My sister Bunny dreams of buying an old house in the country, so Mom and I often accompany her on house-hunting expeditions. On Veterans Day, the three of us spent the morning visiting a very special house near Cairo, Georgia, the former home of folk artist Laura Pope Forrester.
Last night, Halloween night, I whipped up some vegan pumpkin cupcakes as I waited for trick-or-treaters. I thought I might get quite a few visitors. See, I’d gone to our Quincy CVS earlier in the evening for some Hershey’s cookies ‘n creme candy skulls, and while I was there I overheard a man talking about how he’d already handed out over 100 pieces of candy; he was at CVS to replenish his supply. His neighborhood was flooded with trick-or-treaters, he said. His neighborhood had also had a scarecrow contest, I learned, and he had won first place. He was chatting with a lady dressed up as a mermaid.
Well, I didn’t end up getting any trick-or-treaters, but that’s okay. I’ll bring the candy to the office with me tomorrow and share it with my coworkers.
I had fun making my cupcakes (and listening for the doorbell). Buntin, my high-maintenance tortie, was “helping,” of course. She was opening the kitchen cabinets and exploring them. She sat in a large stew pot for a while, which was really cute. Then she burrowed in among the cardboard in the recycling bin and made herself a little nest.
The cupcakes turned out great, though they looked a bit plain until I topped them with adorable (non-vegan) mellowcreme pumpkins. You really ought to try this recipe—because it’s easy and totally delicious. I found it on this lovely blog and tweaked it just the tiniest bit.
Vegan Pumpkin Cupcakes
Ingredients:
Cupcakes:
1/3 cup vegan butter
3/4 cup white granulated sugar
3/4 cup pumpkin puree
1/3 cup almond milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 teaspoons pumpkin pie spice
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/4 cups flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
Icing:
1/2 cup vegan cream cheese
1/2 cup vegan butter
2 cups powdered sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice
Directions:
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. With an electric beater, cream the butter and sugar. Beat until light and fluffy. Add the pumpkin puree, almond milk, and vanilla extract and mix until incorporated. In a separate bowl, whisk together the pumpkin pie spice, baking powder, flour, and salt. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and mix until just blended. Be careful not to overmix.
Pour the batter into a lined cupcake pan, filling about two-thirds full. Bake for 15 to 18 minutes. Test with a toothpick. If the toothpick comes out clean, the cupcakes are done.
Remove the cupcakes from the pan and let them cool completely on a wire rack before icing. To make the icing, whip the vegan cream cheese, vegan butter, powdered sugar, vanilla, and pumpkin pie spice together until the mixture is light and fluffy.
Last Sunday I cleaned up the Vine House, our little tin-roofed shelter on the north side of the yard. I washed all the furniture (periwinkle-colored chairs and a matching table) with bleach, and I dusted the decorations—wind chimes and sun catchers and a collection of …
Here are some little fun things that have been happening around Spruce Pine Cottage recently. About a week before school started, Sophie (my niece) got her braces off. I couldn’t wait to see her new teeth, so I arranged a visit with her as soon …
About a week ago, I ordered Carl a cat-sized collar and tie from a lovely Etsy shop called ChariotsAFire. The combo arrived in the mail on Tuesday. The tie is olive green with tiny gold dots, and Carl looks great in it (it really complements his eyes). When he tried it on for the first time, Rob said, “He looks like a little businessman. You should get him a little matching briefcase.”
“He is not a little businessman!” I said, laughing. “He’s a little boy. He’s four, and this is his Sunday school outfit.”
(Rob knows I like to play that Carl is my darling little boy and that he’ll never grow up, that he’ll be four forever and ever. He was just giving me a hard time.)
It was tough to get a good picture of Carl in his collar and tie, though he seemed moderately comfortable in this getup. He really needed to be sitting up nice and straight in order for me to capture the full effect, but he kept wanting to lie down in his tie, which wasn’t a very photogenic position. I’ll keep trying to get some better shots. Since he didn’t really mind wearing his tie, I should have ample opportunities for photos.
Last Saturday Rob and I went antiquing in Destin, a booming beach town about two hours southwest of us. Destin is full of fancy shops for all the rich people who vacation there. At Smith’s Antiques, we lucked out and found a not-too-expensive carving from Indonesia that was perfect for decorating the empty wall in the sunroom. The carving is of a dragon boat full of passengers, and it’s over 6 feet long, painted metallic gold, pink, green, white, and yellow. I love the dragon’s sassy, crazy expression and his magnificent tail.
I wanted to show you a picture of the arch we bought a couple weeks ago, the one that helps support the fruit-laden branches of our satsuma trees. The arch looks to me like the ghost of a pagoda, and it forms a rather grand entrance to our lowly utility room. Next time I’ll have to take a picture of the whole arch, not just the top. The arch spans a pebble path lined with bricks. Coonties and pink pentas grow on one side of the path, and purple coneflowers, prairie coneflowers, and mountainmint grow on the other.
I’ll close with a picture of a cute strawberry cupcake that I posed the other day on the little cast-iron table by the vegetable garden. There’s nothing I like better than photographing cute desserts. When I was a child, I would do the same thing, but with mud pies and cakes. My sister Kris and I would fashion whole spreads out of mud and other “ingredients” from our yard. Our cakes were large mushroom tops covered in creamy chocolate mud icing and rose petal garnishes, and we’d make candy apples by wrapping crabapples in red clay, with twigs serving as the popsicle sticks. We’d raid Mom’s marigold and zinnia beds so we could have centerpieces for our table. When everything was ready and our dolls were all dressed and in their places, we always took a picture with our little camera. It’s just funny the way people never really change.
The yard is emerald green and wonderfully jungly this summer because it’s actually been raining. For the first time in years, it seems, we’ve been getting daily afternoon thundershowers in the proper summer pattern. Rob and I spent Saturday taming our backyard jungle (just a …
Though it’s still technically spring, Saturday felt like high summer. The air was sultry, the cicadas were roaring, and the yard was jungle-y green. Rob and I spent the day weeding and mowing and planting, but it was so hot we had to keep taking breaks. We’d sit on the breezeway and eat fresh pineapple and popsicles under the ceiling fan.
In the morning I planted 15 Southern lady ferns in the big bed under the giant water oak in the backyard. Lady ferns are my favorite fern because they’re just so . . . “ladylike”—delicate and graceful and pretty. As I worked, I kept thinking about all the other ferns I’d like to add to the bed—Christmas and royal and netted chain. There’s nothing like the softness and lushness of ferns (in my opinion), and they provide good shelter for toads, lizards, turtles, and other small animals.
Saturday was an especially fun day because I worked in the yard, but I also got to enjoy it. I had time to observe little things. In our Ambersweet orange tree, a pair of cardinals has built a nest. Well, we checked the nest on Saturday and the babies have hatched! There are three of them, so fuzzy and sleepy. When we peeked in, they were sprawled about the little pine-needle nest, their eyes closed. We could see them breathing. Their beaks were bright yellow and their down was gray.
In the late afternoon we weeded the vegetable garden and picked some cilantro and catnip. During one of our breaks on the breezeway, we decided to see how the cats would like the fresh “nip” (they’ve only had the dried stuff before). At first only Carl had a leaf. But then something happened. I was writing in my journal when Rob reported: “Maggie stole Carl’s leaf! She came up and bit him on the foot and he got scared and ran away, and she took over his leaf! I thought she wanted to play, but she just wanted his leaf! I thought she was being nice, but she was being a jerk!”
This was surprising because Maggie is usually very kind and polite to the other cats and is well known for her purring and peacemaking.
“Maggie,” Rob laughed, “I didn’t know you had it in you!”
It was evening by then, and we could hear a concert on the courthouse square, which is about a mile away. The music was drifting through the trees.
Rob passed out more catnip, and soon each cat had a leaf.
The cats reacted to the fresh catnip in a funny, restrained sort of way. They seemed not to know quite what to do with it. Each was possessive of his or her leaf. “But they seem to just want to be near it,” Rob said, “or they just want to lie down on top of it.”
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| Carl on top of the jelly cupboard |
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| June sitting on the rocker in her special June style |
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| A frog by our little goldfish pond |
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| Our potato harvest. We got 27 pounds, with very little insect damage. We were proud! |
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| The north side of the yard. This view is the result of the big re-sodding project we did in April. |
