Desserts and one side dish

There is a dessert slippedy-sliding around in our fridge right now called "Dofu," and it's mango flavored. Dofu is an Asian Jello-like thing, made like Jello is, but instead of adding cold water to your hot-water-and-gelatin mixture you add cold milk. It has a different texture than Jello, and the water kind of seeps out of it as it sits in the fridge. I'm not real thrilled about it, but A. has offered to eat it all. You can get Dofu at Chinese and Indonesian grocery stores in a variety of flavors.

A. also really likes pumpkin, so I've been thinking a lot about gourds lately. I just, just, just made some pumpkin bars for her, but she's not home to try them. I think they're quite good, so I'll tell you how I made them sans A.'s taste approval:

Mix up these ingredients in a bowl:

1 C. flour
3/4 C. brown sugar
1 /2 C. oil
1 egg
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
1 C. of pumpkin from a can (about 1/2 a can)
2 tsp. cinnamon (or more)
1/2 tsp. ground nutmeg
Allspice? Ginger? Ground cloves? whatever...

Pour into a greased 9 x 13 pan; bake for 22 - 25 minutes at 350 degrees. When cool, cut into bars.

These bars end up really fluffy and airy. I guess it's the egg AND the baking powder at work. The recipe I was bastardizing recommended twice as many eggs, but frankly, that seemed like fluffiness overkill to me. Plus, my girl has a family history of high cholesterol, so I try not to tempt fate or nature by feeding her too many eggs.

Speaking of pumpkins, by the way, (this is not a dessert) after I made the Kitchen Wench's tart, I baked the other half of the butternut pumpkin. I diced up one small apple, mixed it with 2 T. of honey, a bit of cinnamon, and a little nutmeg. I would have added raisins, but I didn't have any. I put this mixture into the hollow of the 1/2 pumpkin and oiled a cookie sheet lightly. The tricky part is getting the pumpkin with the stuff in the hollow face down onto the cookie sheet: I just put cookie sheet on the pumpkin and turned them both upside down together. Bake for 45 minutes or so at 375 or 400 degrees, until squishy. I guess real cooks would say, "until tender," or "until you can pierce the pumpkin gently with a fork."