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Copyright © 2009 Andrea Langworthy
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With all the excitement of the election, I forgot to tell you about my Halloween party. It’s a tradition: our grandchildren and their parents come to our home the Sunday before Halloween. The youngsters wear costumes. I call a week ahead to find out what they’d like to eat. This year, our nearly nine-year-old grandson answered the phone and I let him choose.
“What would you like to eat when you come to Grandma’s for the Halloween party?” He was silent for a time. Then, he said quietly, “Do you think we can have pumpkin muffins?” I had expected him to say pizza or chicken fingers. I assured him we would, indeed, have pumpkin muffins and asked if they were a favorite because his mother made them for him. She never did. He’d made them at school with his class and he remembered they were very good.
“Pumpkin muffins,” I told my friend, the baker extraordinaire, when I asked her for a recipe. She searched the Internet and offered a sheaf of papers. On each page, a recipe for pumpkin muffins. Flour, shortening, sugar — I didn’t have one ingredient in my cupboard. I scanned the shortest pumpkin muffin how-to and started a shopping list. After the fourth ingredient, I decided there had to be a better way.
“Do you have pumpkin muffins?” I asked the bakery employee who answered the telephone at Cub. They did. She said I could order them with or without cream cheese frosting. I made another call to St. Paul to find out if the muffins he and his schoolmates baked had been frosted. “No frosting,” he said.
A few days later, my husband and I were shopping at the natural foods store in Burnsville. Strolling through the bakery department, we spied not only pumpkin cupcakes but pumpkin bars, also. We put some in our cart to test at home and got extras for our neighbor. After all, she is the official neighborhood baker. She agreed on the excellence of the cupcakes.
We still needed a main course. Everyone voted for pizza. Days before the get-together, I ordered pumpkin muffins — no frosting — four large pumpkin bars and eight pumpkin cupcakes slathered with cinnamon butter cream frosting. I added a dozen pumpkin-shaped sugar cookies to be safe.
Right on time, our guests arrived carrying the pizzas they’d picked up on their way. The table was set with fall flowers, orange skull-shaped drinking mugs, a scary skeleton tablecloth and pumpkin-colored napkins. To either side of the floral arrangement, plates were piled high with pumpkin muffins. Another held the banana pumpkin bread my neighbor sent over for the occasion. My grandson took his place and stared at the muffins.
“We have pumpkin cupcakes, pumpkin bars and pumpkin-shaped cookies for dessert, too,” I told him. He sighed and placed his elbow on the table. He crooked his arm and rested his cheek on the palm of his hand. His eyes still on the muffins, he pursed his lips before he turned towards me with a puzzled look.
“I might have made a mistake,” he said. “Maybe the muffins we made in school were apple.”