Pumpkin Carving FAIL = Delicious (triple) WIN

Todd and I like to make unnecessary things into a competition. We place bets on everyday things like how many times Luke will wake up in the middle of the night. We have a tradition of making graham cracker haunted houses and having our friends on facebook judge whose is better. Last year was a total fail on my part.


This was Todd's house:

And this was mine:

Some of our friends actually thought that Luke made it because it was so bad! Really? REALLY? Luke was not even a year old at this point!

This year we wanted to turn our pumpkin carving into a facebook competition too. We have both been reading the Scott Pilgrim books and we actually both had the idea to make Scott Pilgrim pumpkins, but one of us had to give up the dream, and so I went to my second option. A LOLCats pumpkin. I wanted to do that fancy carving thing where you don't cut all the flesh out, but just make it thin enough that light shines through. Long story short-it was a fail.
 













After so many halloween competition related failures I was determined to salvage what I could of this project. Pumpkin puree to the rescue!

A couple of years ago we found instructions on how to make pumpkin puree, along with a recipe for pumpkin pie from scratch. This is what saved me from another Halloween of humiliation.

We had much more puree than was needed for the pie, so we also made a pumpkin cheesecake and pumpkin bread. We topped all 3 pumpkin creations off with an amazing recipe for homemade whipped cream using almond extract. ~heavenly~ (If you follow the links to one of the recipes, make it the whipped cream, this stuff makes ANYTHING taste amazing)