Cooking Something Pinteresting

Are you a Pinterest addict?  I am.  Pinterest is a site where you can waste hours of time doing two things.  One: create a virtual bulletin board of pictures and websites you want to remember for later ("I love the cute hair bow tutorial I saw online.  I'm going to 'pin it,' so I can find the instructions later.") Two: look at the myriad of stuff other people have pinned, then re-pin it to your own board ("Oooohhh... it never occurred to me that you could deconstruct Baby's crib and make a bench out of it, and I never would have read the kind of blog that talks about this, but now that I see it, I have to do it!!!!")  I've seen so many good ideas on Pinterest that I decided I can't look at it while I'm up at night with Lydia.  I get so excited about the possibilities that I literally can't go back to sleep.  I know...I can't help it.

(By the way, want to follow me on Pinterest?  Click the big, red button on the side bar.)

The folks at Pinterst have helpfully created some umbrella categories that one can peruse, like fashion, food, crafts, photography, and travel, just to name a few.  I spend most of my time looking at kids, crafts, and food - and I mean this virtually, not just in real life.  Let me tell you, seeing row after row of beautiful photographs of really nice food just does something to me.  My mouth waters as soon as I log in.  (I don't want to hear your remarks about Pavlov.)  I got so many cakes going on my food board that I even created a separate cake board.

So after weeks of looking at all these pictures and accompanying recipes, I decided to get out my mixing spoon and make a few.  Some are wonderful.  Some look good and taste mediocre.  I figured that I'd try my hand as a food critic; that is, of my own cooking, based on recipes I find on Pinterest.  Interested?  Then read on...

Just before Halloween, there were a plethora of pumpkin recipes making the rounds on the Food Boards.  I really like cooking with pumpkin.  I always buy several pumpkins, which I roast, puree, and freeze to bake with throughout the year.  So I was looking for ways to use up the end of last year's pumpkin.  And this Pull-Apart Cinnamon Sugar Pumpkin Bread showed up over and over again.  This is from a beautiful and yummy-looking food blog called Sunny Side Up in San Diego.  It looks amazing, doesn't it?  I had just made pumpkin muffins, which Jonathan and Hannah both devoured (and these are people who turn up their noses at banana, blueberry, or chocolate muffins).  So I was ready to venture deeper into the realm of pumpkin breads.

One afternoon last week, Hannah and I gathered the ingredients and went to work.  This is a yeast bread, so it was a lesson in delayed gratification for daughter and mother alike.  Hannah especially enjoyed cutting the strips of dough to make the pull-apart bits.  It baked up into a nice loaf, which looked almost as lovely on our plate as it does in the original picture.

Hannah and I sat down to take our first bites.  She liked it okay, but unlike the magic pumpkin muffins, only ate a few bites.  (This is normal for my non-sweet-tooth.  I don't understand how she is related to me, but I guess it's for the best.)  I, on the other hand, was hugely disappointed. 

I don't think I've ever said this before in my whole life, but there was too much sugar.  The entire bread tasted like sugar: cinnamon sugar coating each piece of bread, and then a very sweet glaze drizzled over the entire thing.  (By the way, I left the rum out of the glaze.  Maybe that was the problem.)  It did not taste one bit like pumpkin. I was sad that I used my second-to-last cup of frozen pumpkin on a bread that didn't have any pumpkin flavor.

Bottom line: this one's not going in the Keeper File.  As a cinnamon sticky bread, it was just fine, but for a pumpkin bread, it missed the mark for me.