Do you know the feeling that certain types of food and certain dishes are deeply connected to a special chapter of your life? The cake your mother always made for your birthday. The favorite food as a student. Food you very much enjoyed during your holidays or stays abroad. For me, every life chapter, every stay abroad is somehow linked to one or two dishes I adopted and which are now part of our cooking routine.
During an internship in Canada, I stayed with a Canadian host family. While their regular food drove me crazy after some weeks (meat twice a day…), I also got to know some meals I never really appreciated before. Corn on the cob, for instance. Somehow, corn was never really on our menu at home. But gee, fresh corn on the cob, what a delicious thing to eat! Got its place in our cooking routine. The other thing was pumpkin pie. Before I went to Canada, I never had pumpkin pie. Pumpkin pie just isn’t very popular in Germany. Isn’t that a sad thing to say?
Unfortunately, pumpkin pie hasn’t really made it into our cooking (or baking) routine, simply because it involves a bit more of an effort. While you can buy canned pumpkin pulp in every supermarket in Canada, the US and the UK, it is almost impossible to find it over here. In fact, I have never seen it in a German or Swiss supermarket so far. Which might be because pumpkin dishes don’t have such a long tradition in Germany.
SO! Yesterday, the little one and I bought a big pumpkin and I used the lunchtime nap (both kids were sleeping! Jackpot!) to make pumpkin pulp. And today, the little one and I made pumpkin pie. In the afternoon, Karsten came home and we invited our friend and sat down in order to celebrate Püppis birthday (the doll. It’s always good to have a reason to celebrate with a piece of cake!) and to enjoy some proper and incredibly delicious pumpkin pie with vanilla ice-cream. Why, oh why don’t I make it more regular?? I should, really. After all, I have such a great kitchen aide!
familial entropy 
This cake was definitely worth being baked! I never had pumpkin pie before but since the garden delivers them for free (more or less) we will probably try it ourselves. – I feel this way about Tim Horton’s. I think I more or less lived on Tim Horton’s when I was on Newfoundland for six weeks. And although it’s a bit difficult to make a Tim Horton’s cinnamon roll myself I still have the taste in my mouth when I think about it – and then I’m back in St. John’s… So sad they don’t expand to Europe…
Haha…it so happens that I worship the brownies from 7/11. During my semester abroad in Stockholm we would share one of these brownies between three of us and I am not sure whether the brownies were really that good or whether it is just the happy memories connected with it, but for me there is no better brownie than the one’s from 7/11. (There is a 7/11 on every corner in Stockholm. We were actually joking that they might be owned by aliens who want to slowly take over the world :-))