Spiced Pumpkin Pull-Apart Cupcake Cake {Recipe Time}

It’s that time of year again! Time for pumpkin spice everything!!! Woohoo!!

One of our top favorite goodies to make, besides the classic pumpkin bread, are Spiced Pumpkin Cupcakes. I used to make them topped with a Maple Butter Frosting until Rosie requested a Spiced Pumpkin Cake with a Brown Sugar Frosting for her birthday some years ago. {The link takes you to a post from 2010 on my first blog.} Rosie has requested it a couple times since and I’ve started making it for other occasions.

Recently, my dad asked me to bake something for my sister’s homecoming. Actually, what he asked for was “something with that really good maple frosting on it.” The “really good maple frosting” is actually a brown sugar frosting that tastes almost exactly like my maternal grandmother’s maple fudge. ::swoon:: That stuff is so addictive!

Quick No Cook Homemade Playdough — with a twist {and without cream of tartar}

Back when the girls were in preschool, the teachers had a sign-up sheet asking the parents to each take a month to make playdough for the class to play with. The colors would vary depending on what the theme for the month was. I definitely made my fair share of it. The school provided a recipe to make sure it was everything coming into the classrooms was allergy-safe. This particular recipe was for a cooked, unscented playdough. Once the girls were done with preschool, a part of me was glad not to have to make any more playdough. [Hey, that was 4 years of playdough making! Four years of large playdough batches that took a ton of flour, almost a whole container of salt and enough cream of tartar that would make me constantly need to make last minute trips to Kroger.]

After preschool, we had a TON of the store-bought Play-Doh in our home and a ton of the playsets. With our last move, we cut down on some of our containers and sets that just didn’t see much play time.

Enter my Little Man. I recently found a three-pack of Play-Doh hiding in my garage. (It may have been hiding…or I may have just forgotten to bring it in the house when unpacking…) He has enjoyed playing with the stuff and life was good.

Or so I thought.I was checking out some people on Instagram the other day and saw a mom sharing her genius idea {you can see it here}. Seriously, it’s such an awesome idea. Homemade SCENTED playdough! She tinted her dough orange and added orange zest. I know, amazing!