Pumpkin carving

Halloween is not celebrated in Finland although some stores do sell Halloween junk for the kids. Also pumpkins are sold around this time. I, like most other Finns, am not that excited about Halloween, heck I don't even know what it's for. Well anyway... crafting is fun and when I saw the carved pumpkin on Santa's blog Homestilo I just had to carve one too.

Like said the Halloween isn't such a big thing here so I did not want to carve on the pumpkin anything scary but thought of carving something more related to fall. I searched a simple image from the web about a tree and did plan to print it out, but for some reason the printer would not work so I ended up copying the image to a paper from the screen using a pencil. Then just carved the pumpkin using the drawing as a guide.

I think it ended up looking really cool. I added a string of light inside it. I made a small hole in the back with an apple drill where I ran the wire through.

Because I scooped out most of the inside of the pumpkin before the carving I also had to figure how to consume all the pumpkin. So I made a pumpkin pie with this recipe (click). I know according to the recipe I should have used a sugar pumpkin and I don't know what is the pumpkin I had but I had to use it somewhere. I made the pumpkin into a puree and used half of it to the pie and placed the rest in the freezer, so I can make a new pie later if I want to. I hope the puree freezes well. Since A is in Shanghai again I took the whole pie to work and fed it to my co-workers. Anything taken to work is gone in a matter of minutes and so was the pie too. I had never made a pumpkin pie before and had actually tasted it only once before. That was last year when we were visiting in NY on Thanksgiving. The pie I made looked quite ugly, like you see there, but it was good, tasted like gingerbread dough.