past the seven minute mark.

For the filling, I literally grabbed everything in my pantry that made shouted "Autumn" and "sweet."

6 oz of cream cheese
1/4 cup pumpkin puree
1 Tbsp. maple syrup
2 Tbsp. brown sugar
As little or as much cinnamon as you prefer [I probably used about 1/2 Tbsp.]

I put a dollop of filling between two cookies and let them sit so that the filling would stiffen. They were g-o-o-d.  And that's coming from a girl raised to believe that made-from-scratch cookies are the only kind of cookies.

I think the extended Jenkins family enjoyed them too. Too bad about half of them disappeared before we even made it there thanks to all that fair-goer traffic.

Happy Fall, y'all!