With the passing of October and Halloween (you did check out our awesome pumpkins, right?), I had officially declared the holiday season open.

Since it was now the holiday season, I knew it was time to get ready to bake some fruitcakes.

Without knowing how many people we were going to give fruitcakes too, or how many we might want to eat ourselves, I decided to quadruple the recipe I unusually use. This means that we now have 15 mini fruitcakes and one larger one (which we subsequently split in half and are eating little by little).

In all honesty, the fruitcakes themselves are pretty easy — let a bunch of fruit soak overnight in rum (Captain Morgan, natch), the next day cook with some sugar and unfiltered apple juice, add the dry ingredients and finally bake (then spritz with brandy every few days until you eat them, the longer you wait, the more complex they taste).

The only issues we were having were because it was such a big batch! Still though, it wasn’t too tough and we persevered.

One of the real losses was that I tried to play some Christmas music streaming through my 360, but the music wasn’t on my computer anywhere to stream. If you know me, or have heard about my luck with computers, you know they often like to die around me (especially hard drives).

Thankfully, I put all of my Christmas music on an external Western Digital hard drive, which seems to work great, but I then lost the power cable for it!

Since this is my one and only Western Digital external drive, I don’t have any spare cables and couldn’t get any music playing for us.

Even though Bing Crosby couldn’t serenade us while we were baking, everything still turned out fantastically!

It was Halloween on Saturday and Alice and I decided it was time to carve pumpkins! Back when we went to the corn maze (a tropical vacation in October mind you), we also picked out some pumpkins to carve.

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Ah Halloween, I love it.

It’s the official beginning of the holiday season – it turns a little cooler (finally), you get pepped up on candy, then there’s my birthday (holla!), Thanksgiving, Black Friday (I’m a big fan, Alice doesn’t want to go shopping with me, but still, it’s a ton of fun) and finally Christmas.

All the while, you’re eating lots of good stuff, meeting with friends, reconnecting with people you haven’t spoken with all year. Yup, all in all it’s a great time.

To start the whole ball rolling, there’s Halloween…and what says Halloween more than Peanuts and Garfield?

If you can think of something, let me know; but I’ll be impressed if you come up with something more.

Which means, as per tradition, I got out the Great Pumpkin and Garfield Halloween DVDs so that Alice and I could watch them.

As it turned out, Alice had never seen the Great Pumpkin before! On the one hand, I was shocked and appalled that anyone could grow up here and never have seen it, but on the other, I was excited to get to watch it with her for the first time (not just our first time together).

We watched it. We laughed. We cried. It was amazing.

Then we watched Garfield’s Halloween, another tear jerker — another amazing show.

Side note: for those of you who don’t know, I love Garfield and I love pirates. The fact that Garfield went as a pirate (Orange Beard, none other!) in his Halloween special has nothing to do with the fact that I love both (I swear! I mean, I was four when the special first aired [almost five!]).

Long story short, we watched some fine cartoons and heralded in the beginning of the holiday season in style with Charlie Brown and Garfield!

Now, bring on the candy candy candy!

These are our cats, Freya and Momo.

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Recently, Alice told me about some cookies that she had once, never again, but that she would love to try again. As she recalled, they were called flourless chocolate chip cookies. Immediately when she told me this, visions of flourless chocolate cakes danced in my mind (I know, I know, everything isn’t always about chocolate).

However, when she started describing them to me, light, airy, crumbly, only one thing came to mind: meringue. I now knew what I had to do, hunt down a meringue chocolate chip cookie recipe and try it.

For those of you who don’t know, or just care to listen to me blather on about food stuffs (seriously, I can go on and on), a meringue in its simplest form is egg whites beaten until stiff mixed with sugar and then baked until done. Uncooked (I’m not saying you should eat it uncooked, there are a bunch of different places saying that raw eggs aren’t good for you, but I’m a rebel ), this is rather like marshmallow cream.

I did some research, found a few recipes I liked, tweaked them slightly and made some flourless chocolate chip cookies.

Alice seemed like she really liked them, but they weren’t exactly as she remembered them. The texture wasn’t quite right.

With meringue, there’s two ways of cooking it, hot and fast or low and slow. I went with a middle, not quite hot, but warmer and slightly quicker. After she had them and I was able to dissect further how she remembered them being, I’ve determined that the next time I make these, I’m going to go with a higher temp to cook.

If you’re interested in the difference of the two cooking styles, the hotter and quicker you bake meringues, the more crackly and crumbly they’ll be with more of a hollow center. Taking the other method, low and slow, they turn out more soft and fluffy.

Still, I’m happy with the way they turned out, Alice had three before dinner and I think we’ll be trying them again shortly.

Best of all, for all of you who like such things, these are 100% fat free! I mean, fat free chocolate chip cookies that taste good, really, how can you go wrong?

Yesterday we had the first official hot chocolate of the season.

It’s been cooler here in LA (highs in the upper 60s, practically arctic for this area) and yesterday was the tipping point for me. Alice had been talking about how she hadn’t been able to get warm all day, so I knew what I must do: hot chocolate.

Nothing warms you up in the same tasty, yummy kind of fashion like hot chocolate.

Plus, Alice had yet to have my hot chocolate. Since I’m a chocoholic (seriously, I read a Danish study [of course it was Danish] talking about the benefits of 6ozs of dark chocolate a day and knew that I’d been on the right track all along), I’ve always been particular about my hot chocolate. I’m never fully happy when I buy it somewhere, but I’ll always get it because I love it.

After work when I went to the grocery store, I picked up a few food items for the week and some milk for the hot chocolate — you can try to use something other than whole milk, but it won’t turn out quite as tasty.

When Alice came home, after we had dinner (some very tasty fried rice that she made), I fixed us some hot chocolate.

I used two different chocolates for their complexity, whole milk, cream and a few other things — healthy and delicious. When I gave it to Alice, after she had a sip, she said, “I’ve never quite had hot chocolate like this before.” From what I could tell, it wasn’t a, “Eww, I’ve never had anything like this before,” it was a, “Yum, I’ve never had anything like this before!”

Since it was the first of the season, it was the standard plain version. However, soon to come are the variations, cinnamon, cayenne, peppermint (a personal fave of mine) and maybe even a few others.

No matter how you slice it, cold weather demands hot chocolate.

Sadly, it wasn’t until after we had finished drinking it that I realized we weren’t able to take any pictures of it. You know how it is with hot chocolate, once you get it, you don’t want to put it down. I promise, one of the next few times that I make it, I’ll try to remember to takes some pictures to show everyone.

You all just have to promise to go make some yourself. Making stuff at home is both fun and delicious! Plus, you’ll get to control everything that goes into what you’re making.

Over the weekend, Alice and I went on a tropical vacation.

Alright, so it was less a tropical vacation as it was a corn maze and harvest festival — but there was corn, bamboo of the west! Seriously, nothing says the tropics like hiking through a forest and that’s exactly what we did.

When we first showed up to the maze, the very first thing they did was give us maps. I’ll admit it, I’m new to this whole maze thing having never done one before, but doesn’t a map defeat the purpose? We promptly ignored them.

We wandered into the corn, ran away from a few groups of families with kids and happily got ourselves good and lost. Then we started taking pictures left and right, imagining ourselves in a faraway place, not just down the street.

Naturally, I used the opportunity to test the waters with Alice and casually mentioned that we’d be honeymooning somewhere similar. I’m pretty sure she was onto my ruse, ’cause she didn’t flinch in saying that it’d be an amazing trip.

Eventually we made it out of the maze, took some pictures with a monster (it gets scary at night), had some lunch (very tasty, god bless festivals) and bought some pumpkins.

For out first tropical vacation, I’d say I’m pleased with the way everything transpired. No one was eaten by sharks, boats didn’t sink and there weren’t any hurricanes.

Really, how much more can you ask from the tropics?