Thanksgiving Baking

The Tale of 6 Thanksgiving Desserts

Or, How We Had As Many Desserts As People At Our Thanksgiving Table

Yes, you read that right. This is the tale of 6 Thanksgiving desserts. And since our Thanksgiving celebration was smaller than usual this year, we had as many desserts as people at our Thanksgiving table.

In fact, I think we had more desserts at Thanksgiving this year than any other year I can remember. I suggested embracing the strangeness of our holiday this year by using desserts as palate cleansers between each course. Why not start with pre-dinner pumpkin bread, followed by post-soup and salad cranberry-pistachio cookies? And then apple pie after the main course and maybe a Rugelach night-cap? Needless to say, nobody took me up on this suggestion. Perhaps next year …

So, you’re probably wondering how exactly we ended up with 6 desserts when we only had 6 people attending our Thanksgiving dinner this year. It feels like a very 2020 pandemic story. So, let me share the tale of 6 Thanksgiving desserts …

It Started With a Quest for Pie

While I used to be responsible for contributing an apple pie for Thanksgiving annually, I was relieved of these duties several years ago after we discovered quite possibly the best pies on the planet (definitely on the East Coast of the United States), from Mom’s Apple Pie Company. It’s not that my pies were bad but these were far superior, so why would I deprive my family of apple pie perfection?

So it was that our tale of 6 Thanksgiving desserts began. We decided to play it safe given the global pandemic, which left all eyes trained on me for the pie. After all, I’ve been baking even more than usual during the last several months. I mean, if I can perfect baking bread during meetings, I can certainly revisit my pie-baking techniques.

So, I decided to take all my baking skills honed over not only my lifetime of baking but the last several months of intensive #stressbaking and pour them into the perfect apple pie.

This launched my quest to find the perfect recipe. I opted for a Dutch style pie and ultimately landed on this Apple Crumble Pie from my now favorite baking site, Sally’s Baking Addiction.

After reading the recipe twice, I was confident that this was going to be my best pie yet (Dessert #1)! However, my mom’s decision to also bake Rugelach (Dessert #2) made me wonder if she was expecting me to “pull a Monica”. You know, like the episode of “Friends” when Monica’s mom hired her to cater a party but bought back-up frozen lasagnas just in case she screwed up?

Yeah, I think the Rugelach may have secretly been a back-up in case my pie didn’t cut it. Perhaps it’s open for debate. But I simply feel the need to illustrate how seriously my family takes our pies.

Well, for the record, let me just say that it was the best pie I have ever made and we all agreed that it even gave our usual Mom’s Apple Pie Company pie a run for its money. In fact, I think I might have gotten the job again next year, pandemic or not!

Don’t Forget The Traditional Thanksgiving Desserts

Our tale of 6 Thanksgiving desserts owes much to tradition. For us, it’s not Thanksgiving without pumpkin bread (Dessert #3). So, basically no matter what, we will always have pumpkin bread at our Thanksgiving table.

When my parents were in graduate school in St. Louis, my mom worked in a shop on campus. She worked with a middle aged woman who smoked cigarettes through a plastic holder and also happened to make the best pumpkin bread. When she shared the recipe with my mom, she also shared her secret: baking in coffee cans. And so for as long as I can remember, my mom has used this recipe to bake pumpkin bread in coffee cans.

Somewhere along the way, my mom passed on the recipe, along with 3 coffee cans, and the responsibility of baking pumpkin bread for Thanksgiving to me. It’s not Thanksgiving in my mind until I mix up a batch and pour it into my early 1990s coffee cans. I love reading each one as I pour the batter in. Maybe it’s the dated copy on the cans or the memories of baking this exact recipe with my mom as a kid, but the entire process is tradition.

And I think for so many of us a big part of the holidays is the tradition. Not that I don’t love the pumpkin bread it produces — it really is the best — but the tradition makes it even more sweet!

Reduce Waste

After baking my pumpkin bread, I was left with a half can of pumpkin that didn’t fit into the recipe. I really hate to let anything go to waste. Most years, I look for some recipe to add canned pumpkin to. And this year, I didn’t have to look very far.

As luck would have it, I made two crusts when I baked the apple pie but since I made a crumble-topped pie, I only needed one of the crusts. What do you do when you have leftover pumpkin and a pie crust? Well, to me the answer was obvious: mini pumpkin pies (Dessert #4)! For this endeavor, I turned once again to Sally’s Baking Addiction and whipped up a very Thanksgiving-appropriate dessert using these leftover ingredients.

So now our tale of 6 Thanksgiving desserts was up 4.

Tis the Season to Try New Things

And since I love to bake, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to try something new. When I was scrolling through Pinterest for apple pie recipes, I stumbled upon these cranberry pistachio cookies (Dessert #5). I love the combination of cranberries and pistachios and I really like cooking with cranberries around the Thanksgiving season. And obviously, throwing in some white chocolate couldn’t be a bad thing.

I will admit that I made some modifications to this recipe. I used fresh cranberries rather than dried. And instead of drizzling melted white chocolate on the finished cookies, I added the chips right into the batter. But really, one of the best pats of this recipe is that it’s a basic cookie recipe. So, you can create multiple variations depending on what you add in. I couldn’t resist a little improvisation with some of my favorite flavors. Especially since white chocolate is my husband’s favorite!

It definitely paid off as my husband ate the last cookie a few days post-Thanksgiving saying “I think these may have been my favorite dessert from Thanksgiving.” You better believe I’ll be making them again!

And One More To Grow On

For those of you keeping score at home, that’s 5 desserts. So what was our final mystery dessert for Thanksgiving this year? Store-bought iced sugar cookies (Dessert #6).

This may seem like an odd choice given all the homemade baked goods I’ve outlined above. And you’d be right. We typically love the iced sugar cookies from Wegmans. They’re not only beautiful works of art but they are delicious. So, as my parents picked up the final Thanksgiving items from the store, they grabbed a few Thanksgiving-themed iced sugar cookies to ensure the girls had something they liked for dessert.

And while they were pretty excited to eat the cookies shaped like turkeys, especially since they were amply layered with icing, everyone’s attention was much more focused on the 5 other enticing desserts.

I am sure we will buy iced sugar cookies from Wegmans again. But for now, I’m pretty pleased that everyone in our household is much more excited by the treats that we bake ourselves. The traditions we share annually. The family recipes that come with years of stories. The new experiments we try with our favorite flavors.

So, perhaps we’ve created a new tradition for Thanksgiving. A tradition of having a dessert for each guest present at our table. That’s a tradition I could sure get used to.