First, let me clarify something about the title of this post. While the oven is new to us, there is nothing new about our oven. If I had to take a guess, I would say this oven is older than me, and was perhaps created before the invention of digital clocks, as it has no time-telling mechanism.
Isn’t that the crazy thing about moving to a new place? There aren’t a lot of ways to tell time. In our old apartment, our alarm clock, our wall clock, our oven clock, and our coffee maker clock all reminded us of the time. In the new place, the alarm clock is only visible from one particular edge of the bed. The wall clock has yet to be mounted, as we have to decide on a furniture arrangement before we being thinking about hanging things on the walls (and the last time I checked, the clock was on eastern time anyway). Like I mentioned above, our oven is clockless, and our coffee maker is positioned in a way that we can’t actually see the clock. Needless to say, our grasp of time is not great as of late.
To give you an example of this, let me explain Sunday morning. We were going to try out a new church. We checked out their website and saw that the service started at 9. So we decided we would need to leave the apartment around 8:40 in order to pick up a friend (yes, Eric is making friends already!) and be at church by 9. Of course, as I said before, we have no grasp of time and it is physically impossible for me to be ready for church on time anyway (you can ask my parents about the years of Sunday morning frustration I caused them). So we roll out around 8:45. Not terrible. We pull into the church parking lot around 9:05 (also, not terrible), but discover that the parking lot is completely full. Now, if there’s anything I know about Baptist congregations (yes, they have Baptist churches here in the Northwest), it’s that these are generally not the most punctual of crowds. But maybe things are different in the non-Southern Baptist world. So we walk into the building and see that the preacher is already in the middle of his sermon. It’s only 9:10! How can the pastor be preaching when the service just started 10 minutes ago? Confused and feeling awkward, we turned to go back outside. We ran into a nice greeter who told us the service started at 8:30. We were 40 minutes late. Whoops. Apparently they are switching to a 9 o’clock start time next Sunday.
We decided to make a pit stop for donuts and try a different church.
So that brings me to baked goods.
It’s been close to a month since we left Kentucky, which means it has been over a month since I’ve done any significant baking. Eric and I made an agreement that I would bake less in Oregon because baking is expensive, and as of right now, we have no income. Plus, we don’t want to be morbidly obese in our mid-20’s. But I couldn’t resist the urge to make these pumpkin spice bagels. And I will justify making these because I only had to buy one ingredient (canned pumpkin). And I’ve never made bagels before, so it seemed like a great way to break in our kitchen.
If I made these again, I’d add more cinnamon to the bagel batter, partly because I couldn’t really taste it, and partly because cinnamon is the best spice on the planet. And while the cinnamon honey butter was good, I think I’d prefer a cream cheese base, rather than butter. I’m not sure how this is possible, but I don’t really care for the taste of butter. So I’d try substituting a block of cream cheese and mix in the honey and cinnamon. It would make for a thicker spread, which would probably be more delightful anyway. But overall, these things were a wonderful taste of fall. And they were the most perfect bagel consistency.
I may or may not have eaten 3 1/2 of these bagels in the past 24 hours, including serving them for dinner with a side of badly burned bacon, the smell of which may reside in this apartment longer than us.
Hope you’ll enjoy something wonderfully autumn with a side of bacon today!
-Ally
tokyohamster says
Pumpkin spice bagels!! What a great idea! Mmmm… all of these fall recipes are hitting the ‘net now. It’s getting me in the autumn mood 🙂