My dear fried Ann of Chocolate Belles made a video (watch bellow) on how to create the most beautiful centerpiece for your Thanksgiving table- a chocolate cornucopia:

To be completely honest, I have never thought of a cornucopia as a table centerpiece. I always associate it it with a barn, but I might compromise by placing it by my door (inside or outside of the house). A table center piece? Never! Never until now that is.

If you are looking to be creative for this Thanksgiving, you can probably still get your cornucopia mold on time for Thanksgiving.

For the sake of disclosure you should know that my husband advises Ann about Internet Marketing, however the above post is only influence by Ann’s creativity. I have been Ann’s customer and attended her cake decorating classes long before my husband and I met.

With the Holiday seasons around the corner, you may be already planing what kind of pies you will be baking this year. Bellow are just a few products that will help you to impress your family and friends. Even if you are not a baker, but know some one who is, some of the products bellow would make an amazing gift during this holiday season. I especially like the 9″ round red ceramic pie plate. It is pretty cheap, and if you want to you can give the pie with a plate as a gift. And of course every baker will appreciate a good recipe book. I also have a wonderful pumpkin pie recipe (scroll bellow) for you to try.

Autumn Pumpkin Pie Recipe
I got this recipe a long time ago from a friend of mine. You can make your own pie crust for this recipe or a store-bought crust will do just fine.

For this recipe you will need:

• 2 egg yolk slightly beaten
• 3 cups of Pumpkin (you can use canned pumpkin or fresh pumpkin)
• 1 cup of sugar
• 1/4 cup of flour
• 1/2 teaspoon of salt
• 1 1/2 tablespoons of cinnamon (you can put more or less depending how much you like the taste of cinnamon)
• 1/2 teaspoon of ginger
• 1/2 teaspoon of allspice
• 1/2 teaspoon of powdered cloves (optional, pie still taste great without it)
• 1/2 teaspoon of nutmeg
• 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
• 1 1/2 cup of evaporated milk

Mix ingredients in order given above. Pour it an unbaked pie shell. Bake at 400 °F for 45-50 minutes. You will know that your pie is done when the clean knife will comes out clean when inserted in the middle of the pie. Halfway through the baking time I use the aluminum foil to cover the edges of the pie to prevent them from burning. But a crust shield for pies seems like a very practical tool to have.

Your pie should look and taste just like the pie you see bellow which I made not so long ago:

If you decide to make the Autumn Pumpkin Pie using the recipe above I would love to see the photos of your pies. You can add photos when commenting bellow.

As painful as it is to write this, I need to say that everyone should completely ignore anything I have written about starting from scratch your own sourdough starter. Unless of course it is your goal to fail.

As many people before, I saw extreme activity in my culture during the first day, bubbles smell and the culture even more the doubled overnight. Then during 2nd, 3nd, 4th and 5th day i barely detected any activity in my starter. Just before feeding I saw some bubbles, but it all disappeared right after feeding my starter. So as any frustrated bread maker would do, I turned to the internet for answers…. Turns, out if there is not enough acidity in the starter, the “bad guys” grow in your culture preventing the good ones from taking off. In fact there is one recipe that allows you to bypass one of the steps in making starter by raising acidity from the get-go disallowing the “bad guys” to grow in your culture. It took me just one feeding where I substituted water with pineapple juice for my starter to really take off.

The Pineapple Juice Solution For Sourdough Starter

I am certain now that if I ever need to make a new starter again, I will follow the recipe I found at Breadtopia.com (see the video to the right). All previous recipes I tried to follow called for water and flour- this mixture is not acidic enough allowing some other bacterias to grow whose behavior can be mistaken for actual wild yest by an inexperienced bread bakers. The sourdough starter recipe I found at Breadtopia.com allows you to completely bypass the step where the “not-so-good” bacteria dominate in your stater. By the way, I highly recommend to subscribe to Breadtopia.com to stay on top of Eric’s (the site founder) newest videos on bread making. At Breadtopia.com you can also purchase number of outstanding products you might need on your sourdough baking adventure.