Kanelbullens Dag, North American style

This past weekend we had a sudden transition into what passes for fall out here--a breeze picked up, temperatures went down, the air was positively crisp. No leaves changing color, but I'll take what I can get. In short, the weather was perfect for a little fall baking:



This here is the beginning of a seriously delicious batch of cinnamon rolls. Not just any cinnamon rolls though. Pumpkin cinnamon rolls. With cranberries and walnuts. Sounds delicious, no? They look delicious also:

And they are even MORE delicious if you take it a step further and top them off with a maple glaze:

Yum. Recipe, you ask? Well....I don't exactly have one yet. I used this recipe on the King Arthur Flour blog as a loose inspiration, but I made some definite changes. Mainly, I turned the recipe vegan, but I also played around with the spices and the dry:wet ingredients ratio. My one complaint about cinnamon rolls (in general) is that they can be VERY dry, which I do not care for at all. So I had to do some tweaking to make sure these rolls came out moist. I did make some notes on my modifications, but I'm going to need to make these at least once more before I've got things down and have a real recipe to share. Which means that this fall, I'm going to be having a lot more breakfasts like this:

Can't complain.

Cornbread!

Last night for dinner I cooked up a big pot of soup (more on that in a later post), and I was in the mood for a little something to go along with it. Conveniently, I also had some cornmeal in the freezer, so I decided to go for cornbread:


Cornbread is one of those typical Southern foods that I love even though I rarely ate it growing up (also on this list: okra, collard, grits). My mother finds the texture too coarse, so she didn't serve it often. So I don't have a tried and true family recipe to share with you, sorry! Instead, I used this delicious vegan cornbread recipe. The only modifications I made were to use 1/4 c. of oil instead of 1/3, and to add about 3/4 c. of corn salsa. The result was a delicious, moist, cornbread with a little bit of kick from the salsa:



One of the best things about this recipe is that it does not have too much sweetener, just a few spoonfuls of maple syrup. A lot of cornbread recipes I have seen call for a ton of sugar, anywhere from 1/2 to a whole cup, which I think is really more like a recipe for corn cake! I think next time I make this recipe I may even cut the maple syrup down to a single tablespoon because even this cornbread was just a little bit sweeter than what I am used to.

Finally, a note about storing your cornbread. Like most quickbreads, it is best eaten straight out of the oven or within a day or two of baking. If you are a single person like moi, you may not care for the rate of cornbread consumption that requires. Fortunately, cornbread (and most quickbreads) freezes well! I wound up putting about two-thirds of this batch into the freezer for later consumption, while the rest is currently chilling out in a Mason jar in the fridge:


Yes, if you're out of tupperware, a mason jar will absolutely do!