Sally Lunn with buttery pumpkin spread and Hong Kong style

An improvement on the Heritage Sally Lunn bread I made the other day.  First, I made a really really delicious pumpkin and butter spread.  This was simply a blend of about 2 parts butter, 1 part mashed, roasted Seminole pumpkin, ground clove, nutmeg, lots and lots of cinnamon (a superfood), and a teaspoon of honey.  Wonderful on fresh bread or toast.

Then, I decided the only way to top this would be to add a drizzle of sweetened condensed milk
Hong Kong cafe style.  If you've never had this, try it.   I guarantee you'll love it!

Heritage Sally Lunn Recipe

I just love heritage cooking, which is why I was so excited to find this "very old" recipe in a cookbook I spotted at the little Sandy Spring Museum. Sandy Spring, Maryland was an early Quaker settlement.  Though it was a short and simple recipe, I did have to figure some things out first.

I rarely bake anything requiring yeast, so I had to figure out how to convert a yeast cake to the powdered yeast I found at the supermarket (thank goodness for the Internet - I found out 1/2 cake is just about 1 packet of yeast).  Then I had to figure out what Martin's Milk was.  I figure it was just regular milk, but wanted to be sure.  I found a lot of artifacts from MANY different dairy and milk companies with Martin as a family name (who knew?), so I concluded the recipe was calling for regular milk.  Then I had to figure out what a "moderate oven" was.  I would have defaulted to 350 degrees, which would have been a good move since apparently, many people have also used the search terms "what does bake in a moderate oven mean", again, hurrah for the Internet.

In the end, the bread was...decent.  Far from the best bread I've had but it came out of my moderate oven, and even mediocre bread is quite amazing hot and fresh-baked from home.

Seminole pumpkin cheesecake

So when my thoughts are not occupied with something pressing at any particular moment, I'm usually thinking about some food that's been in my head.  I will usually not rest until I get it.  Pumpkin cheesecake has been on my mind for about a week or two, ever since a friend celebrated a birthday and posted a photo from her trip to the Cheesecake Factory on Facebook.  

I'd thought many times of zipping down the street to the Cheesecake Factory to pick up a piece, but I'm trying to make better decisions about food.  So what do I do instead?  I make a whole freaking cake.  But man, this cake was freaking good.  All I can say to justify it is that I grew the pumpkin myself, so surely the calories don't count as much.  Plus, the recipe makes a pretty dense and generous cake - plenty to share with others.  I used this recipe - all those perfect 5 star reviews were no joke.  This was an awesome recipe.  

Instead of the can of pumpkin called for in the recipe, we used 2 cups of roasted and pureed Seminole pumpkin

Guest blog on Garden Rant - topped and chopped trees

Horrible, right?!!  I did a guest blog on this on Garden Rant.  Do you see trees like this in your neighborhood?