With the end of pool days and cool lemonade comes the beginning of apple pies and pumpkin spice. Fall recipes are taking over the world once more. Between Starbucks’ new menu, desserts in grocery stores, and viral recipes on TikTok, I’m surrounded by fall food. This made me want to try to make some of my own. My cooking and baking skills are far from that of a chef or bakers’, though. After scrolling endlessly through TikTok, I believe that I found the most simple recipes to try. I have a huge sweet tooth, so I focused on making desserts. 

The first recipe I decided to try was a chai cookie recipe. I love chai and I love cookies, which made me excited to bake a mixture of both. The first step was to acquire the ingredients. I had all of the ingredients except for the spices. When I purchased all of the spices from the store, my total was $31. For a high school student, like myself, that wasn’t cheap . Nonetheless, I was still excited to start baking. I didn’t have any problems following the recipe until I had to brown the butter. The butter I made turned into a liquid. After I put it in the fridge to cool, I checked the step-by-step video to see what it was supposed to look like. In the video, the butter became cream. I had to watch video tutorials on how to brown butter in order to achieve the same results. Despite this, the cookies still turned out really good in the end! I accidentally added too much ginger, which made the aftertaste more spicy than I would have liked. Overall, it was an easy recipe that tasted amazing. 

Mini pumpkin pies were the next recipe on the list. There were only a few things I needed to buy. A mini muffin tin, pumpkin filling, evaporated milk, and Pillsbury pie crusts were $24 in total. Thankfully, I had all of the spices I needed from the last recipe. The pumpkin pie filling was very simple to make. It tasted good too! To make the crusts, I rolled out the pie crusts and cut three inch circles. I couldn’t find a circular cookie cutter, so I used a cup. Then, I pressed the mini pie crusts into the muffin tin. After that, I filled each crust with the pumpkin filling and put it in the oven. The recipe said to leave the pies in the oven until a toothpick inserted comes out clean. It should have taken around 12 minutes. However, at the 12 minute mark, the toothpicks I used had filling on them. I let them bake a little longer, but the toothpicks still weren’t coming out clean. Afraid of burning the crusts, I took them out of the oven and let them cool. My fears came true when I tried one and the crust did not taste right. They were overcooked. The filling inside each pie was amazing, but the crusts ruined it for me. 

Pumpkin cookies were the last recipe I chose. The only thing I needed at the store was pumpkin puree. It was about $5. When I got back from the store, I noticed that I forgot the cream cheese required for the cream cheese frosting, and that I didn’t have enough vanilla extract either. Quickly, I contacted some friends to see if they had any that they could bring over. Unfortunately, nobody had vanilla extract or cream cheese at home. No one was able to come to my rescue. That’s when I knew I had to take initiative. I placed a DoorDash order for both the vanilla extract and the cream cheese. When my ingredients arrived, I continued. I finished making the dough and put the cookies in the oven for 11 minutes. While I waited, I started on the frosting. Everything was going well until I had to mix all the ingredients together. I couldn’t get the lumps from the powdered sugar to mix into the frosting. After several attempts, I gave up and made peace with the lumpy frosting. When I first tried the cookies, I didn’t like them. When I dipped another cookie in the frosting, my opinion on them changed for the better. I faced some ups and downs while following this recipe, but the result made it all worth it. 

Each of these recipes did not turn out the way that I wanted them to. I was expecting them to look exactly like the pictures and taste just as good as the recipes said they would. I didn’t manage to make them look the same, but they all still tasted perfect. Out of these three, the mini pumpkin pies were the easiest to make in terms of steps required to make them and the chai cookies would be the hardest. In terms of taste, though, the chai cookies were the most delicious, with pumpkin cookies next, and mini pumpkin pies falling in last.