Don’t forget to vote today! Truthfully, if I can be honest, I would have tacked on a few additional petitions to add to the ballot to really shake things up. Champagne Fridays. Abolishing Daylight Savings. Remove the “White After Labor Day” stigma. And, despite the fact that my pants may disagree – Always eat Dessert. Cheesecake in particular. Pumpkin Pie Cheesecake to be even more specific. Not sure about you but, I’d stand in line to cast that vote.

Anyway, Here we are… Fall. Pumpkin spice everything season. Bye-bye belt, pajama-jeans-are-my-best-friend season. And, the season of giving. I am giving you this recipe because, it may actually change your view on Thanksgiving treats. It’s a cheesecake. It has pumpkin. It has chocolate. AND, it has a rich gingersnap crust. AND… you can serve it with super simple Maple Pecan Pralines that may completely send it over the edge. Need I say more? Yes, actually, you should know well enough now to know that I will almost always say more.

I would like to go on record to say that I won awards in Culinary School for this bad boy LOOOOONG before Pinterest was even a glimmer in someone’s eye. Actually, back then we were still using MS DOS on computers that were the size of microwave ovens (remember that?) and I was convinced I would NEVER need those stupid command based computer skills. Boy, was I wrong. Let’s just say that’s how long I have been making this decadent Autumn confection. I should also throw in that this falls in the realm of my college “zone”. Which, (if you have read previous posts ) might give you a better visual of what ‘life’ was like when I first cobbled this pairing together. The munchies + Culinary school = BOOYAH baby.

The cheesecake part is your average run-of-the-mill NY style fatty boombalatty mamajama found in just about every cookbook. The beauty of this dessert comes in it’s construction, the addition of the Ganache in the base and ginger snap crust.  Both of which stemmed from a college care package that my parents sent me one year that included a case of Sweetzels Ginger snaps and a 10lb. block of Ghiradelli Bittersweet Chocolate. My parents knew what I liked. And needed.

 

You can Click here for the recipe and we can toast each other for upping the Fall dessert game a few notches and then we can move on because, while we are here, we need to quickly talk about something else. Something shiny. Let’s saaaaaay… COPPER?

~

Here at Witzend I am kind of swimming in copper. I am lucky that each year I have been handed down a beautiful piece of copper cookware from my mother… these are my prize possessions (among the 5000 other collections she has gifted me) and for 75% of the year they hang on a rack… a travesty really. But Copper makes me think of fall. It happens to match the autumn leaves perfectly and paired with the bright green remnants of the season just passed you really can’t go wrong. I am kind of meandering here because what really shines right here is the versatility of a good old fashioned can of copper spray paint. And produce. And the way the tell tale shake of that spray can completely change an armload of cheap flowers.

 

This falls under the ‘no need to be crazy, just be crafty’ category. Just another genetic characteristic I have inherited from my mom best friend. Seriously… my mother was “Martha” before Martha was Martha… she could make works of art out of curbside trash like it was nobody’s business. She scavenged and scoured for cast offs that could be transformed into things of beauty. Are you sensing a pattern here?

One of my favorite parts of each fall was watching my mother prepare for the onslaught of the holiday decorating season. No surface was sacred, each held a treasure of its own… hand shaped, painted and varnished salt dough ornaments, gilded pineapples, yards of yard-loot garlands and greens waiting to be hung, stacks of china, pressed napkins packaged for storage in the freezer (works great trust me), boxes of 12th night charms, and one of my favorites…. dried Artichoke Roses.

I may have been the ripe old age of 6 when my mom first taugt me how to delicately fold the fresh leaves and then patiently wait until the chokes were dried. It was then that I learned about the glory of spray paint. We wore matching aprons, she didn’t have a lick of gray hair, she was never seen NOT wearing her quintessential uniform of a puffy sleeved Laura Ashley dress (you know which ones), she pretty much ruled B. Altman & Co. and she still drank Tom Collins’ and TAB. Just a quick proud side note, my mom could drive a stick shift, down a Tab, smoke a cigarette and be sure her purse didn’t fly off the seat all at the same time. I mean multi- tasking goals people, and that was BEFORE cell phones!

I digress… again. The Artichokes… one of my favorites. Retro vibes being brought back to the forefront of your table decor. Because once they are dried you can paint them any of the 1,867 Pantone colors of your choice… coat after coat and, use them on repeat ANYWHERE and ANYHOW you choose. Here is the super easy no brainer tutorial in case you didnt have a mom like mine who walked you through what you thought was benign but was actually the basis for an entire lifestyle that you never thought would completely control your every breath.

So, Cheers to decadent desserts, real-deal crafty AF moms and breaking out the copper. Happy Fall!

Xo, Pippa

And it’s Halloween…. what does THAT mean here at Witzend!? Ohhhh…. just a nutso mom in decked out in a crazy get up with her broom standing at the end of the driveway waiting for the bus (insert a hefty Witzend Wee One eye roll here).

Or, it may mean a tricked out pre-game Hallows Eve table that has my husband wondering “Is there anything LEFT at the dollar store/Joanns/ AC Moore” ? (For the record… NO…. every decor junkie knows you gotta jump on that jawn (Philly word) in August!!!! Also for the record… I probably had coupons so it was practically FREE!!!

Confession (Read: husband shaming about to go down) as much as I love Halloween, my husband feels the opposite. He will freely joke about turning the lights out and locking the door just to avoid a germ brigade from strolling past our front door… which is FINE, Because here at Witzend we DO NOT GET TRICK OR TREATERS!!! Nope. We have to schlep out to beg for booty my friends. Tonight that will mean piling the Witzend Wee Ones in full costume into the ‘Witzend Womper’ and heading up the road “aways” to a neighboring ‘hood where people actually see all of the toil and trouble fellow Halloweeny inspired Witches and Warlocks go to the trouble of creating.

At Witzend I do it for us (and the cutie patootie neighbor girl who we watch Monday-Thursday) and once a year I do it for guests… costumes not required because I KNOW that I am the craziest Witch they know, so I am totally cool with BYOB (bring your own broom) and tricking out a fun table for a one night stand just to say that I know how do some Halloween in these here parts.

So sure, I may lament about the trials of multiple costume changes that the boys afflict me with, and roll my eyes at sewing a last minute costume reminiscent of ‘Clan of the Cave Bear’, but you know I secretly love it. Especially when last year I was stripped of my homemaker duties and GAWD FORBID found myself biting the bullet AND my tongue and rocking into the Halloween superstore to PURCHASE Star Wars Costumes. That just about killed me.

And while there may be less gore and more Goth here at our house, it is still fun to go cray and play it up. So, for the next 24 hours I will hold off on pulling the battalion of bats off the ceiling and walls, and decreepifying this Witches lair because as soon as I do we ALL know that Christmas is just a blink of an eye away (55 days from today to be exact but who’s counting?).

With that said, may your brew be beastly, your treats be tricked, and your spells be spooky.

Happy Halloween my dear Witches!

XO,

Pippa

Let me paint you a picture. Last week we bought our (real) pumpkins for carving. Cool. We did it. The boys had their designs figured out. We scooped, we roasted seeds, we carved, we treated the pumpkins in hope that they don’t mold in 3 days (they still did). The works. Family bonding at its finest. We only had enough time before bed to carve the Witzend Weeones’, the other 2 victims of the trusty knives would have to wait. And they did. Sometimes my brain just goes into over drive. You get my drift? The kind of overdrive where when you suddenly get an idea and it becomes all consuming? Where you pour yourself a glass of wine (or whatever), pop over to Pinterest for a “quick peek”and fall down a 3 day rabbit hole of You Tube tutorials? Yep. This was one of those.

We all love our chinoiserie painted pumpkins. I mean Duh, they are fabulous! I did a few, you probably did a few and a whole slew of amazing IG friends (@kellymasonbrookedesigns,s,@nataliefrostdavis @sevenstreetmarket, @danamahnke_indigohomeshop, @1mgonzalez and @theinspirednest to name a few!) are churning out pumpkin perfection! I mean WHO would you even try and mess with something that is already such a vision of seasonal sensation!?

Me…. that’s who. The rapid thought stream went like this… ‘I should have painted these pumpkins instead of scooping guts and getting them ready to carve’… WAIT…..’How COOL would it be to CARVE these pumpkins with Chinoiserie Designs!?’ … SOOO COOL! Then I could carve those Gawd awful frightful foam beasts (otherwise known as the “Funkin”) and have them in perpetuity and BAM…. be the coolest chick in the county.

I got to work… I already had some designs selected… ones that would possibly transfer in the usual pin pricking/ follow the stencil of your favorite Character kind of way that we do for the kids. It couldn’t be that hard right? Wrong. Designing effective templates (read: ones that would make is so the design didn’t fall through the pumpkin and would actually WORK) took me almost a week… I ruined 4 real pumpkins and 3 stupid over priced (even though they were on sale AND I had a coupon) Funkins. Urgh. It was all consuming and starting to get expensive. Plus, I then had foamy Funkin poop EVERYWHERE…. that stuff sticks to EVERYTHING, and I am SURE it is carcinogenic in some way… oh, and these pumpkins smell. You know what I mean… they have that injection molded plasticy “made in China” smell… so there was that. I spent the kids community college fund to stink up my house and spit nails.

I stepped away. I regrouped. I drank more wine. I slept on it. I walked by the project 45 times from 360 degrees of side eye angles with a cup of tea. It wasn’t going to beat me. By this point I had talked to a good friend who knew the ins and outs and shared my design frustration. I was on the brink of giving it up. AND THEN… a second round of you tube videos crept in… there was a solution… the DREMEL tool. Well, HEY GIRL HEY! I’ve got a Dremel! AND I know how to use it!

Insert a new mission of epiphanic proportions that included fully abandoning the carving technique and morphed into shading out the designs. So while I am pretty sure I got Carpal Tunnel and have been blowing pumpkin foam dust snot for days I am LOVING the results (and happily will now have these testaments of my toil for years to come). But, this was most definitely a case of ‘do as I say not as I do’ and a process that has certainly been testament to the fact that sometimes being crafty As F*#k can just about kill ya.

So, if you too have a trusty Dremel tool and aren’t afraid to use it then you may want to click here for my top tips on carving Funkins with power tools, otherwise known as Learn from my Lessons.

HAPPY CARVING!

xo,

Pippa